In 2012, former Political Animal blogger Steve Benen wrote a forty-one part series on the lies of Mitt Romney. Each week during the campaign, he chronicled all the things Romney had said that were untrue and provided a link to each item so the reader could verify that Romney was being dishonest. When he posted his last piece in the series, the list of whoppers had reached an astonishing but still only partial number of nine hundred and seventeen. I think it’s safe to say that the country had never before seen a politician who lied so easily and so routinely as Mitt Romney. He couldn’t be relied on to tell you whether or not the sun was shining.
Amazingly, Trump is actually worse. By August of last year, the Washington Post’s FactChecker listed over one thousand lies the president had told since taking office in late January. At the end of the year, Time magazine found 1,950 lies Trump told in 2017. The Toronto Star found 978 lies by Christmas, including twenty-seven examples of the president falsely calling America “the world’s highest-taxed nation.”
As bad as Trump is, it’s not certain that a President Romney wouldn’t be worse. Either way, the two of them are the two most dishonest politicians in America, both demonstrating a pathological disregard for the truth. And I intend to keep bringing this up because I simply don’t care that Romney is in the habit of blasting Trump from time to time. I don’t care that Romney is moderate compared to Trump on some issues, including immigration. Romney is in no way the tonic for Trumpism.
So, when people talk up Romney as a senate candidate to replace retiring Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, I intend to refer people to Benen’s project on his mendacity: Vol. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII,XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI.
People should not ask if a Senator Romney would be a friend or foe of President Trump. They should peruse the record and realize that both of them are enemies of the truth.