Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast, the first podcast of 2019.

This is January 2nd, 2019. I am John Pudhorts, the editor of commentary magazine with me as always,

a senior editor, Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe. Hi John. Associate editor, Noel Rothman. Hi Noah.

Hi John. Christine Rosen is not with us today. Commentary, of course, the 70-odd year-old monthly

of intellectual analysis, political, providence, and cultural criticism from a conservative perspective.

We invite you to join us at commentarymagazine.com where we give you a few free reads and then ask

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So, gentlemen, the New Year begins with Mitt Romney publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post,

upgrading Donald Trump for being a man of weak character who had a bad December and got rid of

Jim Mattis and is in general not handling his presidency with the requisite character. Though

Romney also says that he will support Trump when Trump does things that he agrees with and will

oppose him when he doesn't, and he likes the judges and he likes some of the stuff on China and so on.

So, Trump responds, I think, quite surprisingly widally by saying that he hopes that Romney is not

a flake with a capital F. Raising the question of whether Mitt Romney has been elected to the Senate

from Utah in order to play the role of the ineffectual, whiny sort of outlier senator like Jeff

Blake, the now-gone senator from Arizona or Bob Quarker, the now-gone senator from Tennessee

on the grounds that basically they didn't like Trump and they didn't like him but they never

did anything about it much or something. So, Abe, what's going on here?

Look, I respect Mitt Romney, I agree with much of what he wrote there. I'm not sure I see the

purpose of it. I think he takes a line on Trump that is so well-established, so often repeated,

even among those conservatives and Republicans who have been very vocal about their misgivings

...