These people are horrible at reading the room, aren’t they? Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) once again went full Maddow during an interview recently, when discussing the riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

During the conversation on Thursday with HuffPost, the senator stated that the riot was an “insurrection against the Constitution.” His comments came as several other Republican lawmakers weighed in on the incident, some downplaying the severity of the riot.

Romney said the assault on the Capitol building caused several deaths, injuries, and property damage. “I was there,” he said. “What happened was a violent effort to interfere with and prevent the constitutional order of installing a new president.”

The lawmaker was one of several GOP senators who voted to convict former President Donald Trump for supposedly inciting the riot. Democrats and members of the activist media have been using the incident to smear the conservative movement.

People like Romney and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who was recently removed from her position as GOP House chair, have found it difficult to move on after Trump left office. Along with their friends on the left, these individuals continue fixating over the former president like CNN’s Jim Acosta over his reflection in a mirror.

If only these people had as much energy for the George Floyd riots as they do for the assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Indeed, despite what the left would have you believe, Cheney did not lose her position because she criticized Trump. She was not ousted because she supported the second impeachment sham. It was her constant need to bring up the riots and Trump’s comments about the 2020 election that eventually did her in.

When she faced the same consequences in February, she still enjoyed enough support to keep her in as conference chair. But now, even her allies have grown sick of her incessant relitigating of the election and the riots that followed. While the rest of the party wishes to move forward and work with Trump, regardless of their disagreements with his comment, people like Romney, Cheney and the rest of the Never Trump crowd present themselves as obstacles to progress on the right.

What these people have failed to realize is that the conservative base is moving on. They can’t seem to accept that rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives are rejecting them, and rightly so. Establishment figures like Romney have been in power on the right for decades, without any significant level of success in implementing conservative policies.

Instead, they offered a milquetoast resistance to the left’s worst inclinations. They failed to effectively sell conservative ideas to compete with the left’s further advance toward socialism. In several cases, they completely acquiesced to the Democrats, despite the impact it would have on their constituents. There is a reason why the immigration issue was never given much attention until Trump came on the scene, right?

These are the problems that establishment types find difficult to grasp. This is not about Trump, per se, but about the base growing even more fed up with its ineffectual leaders. To put it simply, Romney’s ilk were given ample opportunity to do right by their constituents, and they completely and utterly fouled it up. Now, it is time to try something new.