#romney

W Rosemary Lane, Romney, West Virginia.

The Honourable Charlotte Clive, George Romney, 1783-85

It’s so clear that this property has been well cared for. Our room was clean, affordable and gave us the exact experience we were looking for. The Koolwink’s website describes their motel as “a modern facility with a retro feel,” which is exactly what it is. I really loved my stay there. Kay left me with a hug and a “come visit us again soon.” I will definitely be back.

On to another hat. This time in Normir DK from Viking Fiber Co in the colorway Plost.

Another hat using the free Purl Soho pattern. This time in Viking Fiber Co's Normir DK in the colorway Plost.

This painting illustrates an early scene from the poem Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora is an aspiring poet. Her cousin Romney has proposed marriage, asking Aurora to devote herself to his philanthropic projects. She rejects him and this role of ‘helpmate’ in order to follow her vocation as a writer. Here, she holds a book of her poems that Romney has dismissed with doubts of a woman’s ability to create meaningful art. This work was commissioned by a friend of Barrett Browning, art collector Ellen Heaton.

Conspiracy theories thrive in moments of identity rupture. They provide clean explanations for messy change. Instead of acknowledging that a movement has evolved in ways that exclude former allies, conspiracy thinking externalizes the loss. Romney did not leave the movement. He was never really part of it. The movement did not fracture. It was infiltrated. This logic performs an important emotional service. It preserves the moral purity of the in group. If Romney is a plant, then MAGA did not fail to persuade him. He was always aligned with the enemy. There is no need to ask why certain Republican leaders found Trump unacceptable. There is no need to interrogate whether institutional loyalty or constitutional norms matter. The problem is not internal disagreement. It is contamination. The theory also depends on a misunderstanding of how power works. Infiltration implies coordination, secrecy, and reward. But Romney’s opposition to Trump was public, consistent, and costly. It alienated him from the party base. It diminished his influence. It ultimately helped push him toward retirement. There was no payoff. No hidden advancement. No Democratic embrace waiting in the wings. What there was, instead, was a political system that increasingly punishes dissent. That punishment is the point. Trumpism does not merely demand loyalty. It retroactively rewrites identity. Once someone breaks with the leader, their entire past must be reinterpreted. Romney did not become disloyal in 2019. He must have always been disloyal. The same logic has been applied to career civil servants, judges, prosecutors, and even Republican appointees who carried out their duties in ways that conflicted with Trump’s personal interests. When institutions resist, they are not functioning. They are conspiring. Richardson, as a historian, recognizes this pattern because it is not new. Authoritarian movements often collapse the distinction between opposition and treason. Once that collapse occurs, facts lose their stabilizing power. Romney’s documented Republican career does not disprove the conspiracy. It becomes part of it. A deeper cover. A longer con. This is why the theory cannot be argued away with evidence. Evidence is not what sustains it. What sustains it is a worldview in which loyalty is the highest virtue and disagreement is moral failure. The irony is that Romney’s actual behavior is remarkably old fashioned. He acted as though senators are accountable to the Constitution rather than to a single leader. He treated impeachment as a legal and moral process rather than a team sport. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, none of this requires a secret Democratic handler. It requires only a belief system that predates Trump. That belief system is now treated as foreign. Watching Richardson lay this out, what struck me most was how quickly the extraordinary has become normalized. A former Republican presidential nominee is accused of being a Democratic plant, and the accusation circulates not as satire but as plausible explanation. That should not be dismissed as internet noise. It is diagnostic. The Romney conspiracy tells us that Trumpism is not merely a set of policy preferences. It is an identity structure that cannot tolerate internal dissent without recasting it as existential threat. It is a politics that replaces persuasion with purification and disagreement with expulsion. Romney was never an infiltrator. He was a stress test. And the fact that so many people needed him to be unreal tells us far more about the movement that rejected him than it ever could about the man himself.

Very pleased with this spin. I am getting better!