Mitt Romney, the US Senator and Republican candidate for President in 2012, has called on Donald Trump and Joe Biden to step aside and not contest next year’s US presidential election, and let a new generation of leaders fill the breach.
Biden and Trump are the frontrunners to secure the Presidential nomination for the Democrats and Republicans respectively.
Biden is 80 and Trump is 77.
Romney also announced that he would not be seeking a second term as one of Utah’s two senators, and seemed to indicate that his age played a role.
In a video posted to social media, Romney said: ‘At the end of another term I’d be in my mid-80s. Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders.’
Romney was one of the few senior Republican figures to openly oppose Trump, when the latter was President. He was the only Republican to vote to impeach Trump during his first impeachment trial. He is the only senator ever to vote to impeach a President from his own party. This made him increasingly unpopular within the party and may have played a role in his decision to not seek a second term in the Senate.
Image: Mark Taylor, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons