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    In New Book, Romney Unloads on Fellow Republicans

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    The senator from Utah and 2012 presidential nominee is openly critical of the direction of his party. Here are some of his views on his colleagues and peers, past and present.Even before Senator Mitt Romney of Utah announced he would not seek re-election next year, he made no secret of his disapproval of the direction of the Republican Party and former President Donald J. Trump’s grip on it.But in a new, deeply reported biography, “Romney: A Reckoning,” set to be released next week, Mr. Romney goes beyond his broad disdain for the party and gives his unvarnished opinion of some of his fellow Republicans.In interviews with the book’s author, McKay Coppins, Mr. Romney, who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, offers frank appraisals that are rare in Washington.Such tell-all, insider books often foster a practice known as the “Washington read,” in which boldfaced names immediately flip through the index to find out what damaging assessments may come to haunt them.Here is a selection of what Mr. Romney’s peers and colleagues, past and present, might find.Christie, ChrisMr. Romney’s advisers in 2012 suggested that he consider Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, as a running mate, according to the book.But Mr. Romney had reservations about Mr. Christie’s “prima donna tendencies,” and worried that the governor was not “up to the physical demands” of being on the ticket and was plagued by “barely buried” scandals, Mr. Coppin writes.The two also came into conflict in 2016 after Mr. Christie became one of the first establishment Republicans to back Mr. Trump.“I believe your endorsement of him severely diminishes you morally,” Mr. Romney wrote in an email. He added: “You must withdraw that support to preserve your integrity and character.”Evaluating Mr. Christie’s 2024 campaign, Mr. Romney labels him “another bridge-and-tunnel loudmouth” like Mr. Trump, saying it would be “a hoot” to watch the two of them spar on the debate stage.Cruz, TedMr. Romney called Senator Ted Cruz of Texas “scary” and “a demagogue” in his journal, and in an email assessing political candidates in 2016, he said Mr. Cruz was “frightening.”He was also bluntly critical of Mr. Cruz’s role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including his perpetuating Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.Mr. Romney said that he believed Mr. Cruz and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, another objector, were too smart to believe what they were saying.“They were making a calculation that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution,” Mr. Romney said.DeSantis, RonOf all of the would-be challengers to Mr. Trump, Mr. Romney seemed to have the most to say about Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who was viewed early on as having the best shot at challenging Mr. Trump for the nomination.Mr. Romney’s views on the governor were decidedly mixed, according to the book.“Mr. Romney wanted to like the governor,” Mr. Coppins writes. The senator said that it was a “no-brainer” to support Mr. DeSantis if it meant keeping Mr. Trump out of the White House.Yet Mr. Romney appeared to have reservations. He worried that Mr. DeSantis shared “odious qualities” with Mr. Trump, pointing to his penchant for stoking the culture wars and his fight with the Walt Disney Company.And Mr. Romney appeared to have objections to the Florida governor on a more personal level.“There’s just no warmth at all,” Mr. Romney said. He added that when Mr. DeSantis posed for photos with Iowa voters, “he looks like he’s got a toothache.”Even his appraisal of Mr. DeSantis’s positive qualities came with a backhanded sting.“He’s much smarter than Trump,” Mr. Romney said. But, he added, “there’s a peril to having someone who’s smart and pulling in a direction that’s dangerous.”Gingrich, NewtWhile Mr. Romney was running unsuccessfully for Senate in Massachusetts in 1994, Mr. Gingrich, a hard-line conservative who would become House speaker, was rising to prominence.Mr. Romney recalls thinking, according to the book, that Mr. Gingrich “came across as a smug know-it-all; smarmy and too pleased with himself and not a great face for our party.”Two decades later, when the two were competing against each other in the Republican presidential primary, Mr. Romney was no more impressed.Mr. Coppins writes that Mr. Romney saw Mr. Gingrich as “a ridiculous blowhard who babbled about America building colonies on the moon.” He also had moral objections to Mr. Gingrich’s admitted adultery.In his journal, Mr. Romney wrote that his wife, Ann, thought that Mr. Gingrich was “a megalomaniac, seriously needing psychiatric attention.”McConnell, MitchAs he does with many other Republicans in the book, Mr. Romney hammers Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, over what he sees as a gap between his public and private statements relating to Mr. Trump.Mr. Coppins writes that Mr. Romney questioned “which version of McConnell was more authentic: the one who did Trump’s bidding in public, or the one who excoriated him in their private conversations.”Still, Mr. Romney seems to have respect for Mr. McConnell. In January 2021, he said, he believed Mr. McConnell had been “indulgent of Trump’s deranged behavior over the last four years, but he’s not crazy.”Pence, MikeMr. Romney makes his disdain for the former vice president abundantly clear, calling him “a lap dog to Trump for four years.”He seems particularly appalled by what he viewed as Mr. Pence’s willingness to compromise his own moral views, or contort them, to be a loyal foot soldier to Mr. Trump.“No one had been more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly, than Mike Pence,” Mr. Romney told Mr. Coppins.Perry, RickMr. Romney described Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor who was a rival for the 2012 Republican nomination, as a “dimwit,” Mr. Coppins writes.In his journal, Mr. Romney wrote of Mr. Perry that “Republicans must realize that we must have someone who can complete a sentence.”In 2016, when Mr. Perry ran a short-lived campaign for president, Mr. Romney said that the Texan’s “prima donna, low-IQ personality” was a non-starter.Santorum, RickThe former senator from Pennsylvania, who also ran against Mr. Romney in 2012, was “sanctimonious, severe and strange,” in Mr. Romney’s assessment.At one point during the 2012 campaign, Mr. Romney finds himself irked by his rival’s “apparently bottomless self-interest,” Mr. Coppin writes.In his journal, Mr. Romney said Mr. Santorum was “driven by ego, not principle.”Trump, Donald J.Perhaps the freshest revelation in Mr. Romney’s book is his acknowledgment that many of his colleagues in the Senate, including Mr. McConnell, privately shared his poor view of Mr. Trump.But that harsh assessment — which would set up Mr. Romney’s conflict with Mr. Trump throughout his presidency — was made most clear in the email Mr. Romney sent to Mr. Christie in 2016.“He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic, vulgar and prone to violence,” Mr. Romney wrote. “There is simply no rational argument that could lead me to vote for someone with those characteristics.” More

