- Mitt Romney thinks Marjorie Taylor Greene's idea to break up the US is unhinged.
- "We're not going to divide the country. It's united we stand and divided we fall," Romney said.
Sen. Mitt Romney did not mince words when he weighed in on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's President's Day pitch to divide the US into red and blue states.
"I think Abraham Lincoln dealt with that kind of insanity," Romney told reporters in Utah on Tuesday, per The Salt Lake Tribune. "We're not going to divide the country. It's united we stand and divided we fall."
Romney also alleged that fringe members of the GOP are using crazy ideas like secession as a cynical way to grift money from their supporters.
"There are some people in my party and the other party that say things to try and get a headline and get people to send them money. And that happens to be in today's 'loony left,' or I should say 'loony right,'" Romney said, per The Salt Lake Tribune.
The congresswoman responded to Romney's jab in an interview with the Washington Examiner on Wednesday.
"Mitt Romney is so bad I couldn't even vote for him for president against Barack Obama," Greene told the outlet.
Greene on Monday made the suggestion that the US needs "a national divorce." According to Greene, this would involve the US getting broken up into "red states and blue states."
"From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat's traitorous America Last policies, we are done," Greene tweeted.
She doubled down on her suggestion to split the US in two during an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday, claiming without substantiation that the US is heading towards a civil war and that a pre-emptive split is necessary.
"The last thing I ever want to see in America is a civil war. No one wants that — at least everyone I know would never want that — but it's going that direction, and we have to do something about it," she said.
"Our ideas, our policies and our ways of life have become so far apart that it's just coming to that point," she added.
Splitting into two countries did not prevent the last US civil war in 1861, when fighting broke out after a series of southern states broke away to form the Confederate States of America in the hope of preserving slavery.
Greene's idea for a national divorce has also received pushback from other members of her party. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called the Georgia congresswoman's call to break up the United States "evil" and "destructive."
"We don't need a divorce, we need marriage counseling. And we need elected leaders that don't profit by tearing us apart," Cox tweeted.
Representatives for Romney and Greene did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.