It’s a wretched time to be an institutionalist in the Republican Party. But it’s a vital time to read about one.
The new speaker of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is an election denier who finds the separation of church and state passé, while his party’s base seems eager to renominate a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted former president for the White House. It is in this era of degraded Republicanism that McKay Coppins has published “Romney: A Reckoning” — a look inside the public life and private misgivings of Willard Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, 2012 Republican presidential nominee, current senator from Utah and politician eternally miscast for his time and his party.
“You don’t want to be the only one sitting at the table and no one wants to sit with you,” Romney says to Coppins, explaining how he feels during Republican caucus lunches. The feeling has trailed Romney throughout his political life.
The easy story to write about Romney today is that of the courageous apostate, the lone Republican senator who voted to convict Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial, the throwback to a vision of a party that barely exists today: fiscally conservative, morally upright, constitutionally conscientious. Washington journalists love tales of party-bucking mavericks, and Romney fits the part. Yet that is not the sole story that Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic, has chosen to tell.
Instead, he explores the extent to which Romney wrestles with, and intermittently accepts, his role in what the Republican Party has become. When Coppins asks Romney if he would still have taken that courageous vote in Trump’s impeachment trial had the senator been 30 years younger, with many campaigns and elections still ahead of him, Romney demurs. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he admits. “I think I recognize now my capacity to rationalize decisions that are in my self-interest.”
It is a memorable distillation of a life in politics, of the tension between high principle and unseemly justification. It’s a tension Romney has navigated better than most, in part for his willingness to acknowledge its existence.
Rationalizations appear throughout Romney’s career. One came in 2012, when, as a presidential candidate, he sought and publicly accepted Trump’s endorsement for president, at a time when Trump was a reality-show host promoting the birtherism canard about President Barack Obama. Stepping on a Las Vegas stage with Trump was “one of the more humiliating chores” of Romney’s political life, Coppins writes, but the candidate explained it away as one of those things that politicians do. After all, if Obama could welcome endorsements from Kanye West and Lena Dunham, why couldn’t Romney stand alongside the host of “The Apprentice”? The awkwardness of the meeting was exquisite. “There are some things you just can’t imagine happening,” Romney said in front of the microphone. “This is one of them.”
Four years later, during the 2016 presidential primary campaign, Romney delivered a brutal speech at the University of Utah attacking Trump’s policies (“The country would sink into a prolonged recession”), intelligence (“He is very, very not smart”), honesty (“His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University”) and character (“Imagine your children and grandchildren acting the way he does”). He almost seemed to enjoy himself, delivering zingers and pausing for laughs as though Trump’s ascent to the White House was one more thing he couldn’t imagine happening. During the race, he also assailed prominent Republicans, like Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and one of the first mainstream party leaders to back Trump. The endorsement “diminishes you morally,” Romney told Christie in an email, and only withdrawing it could “preserve your integrity and character.”
Romney also tried to coordinate strategy with Trump’s primary opponents and, once it was clear Trump had secured the nomination, he even hoped to rustle up a third-party candidate. All such efforts are part of a self-perceived family trait that the senator calls the “Romney obligation” — the compulsion to run toward a crisis, whether that means saving the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City from mismanagement and corruption or trying to rescue the 2016 Republican Party from its Trumpian fate.
But Coppins raises the inevitable question: “Where was this principled stand when Romney was running for president himself?” Romney’s answer comes off as vaguely dismissive. “Obviously if I did anything to help legitimize him, I regretted it,” he said. That’s a big “if.” Obviously.
Perhaps, as Coppins suggests, Romney didn’t consider Trump much of a political threat in 2012, just one more bombastic donor to attract and appease. But there was no such excuse four years later, when Romney legitimized Trump yet again, this time shortly after the 2016 election, agreeing to meet with Trump to discuss becoming his secretary of state. After meeting with Trump, Romney even told reporters that he had “increasing hope that President-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us to that better future.” It is hard to reconcile the man who pilloried Trump at the University of Utah earlier that year with the one sitting at dinner with Trump and Reince Priebus at Trump Tower’s Jean-Georges, with a look, as Coppins writes, of “forlorn defeat.”
To his credit, Romney fesses up to his mixed motives. “I looked at what was happening in the world, and these were really troubling times,” he said to Coppins, arguing, as many Republicans did at the time, that the country needed serious people in the new administration. But Romney also relished the power and the relevance. “I like being involved and being in the middle of things, and having something important to do,” he said. “If you can’t be president, being secretary of state’s not a bad spot to come thereafter.” Trump wanted Romney to go further and repudiate his earlier attacks against him, but Romney declined. In a recent interview with me, Coppins described the secretary of state dalliance as “the last temptation” for Romney.
The earlier temptations emerge well before Trump appears on the scene. As chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Romney traveled the country in 2006 to raise funds for candidates and try out his own message ahead of the primary season. He wanted to talk about jobs, but conservative crowds preferred to talk guns and terrorists and abortion. Romney complied. “When you speak to the N.R.A.,” he told Coppins, “you change your tone. I admit it.… You say the things that make the audience respond positively.”
