# Mitt Romney U.S. Senator from Utah, 2019–2025. The 2012 Republican presidential nominee, former governor of Massachusetts, and co-founder of [[Bain Capital]]. Romney's role in this KB is as the most prominent Republican institutional figure to break with Trump on the floor of the U.S. Senate — and to pay the political price for doing so. ## The impeachments Romney is the **only U.S. senator in history to vote to convict a president of his own party** in an impeachment trial. He cast that vote on Article I (Abuse of Power) of the [[Trump First Impeachment]], February 5, 2020. He voted to convict again on the single article of the [[Trump Second Impeachment]] (February 13, 2021), one of seven Republican senators to do so. Both votes drew sustained intra-party hostility; he was booed at the 2021 Utah Republican Convention and faced calls for censure. ## Retirement Announced in September 2023 that he would not seek re-election, citing the need for a "new generation" of leadership and acknowledging he would not be politically viable in a Trump-dominated GOP. Left the Senate January 3, 2025. His December 2024 farewell speech warned against "those who tear at our unity." ## KB significance Romney is the cleanest test case in this KB for the proposition that the post-2016 GOP cleavage is loyalty, not ideology. His policy record is conventionally conservative; his break with Trump was on conduct grounds. His political fate — driven from the party despite an impeccable conservative biography — established the operative norm tracked in [[Trump Impeachments Timeline]]: defectors pay the price, not the impeached. ## Related - [[Trump First Impeachment]] - [[Trump Second Impeachment]] - [[Trump Impeachments Timeline]] - [[Liz Cheney]] — comparable profile in the House - [[Mitch McConnell]] — comparable profile + opposite outcome