Four years ago, Donald Trump’s candidacy was the craziest thing any of us had ever seen. But since then, his opponents have gone so far off the deep end that they have made him seem the sensible alternative. For whatever reason – jealousy? bad advisers? – Mitt Romney hasn’t come to the realization the rest of us have: that President Trump is now the thin orange line between order and chaos.

Happy enough to accept the president’s endorsement last year, Romney quickly turned on him to become a virtue-signaling headline-chaser. He began his Senate tenure with an attack piece in the once admirable Washington Post, refusing to support border security, voting against a judicial nominee for inconsequential reasons, and supporting sexual assault allegations cribbed from an episode of “Law & Order.”

If Utah Republicans had known that this was the real Mitt Romney, we would not have selected him.

Romney’s smug contrarianism undermines his credibility when there’s the need for legitimate debate – such as on U.S. policy in Syria. But the main victim of Romney’s fecklessness is that credibility. He’s even followed the herd on calling the president racist – even though Trump did better with minorities than Romney did himself in 2012 and is poised to do even better next year.

And where baseless calls of racism are concerned, the Democrats and their allied media have spent the last 10 years playing 52-card pickup – every card is the race card.

Romney has even voiced support for impeachment calls as some mysterious GOP donors – or more likely breathless headline writers – are calling for him to mount an intra-party insurgency. This is all happening at the same time Trump is raising record amounts for his reelection and enjoying approval ratings within the party of about 90%. Meanwhile, Romney has the worst disapproval rating of any member of Utah’s congressional delegation.

Romney could not get reelected in his home state next year, let alone dethrone the president.

Utah’s junior senator is operating under the assumption that it’s still 2016 and there is a more traditional alternative for safeguarding America and the world stability we provide. Spoiler: It’s not, and there isn’t. While Trump’s victory was a warning that Democrats needed to return to Bill Clinton-style centrism, the party has instead hit the snooze button on common sense.

We live in a binary system, and it appears that the Democrats are going to nominate a Marxist next year – one of two candidates who think they can centrally plan the U.S. economy but probably couldn’t run a Burger King for a day. If Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders got as much power as they desire, they would crash the economy, which would spark a global depression, which could (if history is any guide) trigger World War III.

Meanwhile, the Trump economy is the strongest America has seen in 50 years, with a surge of manufacturing jobs, energy independence, and record growth – all things Barack Obama assured us couldn’t be done without a magic wand.

Leftist calls to “fundamentally transform” our society come with a very disturbing embrace of Gestapo-style tactics, whether it’s thought-suppression in academia or online, or actual street-level political violence. So-called progressives are attacking, as never before, the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of religion, and the right for law-abiding citizens to own firearms – all while insisting that Trump is somehow the “fascist.”

So, on the one hand we have a party whose policies lead toward failure, ruin, and urban rot – a party that demands total control over every aspect of American life but cannot even run monolithically Democratic cities like Portland or San Francisco. On the other hand, protecting us from that we have a guy who sends mean tweets and calls people names.

I’d call that a bargain.

And I’d call Mitt Romney jealous and petty for not acknowledging this. The only people he’s impressing with his posturing are people who didn’t vote for him in 2012. Given the threat of the “progressive” left, there is hardly any such thing as a former Trump supporter. There are, however, many, many former Romney supporters.