George Conway: Romney should treat Trump criticism as ‘a badge of honor’

George Conway, a lawyer and the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, said that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) should consider President Trump’s criticism a “badge of honor” after Trump called the senator an “ass” and told him to “wake up.”

“Bravo for @MittRomney. He should treat this tweet as a badge of honor. Sen. Romney stood up for the country. @realDonaldTrump stands only for himself,” Conway wrote Saturday, quote-tweeting Trump’s insult toward Romney.  

Bravo for @MittRomney. He should treat this tweet as a badge of honor. Sen. Romney stood up for the country. @realDonaldTrump stands only for himself. https://t.co/zDlwlTVKXS

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 5, 2019

Trump lashed out at Romney after the GOP senator on Friday criticized the president’s calls for foreign countries to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, with Romney calling the move “wrong and appalling.” {mosads}

“Somebody please wake up Mitt Romney and tell him that my conversation with the Ukrainian President was a congenial and very appropriate one,” Trump tweeted before mocking the 2012 GOP presidential nominee for losing the election that year. “If Mitt worked this hard on Obama, he could have won. Sadly, he choked!”

“Mitt Romney never knew how to win. He is a pompous ‘ass’ who has been fighting me from the beginning, except when he begged me for my endorsement for his Senate run (I gave it to him), and when he begged me to be Secretary of State (I didn’t give it to him). He is so bad for R’s!” Trump added in a subsequent tweet. 

Trump has faced rising scrutiny over his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he pressed the foreign leader to “look into” Biden, according to a rough transcript of the call released by the White House last week.

The call and a subsequent whistleblower complaint filed by a member of the U.S. intelligence community, which raised alarms about the president’s dealings with Ukraine, helped spark the impeachment inquiry against Trump launched by House Democrats last week.

This week, Trump stoked further scrutiny by publicly encouraging both China and Ukraine to investigate the former vice president. 

“They should investigate the Bidens,” he said Thursday when asked about his call with Zelensky. “Likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens.”

Romney slammed the comment as “politically motivated” as well as “wrong and appalling.”

“When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated,” the senator wrote. 

“By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling,” he added. 

Trump in his Saturday post also defended his overture to China as pertaining “to corruption, not politics.”