Romney Is In, but Don't Expect Attacks on Trump

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has announced he is running for a US Senate seat in Utah, while taking a dig at President Donald Trump.

The 2012 Republican presidential nominee and former MA governor said he will seek to succeed Orrin Hatch, a strong Trump supporter who decided not to run for an eighth term despite the president's efforts to persuade him to stay. The seat he aspires to fill will be vacant this election season due to long-time Senator Orrin Hatch retiring. Alas, the rest of the nation couldn't match the overwhelming 49-point win Romney garnered in the Beehive State - the largest margin of victory in the country outside of Barack Obama's win in Washington, DC - but the state Mitt relocated to permanently in 2013 is primed to send him to Washington as its next senator. Romney's campaign said he plans to participate in both the signature-gathering process and the state GOP convention in April.

Romney attracted headlines in 2016 when he took the extraordinary step of delivering a biting speech denouncing Trump, calling him a "phony" who was unfit for office.

As he did in two presidential campaigns, Romney's announcement highlights his stewardship of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Romney was always supposed to keynote the event, but will now use it as a platform to start to get his campaign message out, the Examiner said.

"Utah has a lot to teach the politicians in Washington", Romney says in the video.

Mitt Romney will run for U.S. Senate in Utah, hoping to capture the seat of outgoing Republican Sen.

His former running mate, the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, issued a statement saying it was "a terrific day for the United States Senate".

Romney may also be confronted by the pro-Trump, anti-establishment forces in the Republican Party that influenced decisions by Republican Party Senators Bob Corker of Tennessee and Jeff Flake of Arizona to retire after this year, although a Corker spokesman said he may reconsider.

Then Romney slammed the president for his remarks regarding the deadly attack in Charlottesville, Va., when a man - amid clashes between neo-Nazis and counter-protesters - drove through a crowd of people, killing one woman. While Romney chose to delay his campaign rollout after a mass shooting at a high school in Florida, the announcement is still expected to come within days. Anderson was an early Trump supporter - his wife served as Trump's Utah communications director - and Romney has a famously fraught relationship with the president.

Like Romney, Wilson, a member of the Salt Lake County Council, doesn't really want to talk about Trump either. Jenny Wilson, a Democratic candidate running for Senate in Utah, said this week that "Utah families deserve another Utahn as their senator, not a MA governor who thinks of our state as his vacation home".