Steven Strauss

Hillary Clinton, with her fact-based argument that Donald Trump is encouraging racism, white nationalism and “taking hate groups mainstream,” has now given the speech that many Republicans no doubt wish they had made five years ago.

Back then, Trump was flooding the airwaves with “birther” madness and winning plaudits from the GOP establishment.

When he endorsed Mitt Romney for president in 2012, Romney called that backing “a delight” and added: "I'm so honored and pleased to have his endorsement. ... Donald Trump has shown an extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works, to create jobs for the American people. He's done it here in Nevada. He's done it across the country.”

Four years later, Romney was shocked — shocked — that Trump was edging toward winning the Republican presidential nomination. “His bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who worked for them,” Romney warned in March. “He inherited his business, he didn't create it. … Dishonesty is Trump's hallmark. … He creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants. … Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers.”

Most of what Romney noted about Trump this year was true and easily ascertainable in 2012. So is Romney upset that Trump is playing the American people for suckers, or that Trump is better than Romney at playing us for suckers? Because comparing what Romney told us in 2012 and in 2016, Romney sure seems to think Americans are fools.

In 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton repudiated African-American rapper Sister Souljah’s (arguably) racist comments about why blacks might be justified in killing whites. Clinton was in the middle of his political campaign. He didn’t need to say anything about her or her remarks, but he spoke up. It was a risky gesture — appealing to white moderates, yet potentially alienating to a loyal part of his own political base.

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Romney and the GOP, however, didn’t risk a Sister Souljah moment in 2012. And many Republican leaders today still shirk their responsibility to repudiate the racist anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim extremists (the alt-right) whom Trump has attracted to the Republican Party. Romney and his allies had welcomed Trump’s mixture of demagoguery, reality TV and buffoonery to the GOP. They hoped Trump, like a foul smelling “health supplement” (taken in small doses), would strengthen the GOP. Instead, he’s an internal parasite that has taken over the party.

Romney should have denounced Trump in 2012 for his racist conspiracy theories (especially birtherism, the unfounded claim that President Obama was born in Kenya and therefore not legally president of the United States). Romney and most other establishment GOP figures never espoused this lunatic theory, or suggestions by Trump and others that Obama was Muslim, but they were happy to accept endorsements from people who did.

Nor did they attempt to dissuade voters from these theories. Then-House Speaker John Boehner said that while he personally “believed” Obama was a Christian born in America, it wasn’t his role to tell voters what to believe. Neither Boehner nor Romney felt a responsibility, as Republican leaders, to point out to the American people that birtherism was idiotic, racist and had no basis in fact, and that anyone promoting birtherism was an un-American fraud. That would have required them to put our country’s interests ahead of their short-term partisan gains — something the GOP has notably failed to do since 2008.

In 2012, Romney and the GOP leadership thought Trump was a holy fool they could use to excite their base and help win the presidency. They believed that the sacred Republican goals of saving America from Obamacare, and preventing Obama from raising taxes on the affluent, justified almost anything. Even accepting the endorsement of a charlatan like Trump.

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The GOP leadership thought it could control Trump for its own purposes. Instead, Trump spread his roots deep into the intellectual soil prepared for him by the GOP.

So Romney shouldn’t be dismayed by Trump’s ascendancy. He (and his allies) legitimized Trump when Romney was the presidential nominee in 2012.

I don’t know whether Romney and other GOP leaders would have prevented Trump’s nomination in 2016 had they denounced him in 2012, but they should have tried. Their shameless pandering to Trump in 2012 undercuts any claim they have to moral leadership.

If Trump loses (which thankfully looks likely), Romney and other leading Republicans of his generation will be remembered in some footnote of U.S. history as enablers of Trump, as patsies whom Trump easily outmaneuvered on his way to taking over their party. If Trump is elected, they will be far more than footnotes.

Steven Strauss is the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. visiting professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Follow him on Twitter @Steven_Strauss.

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