President Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses by more than 50%, bringing him closer to winning the Republican Party’s nomination for president for a third time in a row.
That prompted reporters to ask Sen. Mitt Romney why he thinks Trump is winning over Republican voters, even though he faces criminal charges and was found civilly liable for sexual assault.
Romney said he believes people are less trusting in the nation’s institutions — including the media — which has helped Trump.
“I have a hard time understanding how things which would have been disqualifying a decade ago are suddenly just overlooked today and brushed aside,” Romney said, responding to questions in the hallway at the U.S. Capitol. “But that’s just the nature of where we are today. Our nation is much more divided. People are less likely to believe what they see in the media or something they hear from academics,” he said.
Romney also pointed to policies released by “progressives” that he said “made a lot of people shake their heads and say ‘that makes no sense.’” He included in that list defunding the police and rules around transgender individuals and sports.
“And these sorts of things have gotten a lot of people just scratching their heads and saying, ‘I don’t know that the experts know what they’re talking about,’” he said, according to Romney’s office.
Trump attended a court hearing this week for a defamation case brought against him by writer E. Jean Carroll. Last year, Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll, and was ordered to pay her $5 million in damages. After that case concluded, remarks he made led Carroll to sue him again.
Romney: People don’t trust the media
Romney was asked why he thinks that case has not hurt Trump’s chances with voters — and he said the erosion of public trust in the media has played a role.
“Don’t look at me,” said Romney. “It had an impact on me. ... I don’t know why people don’t respond the way we did a decade ago, but I think part of it is we just don’t have the same trust we used to have in institutions and I’m talking about the media, the press generally.”
Romney said that distrust extends to the nation’s judicial system as well.
“We don’t have the trust in those institutions that we once did. If someone is convicted, my guess is some people say, ‘well, that’s just the partisans who convicted them.’ That is very different than what we’ve seen in the past,” he said.
Romney said if the nation is going to “survive as a great democracy,” people need to have confidence again in the nation’s institutions.
“That requires leaders that call on us to come together and work together and find common ground, as opposed to leaders in the field of the most extreme wing of their respective party,” he said.
Romney says he worries about extremism on ‘both sides of the aisle’
When asked whether he thinks Trump is a threat to democracy, Romney said he’s concerned about extremism “on both sides of the aisle.”
“But most of the observers that are saying what are the greatest threats in the world today are saying the dysfunction of American government is one of the greatest threats, if not the greatest,” he said.
That’s not just because of politicians, he said, but because Americans are “more divided, more angry, less trusting in one another.”
“And we have been for a long time. And that I think, is a real threat to our future and we need to come together,” he said. “In the past, great leaders have been able to make that happen. We’re not seeing that today.”