'Aren't you embarrassed?': Conservative explains why Romney’s question is wildly appropriate for 'crazy' GOP

When Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah was loudly booed by fellow Republicans at a Utah GOP event, he asked the crowd, "Aren't you embarrassed?" The conservative senator's cardinal sin, in the minds of those who were booing, was denouncing former President Donald Trump for the January 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C. and acknowledging that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. Conservative pundit Charlie Sykes, in a May 3 column for The Bulwark, lays out some reasons why "aren't you embarrassed" is a wildly appropriate question for the Trumpified Republican Party of 2021.

"Romney is, of course, a lifelong Republican," Sykes explains. "His father was the GOP governor of Michigan. Mitt was the Republican governor of Massachusetts, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, and is Utah's junior United States Senator. As the boos intensified, Romney asked the crowd: 'Aren't you embarrassed?' That question seems to hang in the air. How is the GOP not thoroughly humiliated by what it is becoming?"

The Never Trump conservative adds that the Republican Party of 2021 is embarrassing in a variety of ways, from a shady and blatantly partisan audit of the 2020 presidential vote in Maricopa County, Arizona to the treatment of Rep. Liz Cheney by fellow Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Sykes writes, "Aren't you embarrassed? The House GOP evidently is not. Axios reports that GOP leaders are threatening to strip Liz Cheney of her leadership position for her disloyalty to Trump's lie. During an interview with Axios on Friday, Rep. Steve Scalise laid down a marker of fealty: 'This idea that you just disregard President Trump is not where we are, and frankly, he has a lot to offer still.'"

One conservative Republican who does have enough common sense to be embarrassed, according to Sykes, is Cindy McCain — widow of the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona and mother of "The View's" Meghan McCain. Sykes notes that Cindy McCain, during a May 2 appearance on CNN, described members of the Arizona GOP who support the current Maricopa County vote audit as "crazy." A vehement critic of Trump, Cindy McCain endorsed Biden in 2020.

A major reason for the GOP to be embarrassed, Sykes notes, is the fact that attorney Lin Wood is running for chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. Wood is a far-right extremist, QAnon supporter and conspiracy theorist who tried to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and urged him to declare martial law. And Sykes notes that according to The Bulwark's Tim Miller, "Over the past week of campaign stops in South Carolina, Wood has suggested that Donald Trump is still secretly in charge of the military and that a day of reckoning is coming for those who are perpetrators of the pedo pandemic."

By "pedo pandemic," Miller was referring to Wood's support of the QAnon conspiracy theory — which, during Trump's presidency, claimed that the U.S. government had been hijacked by an international cabal of pedophiles, child sex traffickers, Satanists and cannibals. Sykes points out that Wood has also "argued that Mike Pence and the Deep State let in Antifa rioters on January 6, making them 'traitors' who should die by firing squad" and "said it's common sense that Joe Biden didn't even get 2% of the vote in 2020.

"Aren't you embarrassed?," Sykes writes. "The GOP very obviously isn't."