From James Baker to Mitt Romney, how Washington has changed in the age of Trump

Mitt Romney is “enemy number one” in the Trump administration according to Peter Baker, chief White Houe correspondent for the New York Times. 

“He is loathed in the White House,” says Baker during an interview on the “Utah Politics” podcast. “With [President] Trump, everything is about loyalty, and you’re not allowed to stray from the fold.”

“In the Senate, I think Republicans there respect him. They defended him when Trump went after him. They see him as a principled actor,” he added.

“He’s a party of one,” added Susan Glasser, a staff writer for the New Yorker, and author of the weekly “Letter from Trump’s Washington” column. 

Glasser and Baker are the husband and wife reporting team behind the new biography, The Man who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III.

Glasser says Romney is a throwback to a previous era of politics, and his willingness to stand up to Trump is reminiscent of Sen. Margaret Chase Smith.

“She, of course, was the famous senator who was the lone Republican to stand up to Joseph McCarthy, and it was two years before the Army-McCarthy hearings. She was a party of one for a very long time,” says Glasser. 

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