President Donald Trump went on the offensive against Republican Sen. Mitt Romney for criticizing his appeals for Ukrainian and Chinese officials to look into potentially illegal improprieties in the past of political opponent Joe Biden.

And Trump did not mince words, referring to the Utah senator as a “pompous a–” and accusing him of fair-weather loyalty to his Republican allies.

“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,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning.

The president would go on to attack the senator for weakness, wanting to know where Romney’s offense-oriented political strategy had been when he faced President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

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. If Mitt worked this hard on Obama, he could have won. Sadly, he choked!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2019

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“If Mitt worked this hard on Obama, he could have won,” Trump wrote. “Sadly, he choked!”

“Mitt Romney never knew how to win,” he tweeted. “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).”

“He is so bad for [Republicans]!” Trump added.

The two Republicans have long been at odds, according to Fox News, feuding off and on since the 2016 presidential election when Romney held a news conference lambasting Trump’s behavior on the campaign trail and calling on the party to protest his nomination.

Tensions settled between the two shortly after the election when Trump interviewed Romney for Secretary of State, and once again in 2018 when he endorsed Romney for senator of Utah.

But the president has never refrained from referring to Romney while discussing shortfalls and perceived weakness of the Republican party in the face of Democratic assault this century.

And the Utah senator has, in turn, been dismissive of Trump, frequently speaking out against his rhetoric and even penning a Washington Post Op-Ed earlier this year claiming that the president has not “risen to the mantle of the office.”

Romney reignited the feud in a Friday tweet accusing the president of engaging Chinese and Ukrainian officials to investigate former Vice President Biden for purely political purposes.

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By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) October 4, 2019

“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,” Romney wrote.

“By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.”

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