Donald Trump Takes on Mitt Romney in Heated Tweet, Says He ‘Choked’ During 2012 Election

President Donald Trump went after Republican Sen. Mitt Romney on Twitter this weekend as the conversation around his impeachment heats up. Romney has been one of the president’s few Republican critics throughout his term, and condemned his most recent actions on Friday. The president came back with anger.

Romney tweeted about Trump’s calls for Ukraine, China and other countries to interfere in the U.S. elections on Friday night. He called the efforts “wrong and appalling,” as they violate the code of the “Democratic nomination process.” Trump responded on Saturday morning.

“Somebody please wake up Mitt Romney and tell him that my conversation with the Ukrainian President was a congenial and very appropriate one, and my statement on China pertained to corruption, not politics,” he wrote. “If Mitt worked this hard on Obama, he could have won. Sadly, he choked!”

The president went on to criticize Romney for losing the 2012 presidential race against former President Barack Obama. He claimed that Romney had “begged” him for favors in those days, and that he is bad for the Republican party now.

“Mitt Romney never knew how to win. He is a pompous ‘a—’ who has been fighting me from the beginning, except when he begged me for my endorsement for his Senate run (I gave it to him), and when he begged me to be Secretary of State (I didn’t give it to him),” the president tweeted. “He is so bad for R’s!”

Romney, like many others across the political spectrum, was criticizing Trump’s recent public calls for the governments of China and Australia to investigate the Biden family for allegedly dubious overseas business dealings. This violates American foreign policy, and is an impeachable offense on its own. Despite the president’s claims that he was after “corruption,” Romney argued that the act was inherently political.

“When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated,” he wrote.

“By all appearances, the president’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling,” he added in a follow-up tweet.

The House of Representatives is currently conducting a formal impeachment inquiry on Trump after a whistleblower inside his administration revealed that he had asked the president of Ukraine to find evidence of corruption against Joe Biden’s son. The president has since confirmed that this call took place, and publicly asked other countries to do the same.