Sen. Mitt Romney took a fall over the weekend that rendered him unconscious and left him with stitches and bruises to his face.
“I’m doing better,” the Utah Republican told reporters in Washington, D.C., on Monday. He said he fell while visiting his grandchildren in Boston but didn’t say what he was doing. He was not admitted to the hospital overnight.
Romney said received “a lot of stitches” to his eyebrow and eyelid. He also has bruising around his eyes.
When reporters first asked what happened to him, Romney joked about the Conservative Political Action Conference, where former President Donald Trump called him out.
“Oh my goodness. I went to CPAC. That was a problem,” Romney said.
The senator did not attend the group’s annual conference this past weekend. In 2020, the leader of the group disinvited him to the annual gathering after he voted to include additional witnesses in Trump’s first Senate impeachment trial.
“The ‘extreme conservative’ and Junior Senator from the great state of Utah, Sen. Mitt Romney is formally NOT invited to CPAC2020,” CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp tweeted last year.
At this year’s conference, Trump ridiculed Senate Republicans who voted to convict him for inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, his second impeachment trial. He said if they spent the same energy attacking Democrats as they do him, they would be successful.
“The Democrats don’t have grandstanders like Mitt Romney, ‘Little’ Ben Sasse, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey,” Trump said at the conference, drawing boos from the crowd.
Romney was the only GOP senator to vote both times to convict Trump.
Former Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who acted as a top surrogate for Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, also took a shot at the senator in a joke about his formerly secret Twitter account, which Romney used under the name Pierre Delecto.
“My name is Jason Chaffetz, I’m from Utah and I am not Mitt Romney,” Chaffetz said during a speech at CPAC. “If you’re looking for Pierre Delecto, you need to go down the hall, go left, and then just keep going left until, well, just keep going left. That’s where you’ll find him.”