Park City, Utah (CNN) Mitt Romney had barely disembarked from the Silver Lake Express lift when the glad-handing and ribbing began in earnest.

"All right, guys, the old man is here," he whooped to Ron Kaufman, one of his close advisers, as Kaufman faked a limp ahead of a four-mile hike at dawn Friday.

"It's just walking. Just walking," said Romney, flashing the same mischievous half-smile that he would don 30 yards later, when the 70-year-old began to jog the Wasatch Mountains switchbacks -- uphill. "We can handle that."

If the former private equity executive is at home anywhere, it is here -- among more than 200 of his donors and high-wattage friends.

The same can't be said of President Donald Trump.

None of those hikers came from the Trump administration -- andfew, for that matter, even hear from them these days. The White House sent no official emissaries to one of the GOP's A-list donor summits. And so the annual gathering of Romneyworld here at a ski lodge resort served as a vivid reminder of the chasm that persists between the Republican Party's -- and Romney's -- donor base and the leader of the GOP.

Where Romney revels in the admiration of his fundraisers, Trump appears to shirk it.

"I don't think he spends his time reaching out to donors," Spencer Zwick, a much-heralded fundraiser for Romney and House Speaker Paul Ryan, said in an interview. "The way they got elected was not the way Romney built his campaign."

Trump has earned plaudits from Republican lawmakers for his heavy touch and willingness