Ever since early 2016, when the Republican Party began to fussily
resettle itself behind Donald Trump, Mitt Romney has been an
intermittent oppositional figure, distinct from his party in both point
of view and style. The conservative movement has grown smirking,
clannish, quarrelsome; Romney has been formal, chiding, and pained. In
March of 2016, he called a press conference to warn Republican-primary
voters that, in nominating Trump, they were aligning their party with “a
phony, a fraud.” After Trump won the election, that November, Romney met
with Trump in the hope of securing for himself the position of Secretary
of State. Yet this summer, after a white-supremacist rally in
Charlottesville turned deadly, Romney professed deeper anxieties. “There
may commence an unraveling of our national fabric,” he wrote, in a
Facebook post. For half a century, Romney and his family have existed
close to the center of the Republican Party. Now—just six years removed
from being his party’s Presidential nominee, but with no distinct
Romneyist camp in Washington and no obvious constituency to summon—it isn't
obvious that Romney fits in at all.

Last week, the Utah senator Orrin Hatch announced that he would be
retiring at the end of his term this year, and immediately Romney’s
allies suggested that he would run for the seat; the common wisdom was
that his election would be all but assured. (Romney, a man of many
residences, built his political career in Massachusetts, but he went to
college in Utah, and helped to save the Salt Lake City Olympics from
ruin in 2002; he is the most recognizable Mormon in the world, and he
would be running in a state whose Republican Party is defined by its
relationship to the L.D.S. Church.) Romney’s candidacy is still
unannounced, and its most important position–what line the candidate
takes on the President—is not yet obvious. “This thing is still
developing,” one of Romney’s longtime advisers told me last week. But
already the most romantic vision of Romney—that he might arrive in
Washington as the de-facto leader of an anti-Trump faction—seems
unlikely. “I’ve heard some relatively simplistic assessments that he is
going to be the voice of the Never Trump movement,” a senior adviser to
Romney’s Presidential campaign said last week. “That strikes me as completely
wrong.”

The anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party has not lacked for lonely
heroes. If anything, it has too many of them: John McCain, Susan
Collins, Bob Corker, Marco Rubio, Ben Sasse—each has had moments of
deeply felt yet short-lived rebellion against the President. This
dynamic is inscribed in the modern history of the Republican Party; the
G.O.P. of the past half-century has been home to some moderate
politicians, but they have not often gathered behind an agenda, as a
faction. Romney himself has made no sign of wanting to be part of such a
faction, even if it existed. One of his advisers reminded me last week
that Romney took the idea of being Trump’s Secretary of State seriously,
and believed that Trump’s interest in him was entirely sincere. And, a
month after his appalled reaction to Charlottesville, Romney tweeted
praise for Trump’s speech before the U.N. General Assembly.

Romney’s potential for tragedy and heroism both spring from the same
source: the depth of his feeling for a version of America that may exist
only in his mind, a place where the trees in Michigan are exactly the
right height. Romney’s return to Utah has some elements of a homecoming;
it is also, more simply, a move to accommodating political terrain. Utah
is a conservative state whose politics are moving toward Romney, rather
than away. Modern Utah, the place of the salvaged Salt Lake Olympics,
exists in the Romney image. As the Republican Party has consolidated its
support among white people in poorer and less educated parts of the
country, a trend that Trump has accelerated, Utah has stood as an
outlier—communal in ethic while the rest of the country’s conservatism
has grown more individualistic. The state has a higher proportion of
residents who have finished college than any other state that voted for
Trump; it is richer, by household, than any other red state, save for
Alaska. Its rising political star is the African-American anti-Trump
Republican congresswoman Mia Love. In 2016, the state harbored the
anti-Trump candidacy of Evan McMullin, who briefly threatened to split
Republicans and throw the state’s electoral votes to Hillary Clinton,
and the strange political curio of the Mormons for Hillary campaign.
Trump won fourteen per cent of votes in Utah’s Republican primary that
year. If there is any place in the country that might harbor a
conservative anti-Trump rebellion, Utah is it.

And yet even in Utah the dissident faction is weaker than it might at
first seem. One Republican consultant in Utah told me that the Party’s
primary voters were divided roughly in thirds: one third was for Trump,
no matter what; a second (the McMullin faction) was steadfastly against
him; and a crucial third group, in the middle, liked the tax cuts and
the conservative judges and wished the President would stop tweeting.
The consultant told me that his advice to his clients was to find ways
to agree with Trump and ways to disagree with him, as Love herself has
done, to avoid alienating either faction. “Mormonism is a very pragmatic
faith,” Quin Monson, a political scientist at B.Y.U., pointed out last week. Romney is a very pragmatic politician, too. “The church,” Monson
told me, “is about getting things done.”