Mitt Romney has what he must consider a clever idea to stop Trump: the 2024 GOP presidential field should coalesce behind a single candidate — Ron DeSantis, probably — who would then become the Republican presidential candidate and go on to be our 47th president.  Anyway, that seems to me to be Sen. Romney's idea, put forward in an op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal, July 25.

But see a Morning Consult poll reported online, July 25.  This poll gives Gov. DeSantis 16%, followed by Vivek Ramaswamy with 8%, Mike Pence at 6%, Nikki Haley at 4%, and Sen. Tim Scott and Chris Christie at 2% each.  That, rounded off, gives the former president 60% and the GOP field some 40%.  This observer recalls the days when a 60-40 split would be regarded as a landslide result.

How does Sen. Romney twist a result of landslide proportions for Mr. Trump into a win for a forty-percent minority?  Or does the senator from Utah allow for the Deep State's usual political skullduggery to prevail over the former president?

Simple good political judgment should encourage the Republican presidential field to rally round the party's titular leader, Donald J. Trump — who has drawn the vengeful political wrath of local and federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., and faces additional retaliatory prosecutions from Biden hit man Jack Smith in Washington, D.C., and Fani Willis, Fulton County, Georgia district attorney, reported, surprise, surprise, to be "coordinating on Trump" with Jack Smith. 

Mr. Romney concluded his puzzling suggestion with this statement, in part: 

Our party and our country need a nominee with character driven by something greater than revenge and ego[.]

If the senator were truly a man of principle, not personal pique, he would recognize that former president Trump has, all along, been driven by dedication to the well-being of the American people — not an entrenched oligarchy — and is opposed by a political force motivated by revenge and greed.  How many millions of tax dollars are to be expended by partisan prosecutions intent on preventing the American people from choosing their next president — $25 million?  $40 million?

Sen. Romney's purposeful obtuseness to the persecution by prosecution of a former president by a political enemy for that enemy's political advancement, to the injury of Mr. Trump, should cause voters to press the delete button on any and all public comments from the Utah senator — starting with his call, in The Wall Street Journal, for an anti-Trump coalition of 40% of voters to thwart the rightful support for Mr. Trump of 60% of GOP voters.

Sen. Romney's stratagem to block the former president from being our next president may well suit the ambitions of the Despotic Clique but makes no sense.  But the past seven or eight years have made clear to the American people that Trump Derangement Syndrome is irrational in its origins — and, thereby, a threat not only to the spirit of American democracy, but to national security.  Rallying round the besieged candidacy of Donald J. Trump is very much in the national interest.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0 license.