Who says you can’t teach old dog new tricks?

Not that I’m calling Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) old in the strictest sense, just that for someone who’s lived most of his life without social media, he’s (or someone on his staff) has picked up on the right way to use it.

For example, following Biden’s weird and ill-advised comments on what he believes is a decided lack of threat posed by China to the U.S., Romney’s official Twitter account — pulling straight from the list of best, most effective, most succinct Twitter memes —  gives us this:

This will not age well. https://t.co/IJ8vkPJ5SV

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 1, 2019

Apart from using a great, and well recognized, Twitter meme to make a compact and targeted point, Romney’s tweet hearkens back to his warning about Russia while running against Barack Obama in 2012, for which he was lambasted as some kind of out-of-touch simpleton that needs to live in the now. If you need a reminder of that (and how the press covered for Obama’s cozy relationship with Russia back then), The Washington Post has you covered.

The [hot-mic] back-and-forth between Obama and Medvedev quickly became fodder for Republicans. Romney jumped on it, asking what Obama meant by “more flexibility.”

Romney went on CNN and said: “This is without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe. They fight for every cause for the world’s worst actors. The idea that he has more flexibility in mind for Russia is very, very troubling indeed.”

…

Obama offered a jab that spawned approving headlines: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years….When it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s, and the economic policies of the 1920s.”

Romney’s tweet regarding Biden’s comments on China killed twin birds — both the Obama administration’s strange foreign policy approach as well as the idea that Romney was out of touch to point it out — at the same time. And all with a single, recognizable Twitter meme.

Welcome to the now, Sen. Romney. And well-played, as the kids say.