After a long and remarkable political career that included a governorship in one state, a U.S. Senate seat in another and a presidential nomination, Mitt Romney will likely be most remembered by history for one thing: his vote to convict then-President Donald Trump after his first impeachment, for trying to strong-arm campaign help from Ukraine's government.

It was the first time in America's history that any senator has taken such a stand against a president of his own party — and then he did it again, after Trump's second impeachment, for fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Romney's retirement announcement last week, coupled with the release of excerpts from an upcoming biography, offered brutal judgment of his fellow elected Republicans for enabling Trump — including some choice words for Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.

It's unlikely that any Trump fans will be moved to self-reflection by the words of a man who embodies the vanquished normalcy and decency of their party — two qualities for which the MAGA movement has no use. But any Republican who has not yet been lost down that rabbit hole should fairly consider Romney's assessment of today's GOP.

Romney's exit when his term as a Utah's junior senator ends in January 2025 will be the turning of a page: He is arguably the last prominent national figure from the old Republican establishment who neither left office during the Trumpification of the party in 2016 nor sold his political soul to stay.

Romney said his decision to retire was based largely on his age. But at 76, he's younger than Trump or President Joe Biden, the presidential frontrunners for their respective parties next year.

You have to wonder if there was more to it, in light of the dismay and disgust Romney expresses toward his party in the forthcoming biography, according to excerpts posted by The Atlantic last week.

"A very large portion of my party," Romney told biographer McKay Coppins, "really doesn't believe in the Constitution."

That's not exactly a startling revelation, given that a large portion of the party continues to support Trump despite his suggestion last year that that sacred document should be suspended in order to return him to office. But reading that judgment from the party's 2012 presidential nominee is nonetheless jolting.

Regarding Hawley, Romney pays him a backhanded compliment, calling him "one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest" — too smart, Romney says, to actually believe the election-fraud nonsense he promoted that helped spark the Jan. 6 melee.

Hawley and fellow Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Romney says, were "making a calculation" that "put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution."

Obviously. But, still.

Romney's biography offers another obvious truism that is nonetheless good to see confirmed on the record: The bulk of GOP officials who publicly scrape and bow before Trump are privately contemptuous of his norm-destroying antics.

"You're lucky," Romney says Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell told him, because "you can say the things that we all think." Has there ever been a more blunt admission of political cowardice?

Another colleague noted that Trump "has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn't."

"Almost without exception," Romney says, his fellow top Republicans "shared my view of the president" — not a good one.

Romney isn't blameless, having helped legitimize Trump at various times in the past. But if his clear-eyed diagnosis now of the Trumpian cancer eating at his party from within convinces other Republicans to demand a cure, history will be kind, indeed.

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Photo credit: Gage Skidmore at Wikimedia Commons