Retiring Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, having lost the debate with President-elect Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again majority faction of the Republican Party, admitted Trump is the GOP as much as the GOP is MAGA.
"Oh, MAGA is the Republican Party, and Donald Trump is the Republican Party today," Romney told CNN's "State of Union" on Sunday is a wide-ranging interview.
"And if you were to ask me who the nominee will be in 2028, I think it'll be JD Vance, all right? He's smart, well-spoken, part of the MAGA movement."
Romney lost the presidential election in 2012 and lost in his battles with Trump — once voting to impeach the former president after he left office in 2020 — but even he now must admit Trump has taken the reins of the party by appealing to working-class and middle-class voters.
"Look, the Republican Party has become the party of the working-class, middle-class voter, and you've got to give Donald Trump credit for having done that, taken that away from the Democrats," Romney told host Jake Tapper.
"Democrats pushed them out, all right? The Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren faction of the Democratic Party, with some of this, you know, defund the police and transgenders in — or, excuse me — biological males in women's sports, these things had a lot of people in the middle class just flee the Democratic Party. They're now Republicans."
There will be "some reorientation that's going to be necessary in my party," but ultimately it is the Democrats who lost and will be reeling in the long term, according to Romney.
"The Democrat Party is the one in trouble," he continued. "I mean, I don't know how they recover. And, you know, I'm not going to tell them what to do, because I wouldn't begin to have the capacity to do so. But they've lost their base.
"I mean, union guys and gals have left the Democratic Party and are voting Republican. And the Democratic Party is seen not as rich people, but as college professors and woke scolds. And that's not an attractive feature."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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