For someone who has invested a lot of time into bashing Donald Trump, Utah Senator Mitt Romney sounded like he was trying to throw him a lifeline this week when he appeared on MSNBC with Stephanie Ruhle. Or perhaps not. It was a curious moment to be sure, but when the subject of Trump's criminal trials came up, Romney opined that Joe Biden should have pardoned Trump the moment the indictments were handed down. He claimed that's what he would have done if he were in Biden's place. He described Joe Biden as having made "an enormous error" by not pressuring Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg into abandoning his hush-money case. 

Fierce Trump critic Mitt Romney voiced bewilderment at why President Biden didn’t pardon his predecessor as soon as the federal indictments came down, with the Utah senator saying “he should have fought like crazy” to keep them from moving forward.

“Had I been President Biden, when the Justice Department brought on indictments, I would have immediately pardoned him,” Romney (R-Utah) told MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle.”

“Because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy.”

So was Romeny trying to help Trump by saying that should have been let off the hook by Biden? That seems unlikely, particularly when you consider that he voted to impeach Trump twice and has recently declared that he won't be voting for him in November. He has even called him "unfit for office."

So why suggest that Biden should have pardoned him? He probably gave us a bit of a hint when he described the hush-money trial as "a win-win" for Trump. That probably makes more sense. He wants to see Trump lose, but he's also no doubt been watching as Trump's approval levels and standing in the polls have continued to rise as the trial has been playing out. The hush-money case has been falling apart before our eyes and even some of the most liberal legal analysts on CNN and MSNBC have described it as a lost cause. 

Mitt Romney is preparing to retire in January and he will sail off with his flag firmly planted in the Never-Trump camp. He's 77 years old now, so it's not as if we can blame him for calling it quits. Also, pretty much every Republican who voted to impeach Trump has either been run out of office or turned into a pariah. Romney's political journey on the way to this juncture has been rather remarkable. Only a dozen years ago he had risen so high in the GOP power structure that he became the party's presidential nominee. That's hardly the case today. He's one more person who seems to have been broken by the Trump presidency.

There was one amusing moment during the MSNBC interview when Romney was asked his reason for believing Biden should have pardoned Trump. He said, "Because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy.” I suppose that's not a completely unrealistic analysis, but I'm left wondering if he intentionally summoned up the phrase "the big guy" as a reference to Joe Biden's history of foreign business dealings with his family. Dropping in a Biden Inc. reference in the middle of an interview sounds out of character for Mitt Romney, so perhaps it was just a slip of the tongue. But I'm guessing that some of Biden's handlers were wincing when they watched the interview.

Just for the record, Joe Biden was actually asked by a reporter once if he might consider pardoning Donald Trump. He just laughed and smirked as he walked away, so that's probably not going to be happening. But if, as many of us suspect, it was Biden's plan all along to try to knock Trump out of the race by putting him on trial, that plan is backfiring spectacularly.