It’s not a benefit he expected, or even asked for. Mr. Romney had to content himself at first with critiquing from the gallery of Republican elders: In a 2016 speech he said, “Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,” as Mr. Trump was in the process of rolling to the Republican nomination.

Since then, events have conspired to return Mr. Romney back into the dirty coliseum of politics. He reflected on this return while folded into an armchair of his Washington office during another screwy week in the capital . In the past few days the president had, among other things, declared the emoluments clause of the Constitution to be “phony,” compared the impeachment inquiry to a “lynching” and dismissed his Republican critics as “human scum.”

In the midst of all this, weighty decisions and debates were playing out all through the marbled chambers of Capitol Hill. “I do believe it’s an inflection point in history when a president is impeached,” Mr. Romney said. He has been a persistent critic of the president’s conduct, and therefore perhaps the highest-profile specimen of “human scum” in Trump, D.C. — a designation that seems not to trouble him at all.

Now 72, Mr. Romney looks every bit the well-barbered character who was the last presidential nominee of the pre-Trump Republican Party. He has now settled into a hybrid role of sober statesman and maverick in a party struggling to reconcile the oft-irreconcilable impulses of its leader.

This “Free Mitt” phase has been accompanied by goofy episodes. In an interview with the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins published last weekend, Mr. Romney introduced the concept of “Pierre Delecto” into our Crazytown lexicon by oversharing that he maintained a pseudonymous Twitter account — and thus moving another reporter (Ashley Feinberg of Slate) to discover that the Twitter user going by the name Pierre Delecto was in fact Mr. Romney.