Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) criticized former President Donald Trump on Tuesday for spreading falsehoods about immigrants and the federal government’s response to devastating Hurricane Helene.
“Trump told us that people in Springfield are eating dogs and cats. He likewise said that FEMA money, our emergency money, instead of helping people that were hit by the hurricane is being used to help illegals. I mean, he just makes it up,” Romney said during a discussion at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
“He is able to spew enough disinformation that the Chinese must be smiling,” the GOP’s 2012 GOP presidential nominee added.
Trump has spent the past week lying about Helene, which devastated parts of the Southeast, and the way the White House has been handling it. He’s falsely claimed that President Joe Biden ducked calls from Georgia’s Republican governor, that the White House is neglecting to help conservative-leaning areas affected by the storm, and that Harris spent “all” the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief money on housing undocumented immigrants.
“He’s lying … and the governor told him he was lying,” Biden said of Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp at the White House last week.
Last month, Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), smeared Haitian immigrants who are in the U.S. legally in Ohio by falsely claiming they have been eating Americans’ pets, a lie that has been repeatedly debunked by police and public officials.
“When it comes to taking a holiday from the truth, he’s taken the longest vacation,” Romney said of Trump on Tuesday.
Still, despite being one of Trump’s biggest GOP critics, Romney stopped just short on Tuesday of offering an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris’ Democratic presidential bid, declining to join the likes of former GOP Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyoming) and Adam Kinzinger (Illinois).
“I’ve made it very clear I don’t want Trump to be the next president of the U.S., and you’re going to have to do the very difficult calculation of what that would mean,” Romney told a student who asked him what was stopping him from backing Harris.
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He went on to explain he believed he would have more influence to “rebuild” the Republican Party following this election after either Trump is defeated or after his next four years in office.
“So I’m not planning on changing but it shouldn’t be terribly hard ― given the fact I’ve voted twice to convict him in the impeachment trials, which would have prevented him from running again ― I think where I stand on Donald Trump is pretty clear,” he added.