Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has once again —and perhaps purposely—found herself the focus of pointed criticism, this time for finding the time to engage in some cheesy cosplay with Republican colleague Mitt Romney while Democrats scramble to pass some semblance of President Joe Biden’s signature social spending package.
With Halloween nearing, Romney spent much of Thursday morning posting several tweets of himself dressed as the title character of the hit Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso. Sporting Lasso’s signature mustache, Romney filmed himself inhabiting the character’s starry-eyed optimism in a series of short scenes posted to Twitter.
The series is about an American college football coach—portrayed by Jason Sudeikis—hired to coach an English soccer team. While much of the show focuses on Lasso’s ability to win over his players with unrelenting charm and folksy cheerfulness, it also depicts him building a friendship with the team’s cold-hearted owner Rebecca Welton, who initially set out to sabotage her own team.
ADVERTISEMENT
Throughout his series of Lasso tweets, Romney eventually revealed that Sinema had joined him on his cosplaying journey. Sitting on an art-deco couch dressed as Welton, the Democratic lawmaker received a box of biscuits from Romney’s Lasso (a play on the show’s “biscuits with the boss” scenes between the Welton and Lasso characters).
Romney also added another tweet with Sinema, sharing a picture of him handing her the box of biscuits complete with the caption: “She’s one tough cookie.”
Considering that Sinema—alongside fellow centrist Democrat Joe Manchin—has been a major hurdle to passing Biden’s Build Back Better agenda-setting bill, and is seen as the main reason the social spending package has been severely gutted, Thursday’s tweets were unsurprisingly met with intense backlash.
Several observers, for instance, noted that Sinema was portraying a character who was actively trying to destroy her own soccer franchise, drawing parallels to Sinema’s objections to much of the provisions in the Democratic bill. “It should be noted that Sinema is playing a character who tries to tank her own team,” political reporter Taegan Goddard tweeted.
While liberals and progressives were expectedly furious over the tweets, seeing it as a “Rome burns” moment, others noted how similar Sinema’s actions were to another iconic political moment.
“This has major “I don’t care, do you?” [v]ibes,” Cook Political Report editor-in-chief Amy Walter noted.
