Meghan McCain Tells Whoopi Goldberg That Mitt Romney Is ‘Nothing Like My Dad’
Meghan McCain said this week she was hesitant to give Sen. Mitt Romney full-on praise for his decision to break from Republicans and vote against President Donald Trump in Trump’s impeachment trial.
The 72-year-old Utah senator surprised many, including those in his own party, when he announced he would vote Trump “guilty” on abuse of power, one of the two impeachment charges Trump faced in his Ukraine scandal.
On Thursday’s episode of The View, co-host McCain was tempering the praise for Romney from moderator Whoopi Goldberg, citing what McCain called his history of being a “flip-flopper.”
Goldberg, 64, told McCain, 35, she was giving Romney (the 2012 Republican Party presidential nominee) the same cautious support she would have given McCain’s dad, the late Republican Sen. John McCain, who was the party’s presidential nominee before Romney.
“With all due respect, Mitt Romney is nothing like my dad,” Meghan immediately responded.
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“I like when anyone bucks a party. I will always respect it and I think it took big cajones to do that yesterday, but it doesn’t take that much profiles and courage right now to vote against something that is not going to have any impact,” Meghan said, referencing the fact that Trump was still acquitted on his impeachment charges. “I just think to Mitt Romney, I want to trust him, but would he still feel this way if Trump had given him his secretary of state position?”
Romney and Trump have had an up-and-down relationship through the years but seemed to patch up their differences when the two met shortly after Trump’s 2016 election win and reportedly discussed the possibility of Romney becoming secretary of state.
The position ultimately went to business executive Rex Tillerson.
“His history of a flip-flopper, for people like me, I’m never going to trust him,” Meghan said on The View, adding, “I think right now, the idea that he woke up and found his conscience through the Mormon church is not something that I buy.”
Romney had referenced his deep faith as one of the main reasons why he decided to vote to remove President Trump from office.
“I am a profoundly religious person,” Romney said in a Senate speech on Wednesday. “I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the president, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced. I was not wrong.”
The Senate’s Republican majority found Trump not guilty on both of his impeachment charges. Romney became the first senator in American history to vote against his own party’s president in an impeachment trial, earning him praise from liberal voices and placed him firmly in the hot seat among his fellow conservatives.
Romney told The Atlantic this week that he planned to not vote for Trump in 2020 and would instead write in his wife’s name — just like he did in 2016.
“I get that a lot — ‘Be with the president,’ ” Romney said. “And I’ll say, ‘Regardless of his point of view? Regardless of the issue?’ And they say yes. And … it’s like, ‘Well, no, I can’t do that.’ ”
