Reihan Salam has a bad idea about who should run an anti-Trump protest campaign:

I am increasingly convinced that Mitt Romney, Trump’s most scathing Republican critic, is the man for that particular job. Romney is known for his risk aversion, and it is admittedly difficult to imagine the GOP’s 2012 standard-bearer launching an independent campaign. Running as a third-party candidate would be expensive, and to say that Romney would be an underdog would be an understatement. Romney has already exposed himself and his family to intense scrutiny and the exhausting grind of a presidential campaign on two occasions, so his loved ones would surely question his sanity. By standing against Trump, he would invite a level of vitriol that would make his last bid for the presidency look like a breeze. Nevertheless, Romney should run. And if he were to run as himself—a pragmatic problem solver with a long record of success in business and in government—there is a chance, albeit a slim one, that he might actually succeed.

I won’t deny that it would be entertaining to have Romney to kick around for another election campaign, but this is bizarre. The exercise would be futile, since it would only make Clinton’s victory that much more likely, and it would be a humiliating experience for the former Republican nominee. Romney lost in 2012, but there is not that much shame in losing to an incumbent president in a year when the challenger was supposed to lose. Choosing to run as a protest candidate in an election that the GOP is already likely to lose would make Romney a laughingstock and an enabler of Clinton when it is completely unnecessary. It’s no secret that I don’t like Romney, but even he doesn’t deserve to be drafted into such a fruitless effort.