What Kind of Senator Would Mitt Romney Be?

Ever since early 2016, when the Republican Party began to fussily resettle itself behind Donald Trump, Mitt Romney has been an intermittent oppositional figure, distinct from his party in both point of view and style. The conservative movement has grown smirking, clannish, quarrelsome; Romney has been formal, chiding, and pained. In March of 2016, he called a press conference to warn Republican-primary voters that, in nominating Trump, they were aligning their party with “a phony, a fraud.” After Trump won the election, that November, Romney met with Trump in the hope of securing for himself the position of Secretary of State. Yet this summer, after a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville turned deadly, Romney professed deeper anxieties. “There may commence an unraveling of our national fabric,” he wrote, in a Facebook post. For half a century, Romney and his family have existed close to the center of the Republican Party. Now—just six years removed from being his party's Presidential nominee, but with no distinct Romneyist camp in Washington and no obvious constituency to summon—it isn't obvious that Romney fits in at all.