It’s quite a Trumpian approach, though maybe just a political one, too. “A new incentive structure took shape on those stages,” Coppins writes. “A new persona formed.” Soon, Romney began blasting the “death tax” during speeches, for instance, mainly because doing so got a good response. “It was one of those things you say because you don’t know what you’re talking about when you’re first running for president,” he told Coppins, a seemingly banal quote that grows more stunning with each rereading. Romney complains that he is “the authentic person who seems inauthentic,” but moments like those help explain why.
There is a certain obliviousness to Romney’s campaigning, especially so during his 2012 presidential run, when the candidate still regarded the Tea Party as merely a movement for fiscal discipline. His campaign strategist, Stuart Stevens (who in the years since has become one of the most vociferous anti-Trumpers and one of the most disillusioned ex-Republicans), harbored no such illusions, telling Romney at the time that the primary was not about policy or ideology but about grievance and tribalism. “The base is southern, evangelical, and populist,” Stevens said. “You’re a Yankee, Mormon, and wealthy. We’re going to have to steal this nomination.”
Observers of American politics often marvel that a country that twice elected Barack Obama could then replace him with Donald Trump. But it’s no less remarkable that a Republican Party that nominated Romney in 2012 could then turn around and choose Trump as its standard-bearer in 2016.
Maybe Romney did steal the 2012 nomination from the proto-Trump Republican Party, or maybe Trump snatched the 2016 primary from the last gasp of the party establishment, or perhaps both are true. Regardless, Romney and his wife, Ann, were shocked as they watched Trump’s rallies on television, with the crowds “crescendoing to a state of near-delirium that bordered on bloodlust,” Coppins writes. As Ann Romney said to her husband, “Those people weren’t at our events.”
Unless they were. In politics, people can be as extreme, or as reasonable, as their options.
Coppins depicts Ann Romney as the pivotal influence in her husband’s life; he is always trying to win and preserve her approval. A close second is his father, George Romney, the governor of Michigan, Republican presidential candidate and Housing and Urban Development secretary in the Nixon administration. “He’s both inspired by and at times haunted by his dad’s legacy,” Coppins told me, and their political careers feature parallels as well as divergences. Mitt’s stand against Trump is reminiscent of George’s opposition to the 1964 nomination of Barry Goldwater, and during the protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Mitt thinks back to his father’s steadfast support for civil rights in the late 1960s, even as urban unrest spread and Richard Nixon peddled law and order.
Decades later, Romney remains aggrieved at the news media’s response when his father — in an infelicitous choice of metaphor — complained that he had undergone a “brainwashing” by the government spin about the Vietnam War. The controversy surrounding his use of that term finally derailed George Romney’s presidential aspirations. At the start of his own campaign for the 2008 nomination, Romney gave his senior staff a copy of an 88-page master’s thesis, written in 1969 by a George Romney campaign staffer, describing how his father had gone from front-runner to also-ran. The elder Romney’s crucial political misstep, Coppins writes, was a compulsion to speak his mind and stick to his beliefs, no matter the consequences, even when seeking the nation’s highest office.
His son sought to avoid that mistake in his own White House bids. “The one question Romney would struggle to answer — even a decade later — was whether he had been true to himself in his pursuit of the presidency,” Coppins writes. (I hate to say it, but if you can’t settle that question after all those years, maybe you know the answer.) When Romney speaks to student groups these days, Coppins reports, the senator advises them never to trade away their integrity for political gain, and he says it with an air of someone who has lived that trade-off. “It’s not worth it,” he tells them. “Believe me.”
Upon joining the Senate in 2019, “Romney finally felt free to follow his father’s example — the way he’d always wanted to — without worrying about the politics.” He knew that voting to convict Trump of abusing the powers of the presidency would marginalize him in the modern Republican Party, and he agonized over the decision; after all, it is one thing to be an outlier, another to be an outcast. (His 2012 running mate, Paul Ryan, a former House speaker, showed his colors by reaching out when he had learned how Romney would vote, not to offer support but to try to talk him out of it.) “My promise before God to apply impartial justice required that I put my personal feelings and political biases aside,” Romney said on the Senate floor, a brief but indelible counterpoint to what his party had become.
Did this moment come late in Romney’s career, only once the prize of the presidency was no longer possible? Yes. Did it allow Romney to make a statement rather than a difference, in that his isolated vote could not produce Trump’s conviction? Of course. But over time, a statement can become a difference. As a senator, Romney still voted in line with Trump’s agenda most of the time, but his declaration that Trump’s behavior was “wrong, grievously wrong” was the assertion of principle over self-interest, affirming his father’s legacy and bringing him closer to fulfilling the Romney obligation. When I asked Coppins how history might look upon Romney, he answered: “If we could all be remembered for eventually reaching the best version of ourselves, I think that would be wonderful. And I think that would be fair for him.”
Romney has long kept private journals, and Coppins noticed that the most copious entries came during the 2012 campaign, when Romney imagined he was gathering material for a memoir. He would never write one because, as he explained to Coppins, no one reads memoirs by the losers. That may be so. But “Romney: A Reckoning” shows that books about the losers can be worth the read, and that eventual victories can be worth the losses.
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