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Sen. Mitt Romney says the nation suffers a "malady of denial, deceit, and distrust,"and former President Donald Trump would make things much worse.

"A return of Donald Trump would feed the sickness, probably rendering it incurable," Romney, a senator from Utah and former GOP presidential nominee, wrote in a July 4 essay in The Atlantic.

The essay takes aim at "wishful thinking" across the political spectrum and the nation's "blithe dismissal of potentially cataclysmic threats."

"More and more, we are a nation in denial," he wrote, citing Trump's false assertions that he won the 2020 election as a "classic example." "Perhaps this is a branch of the same delusion that leads people to feed money into slot machines: Because I really want to win, I believe that I will win," he added.

Romney wrote that leadership is the only cure for wishful thinking.

He called President Joe Biden "a genuinely good man, but," he wrote, Biden "has yet been unable to break through our national malady of denial, deceit, and distrust."

Congress, he wrote, is "particularly disappointing: Our elected officials put a finger in the wind more frequently than they show backbone against it."

"I hope for a president who can rise above the din to unite us behind the truth," he wrote. "Several contenders with experience and smarts stand in the wings; we intently watch to see if they also possess the requisite character and ability to bring the nation together in confronting our common reality."

During the 2016 election, Romney, a former Massachusetts governor elected in Utah to the US Senate in 2018, was fiercely critical of then-candidate Trump, calling him a "phony" and a "fraud."

And in February 2020, Romney earned the distinction of becoming the first senator tovote in favor of removinga president from his own party from office because of what he described as Trump's "appalling abuse of public trust." He voted to convict Trump for abuse of power for withholding nearly $400 million in military aid from Ukraine and pressuring Ukrainian officials to investigate the Biden family.

A year later, Romney was amongseven Republican senators who voted to convictTrump in his impeachment trial in connection with the January 6, 2021, insurrection, though Trump was acquitted by the Senate.

Read the full essay on The Atlantic.

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Romney says a return of Trump would feed nation's 'sickness': The Atlantic - Business Insider