Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) slammed President Donald Trump on Sunday over his flirtation with the idea of imposing martial law to rerun the 2020 presidential election, insisting that “it’s going nowhere” while calling Trump’s actions “really sad” and “embarrassing.”
Several media outlets, including The Daily Beast, reported over the weekend that Trump held an Oval Office meeting with his former campaign lawyer Sidney Powell and her client Michael Flynn, Trump’s ex-national security adviser who the president recently pardoned. Both Powell and Flynn have been front-and-center in peddling unhinged, baseless conspiracies that Trump lost the election due to a nefarious international plot featuring dead dictator Hugo Chavez and corrupt voting software.
During the bonkers meeting, which apparently left several advisers “spooked,” the president reportedly considered Flynn’s recent proposal that Trump should invoke martial law in order to allow the military to redo the election in several states. Trump also suggested making Powell, whose “Kraken” election lawsuits have been laughed out of court, a special counsel investigating voter fraud.
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Interviewing Romney on Sunday’s State of the Union, CNN anchor Jake Tapper brought up the latest reports—which also included Trump pushing to issue an executive order to seize voting machines—before asking Romney to weigh in.
“This is, needless to say, quite alarming and scary to a lot of people. What will the Senate do to make sure this doesn’t happen?” Tapper wondered aloud.
“Well, it’s not going to happen. It’s going nowhere,” Romney responded. “It’s really sad in a lot of respects and embarrassing because the president could, right now, be writing the last chapter of this administration with a victory lap with regards to the vaccine.”
The former Republican presidential nominee, who has been a vocal critic of the president for years, went on to praise Trump over Operation Warp Speed before criticizing him once again over his refusal to accept his election loss.
“He could be championing this story but instead he’s leaving Washington with conspiracy theories and things so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their heads, wondering what in the world has gotten into this man,” the Utah senator stated. “I think that is unfortunate because he has more accomplishments than this last chapter suggests he is going to be known for.”
The president, meanwhile, has leaned back on his favorite retort over the multiple reports on the meeting and his discussions about a coup, calling it “Fake news” and “more knowingly bad reporting” in a late Saturday night tweet.
