Romney Got Real Philosophical In His Trump Speech

In a televised speech at the University of Utah, former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney took his attacks on Donald Trump, his party's leading candidate in the 2016 campaign, to a new level. The public address reiterated a few of the harsh comments recently put out there both by Romney and by Trump's opposing candidates, such as Marco Rubio. Romney suggested that Trump must be hiding something in his tax returns, and referred to him as a phony and a fraud. His call to fellow Republicans across the country also tried out one or two new ways to make Trump look like the spawn of Satan by delving into (believe it or not) democratic theory. Here's the one Mitt Romney quote about Donald Trump that got super philosophical on everyone, and may have been the worst zinger of the whole speech.

The statement was tucked neatly in the middle of the former Massachusetts governor's plea for Republican voters to denounce Trump, and it didn't have quite the punch of, say, claiming that Trump seeks to kill innocent children. The attack was instead of the more subtle kind. Romney went back to the time of America's birth in order to talk about how the country has defied expectations by thriving for centuries. In doing so, he basically said that Trump would ruin all of that.

Ronald Reagan used to quote a Scottish philosopher who predicted that democracies and civilizations couldn't last more than about 200 years. John Adams wrote this: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." I believe that America has proven these dire predictions wrong.

Reagan's reference refers to a 1787 quote which states, "a democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government." The line has never been verified as real, but is often attributed to Scottish professor Alexander Fraser Tytler. The John Adams quote comes from a 1814 letter to John Taylor. Both statements are undoubtedly pretty bleak on democracy's prospects for success, which is why Romney took the time to claim that America has already beaten the odds.

It was in this prideful portion of Romney's address that he said that American democracy has survived for so long both because of its long line of honorable leaders and its people, who have "put the interests of the country above their own." Juxtaposing these statements with numerous insults aimed right for The Donald, it becomes clear that Romney had just one takeaway for American voters: Supporting Trump means supporting the end of America as a democracy, because the presidential hopeful would fall under the category of "none of the above."