By The FirstSenator Mitt Romney, the normally reserved elder statesman from Utah, was caught on camera minutes before the start of President Biden’s State of the Union address giving controversial Long Island Congressman George Santos a piece of his mind. During the brief exchange, Romney reportedly told Santos, “you don’t belong here.”
Check out the tense exchange below:
Though it’s difficult to make out exactly what passed between the two men, it appears that Romney told Santos, “you aught to be embarrassed” and preceded to call him “an ass” multiple times.
Rep. Tom Massie of Kentucky, who was standing next to Santos during the heated exchange, told The Washington Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell that what Romney was “the rudest I’ve ever seen a human being been to another human being.”
CNN’s Manu Raju caught up with Romney later in the evening and asked the junior Senator about the confrontation.
“[Santos] should be sitting in the back row and staying quiet instead of parading in front of the President and people coming into the room,” Romney told Raju.
On Wednesday, ABC reporter Lalee Ibssa asked Rep. Santos about the exchange.
“I think it’s reprehensible that the Senator would say such a thing to me in the demeaning way he said,” Santos said about Sen. Romney’s comments to him at last night. “It wasn’t very Mormon of him.”
Rep. Santos also had this to say about Senator Romney on Tuesday evening:
