Behind Mitt Romney’s Increasingly Lonely Challenge to Donald Trump wsj.com ^ | Monica Langley
The 2012 GOP presidential nominee reflects on the waves he created by attacking the 2016 candidate and how he increasingly finds himself a voice in the wilderness
Mitt Romney’s advisers begged him not to go to war with...Trump. After he decided to go ahead, Mr. Trump dismissed him as “lightweight” and “failed candidate.” This week, Newt Gingrich called him “pathetic.”
Mr. Romney, sticking to his guns, has become a rare figure in American history—a former presidential nominee openly defying the man succeeding him as his party’s standard-bearer.
Sitting at his home on the Pacific Ocean last week, Mr. Romney reflected on the waves he created by attacking Mr. Trump, how his family helped persuade him it was the right thing to do, and how he increasingly finds himself a voice in the wilderness.
“Friends warned me, ‘Don’t speak out, stay out of the fray,’ because criticizing Mr. Trump will only help him by giving him someone else to attack,” Mr. Romney said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal—the first time the 2012 GOP nominee discussed in depth his reasons for going after Mr. Trump.
“They were right. I became his next target, and the incoming attacks have been constant and brutal.” He said he had no illusions he would alter Mr. Trump’s progress toward the nomination or spark a meaningful independent candidacy.
His motivation: “I wanted my grandkids to see that I simply couldn’t ignore what Mr. Trump was saying and doing, which revealed a character and temperament unfit for the leader of the free world.”
Today, the GOP anti-Trump chorus is dwindling, leaving Mr. Romney among the few making the case publicly.
Mr. Trump, in an interview on Wednesday, said of Mr. Romney: “Once a choker, always a choker. I’ve got a store worth more than he is.” He said Mr. Romney’s attack “has nothing to do with his country. It has to do with me. I’m the one who forced him out”...
[Continued behind a pay wall]
http://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-mitt-romneys-increasingly-lonely-challenge-to-donald-trump-1464354734
