The conventional wisdom after Donald Trump defied the conventional wisdom and won the presidency is that true-blue Massachusetts is utterly irrelevant.
After all, the entire Bay State congressional delegation is Democratic and only two other states rejected Trump by a wider margin. The state’s senior senator, Elizabeth Warren, belittled Trump more than Hillary Clinton did. Even Republican Governor Charlie Baker wouldn’t vote for his party’s standard-bearer.
The presumption is, in Trump’s America, if we get hit with snow like we did a couple of years ago, FEMA might give us shovels. If we pay for them.
But Massachusetts still matters in Trumpland. Jill Stein, the Green Party leader from Lexington, has mounted a recount to try to deny Trump the White House. And former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is a leading candidate for secretary of state.
The bad news for Mitt is that Stein has a better chance of prevailing than he has of becoming America’s top diplomat, and her chances are slim and none.
When Romney went to Trump’s golf club in New Jersey to discuss the possibility of joining his Cabinet, it was like that scene in “Goodfellas’’ when Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci, goes to a house in New York, expecting to be inducted into the Mafia. Tommy was ebullient, thinking he was about to realize a lifelong dream of being a “made’’ guy.
But the whole thing was a setup. Tommy had taken out a made guy, and the Mafia was duty-bound to retaliate against such disrespect. Rather than just whack Tommy in a wiseguy social club or on the street, the Mafia encouraged him to think he was about to be given the ultimate reward.
The Mafia’s devious revenge was that, just before Tommy took two in the hat, he realized he had been set up. His end came at the precise moment he realized he had been fooled and humiliated.
Romney hasn’t had his Tommy DeVito moment yet. Because he’s a decent guy, it hasn’t occurred to him that being invited into Trump’s inner lair is like Tommy DeVito being invited to that house in New York. Romney’s going to meet with Trump again, on Tuesday, this time in, gulp, New York.
There is an alternative, if less likely, scenario. Trump may believe that giving a prominent position to someone who dismissed him as a fraud and phony would show that he is not a narcissistic, thin-skinned juvenile who lies awake at night tweeting about slights real and perceived, that he is rising to the office. Under that scenario, the scorn heaped on Romney by Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and others is part of a ruse to make Romney’s appointment appear even more magnanimous.
So courting Romney is a case of cruel, Machiavellian revenge, or mature, if slightly cynical statesmanship. Either way, it’s a setup.
There is another Massachusetts guy in the mix for a Cabinet seat. Marine General John Kelly is under consideration to head the State Department or Homeland Security, maybe Defense. Unlike Romney, who insulted Trump during the campaign, it was Trump who insulted the likes of Kelly by saying he knew more about ISIS than the generals.
Luckily, Kelly has thicker skin, and knows far more about ISIS, than his prospective boss. Kelly grew up in Brighton, the son of a postal worker. He knows the cost of war because he lost Marines, including his youngest son, in combat.
He often tells the story of two Marines, one black, the other white, one dirt poor, the other well-off, who died side-by-side in Iraq, firing at an approaching suicide bomber. They died saving others.
John Kelly’s America is one where people are judged not by the color of their skin or the size of their bank accounts but by their character, their sense of honor, of duty, to country and to others.
He is an American first, a partisan last.
I’d like to think his chances are better than Mitt Romney’s.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeCullen.
