Bonjour, human Twitterers! It is I, Pierre Delecto, your better. Please pay no attention to me and go about your daily lives.
Yes, yes, we probably should have been expecting this. On Sunday we learned that Sen. Mitt Romney, the Republican ex-presidential candidate who as new Utah senator has settled into a quiet life of occasionally being troubled by the brazen corruption roiling his party, has for years been monitoring political reactions on Twitter using the genuinely fabulous pseudonym "Pierre Delecto." And by monitoring, we mean "liking" selected criticisms of Donald Trump that Mitt Romney, one of the most powerful people in the nation, did not have the spine to "like" under his own name (like calling Trump an idiot) and offering up occasional defenses of Mitt Romney's luminous courage.
“Only Republican to hit Trump on [Robert Mueller's] report, only one to hit Trump on character time and again, so Soledad, you think he’s the one without moral compass?” was one Delecto response to a tweet critical of Romney from journalist Soledad O'Brien. (Determining whether or not using a pseudonymous account to defend your moral compass is evidence of having a moral compass is an exercise left to the reader.)
All this came out because Romney confessed to having a secret account in an Atlantic article that was published on Sunday. "What do they call me, a lurker?" Romney told writer McKay Coppins. From there, Slate's Ashley Feinberg needed only hours to find which of the eleven bajillion accounts on Twitter was his (tip: the one following Mitt Romney's grandchildren). Asked for confirmation of the match, Romney copped to being the Mitt behind the Pierre: "C'est moi."
While Mitt portrayed the account as a way to monitor politics, of course, one does not need a pseudonymous Twitter account to do that; he could more easily have simply browsed Twitter under his own name, reading whatever he wanted to. Mitt was actually using the account as a means to "like" Trump criticisms without having to face the wrath of the Angry Hatepumpkin and to defend himself under a different name; the term he was looking for was not lurker but sockpuppet.
Oh, Mitt. Mitt, Mitt, Mitt.
Whatever else we might learn from this, it will not go down as a profiles-in-courage moment for Sen. Mitt Romney. Once again, we learn that Republicans privately know full well Donald Trump is an idiot who is endangering the nation, but are only willing to say so if their names aren't attached to it. If Pierre Delecto was a senator and Mitt Romney was not, both our country and Pierre's party might be in slightly better shape.
But we should not be surprised. Isn't it likely that dozens, at least, of top Republican lawmakers have their own pseudonymous online accounts in order to pretend at toilet-seat courage while remaining sullen loyalists in public? Sen. Mitch McConnell might be Vlad Terrorpin, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy might moonlight as Screw Paul Ryan, and Trump defender Rep. Jim Jordan might have a secret life as Fallo Occaeco.
Alas, Pierre Delecto, having been caught in flagrante, has now retreated from the stage, making his account private. It's too bad. He could have been the most popular anti-Trump Republican on Twitter with just a bit more work. Pierre was a timid soul, unaccustomed to the spotlight and reluctant to give up his own quiet life. Not at all like that John Barron jackass.