Mitt Romney’s name has been bandied about in some quarters as a possible Republican savior: the man who could either enter the race at the last moment or emerge victorious during a contested convention. Widely seen as competent and sturdy, not to mention opposed to racism and hate-mongering, Romney, the thinking goes, would allow the Republican establishment an ultimate victory over Donald Trump. Social media even exploded in excitement on Wednesday with the news that Romney would deliver a speech on the state of the presidential campaign on Thursday morning in Utah.

Romney would likely be a better general election candidate than Trump, but he was a far-from-perfect nominee last time, and wouldn’t stand much of a chance if he entered the race this time. Nor would he necessarily be particularly strong if he somehow emerged from the convention as the party’s standard-bearer, overriding the substantial number of voters who supported Trump. But what’s even worse, and less talked about amid his Twitter warring with Trump, is that his response to the front-runner has displayed all the same symptoms of the establishment’s response: fits and starts, hypocrisy, and very little grand strategy. Romney is less a cure for the GOP’s problems than a symptom of what ails the party.

The Republican establishment has viewed Trump as everything from a nuisance who must be appeased, to a demagogue, to the man who could potentially destroy the party. Romney has mirrored this progression. In 2012, after Trump had flirted with running for the presidency before abandoning the idea, Romney felt the need to seek the businessman’s endorsement, holding an event with him and receiving his blessing. This was well after Trump had used the so-called “birther” issue to drum up media coverage for himself, one of many examples of Trump’s bigotry that Romney now decries in appropriately moralistic fashion. Like the entire Republican establishment and its ideological allies in the media who have found themselves “shocked, shocked” by the Trump campaign’s dark turn, Romney was, for a long time, just another enabler.