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      Will Trump and Biden Gang Up on DeSantis?

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      If President Biden sometimes sounded a lot like Donald Trump during his State of the Union address, boasting about a record of economic nationalism, the imitation may soon run the other way. Biden’s attacks on congressional Republicans for being allegedly eager to cut Medicare and Social Security were a clear preview of how he hopes to run against the G.O.P. in 2024. But they were also a possible preview of how Trump may try to reclaim his own party’s nomination — by reprising his 2016 campaign’s rejection of Tea Party austerity and attacking potential rivals (which means, primarily, Ron DeSantis) as libertarian dogmatists who don’t care about the middle class.That strategy was previewed a bit recently by Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Shelby Talcott in Semafor. Their subject was the so-called Fair Tax, a longstanding fascination for certain right-wing activists that proposes to replace the U.S. tax code with a sales tax. This would yield certain advantages in economic efficiency; it would also result in a dramatic tax increase on the middle class.In the heyday of the Tea Party, when implausible policy proposals were all the rage, the Fair Tax was endorsed by many of today’s 2024 hopefuls: by Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo and, yes, by DeSantis himself. Which gives Trump a license to accuse all these potential rivals of supporting a middle-class tax hike — and the Semafor writers quote a Trumpworld source basically promising an attack along those lines, to force Trump’s rivals to “answer for what they supported and what they’ve advocated in the past.”That same quote could easily apply to the proposed entitlement changes that many Republicans (again, including DeSantis) embraced in the same era, under the influence of Paul Ryan’s budget blueprints. Those proposals were serious rather than crankish, if ill-timed for a moment when there was more fiscal space than deficit hawks believed. But they were also seriously unpopular, and Trump’s discarding of them was crucial to his success in 2016. And having discarded them then, he’s well positioned to go after DeSantis and others now — in imitation of not only his prior campaign but also, as National Review’s Philip Klein points out, the strategy pursued by Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries, when he sank Rick Perry’s candidacy in part by blasting Perry for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”This means that the non-Trump G.O.P. can expect to spend the looming presidential race facing similar attacks from the Biden White House and the Trump campaign. Making the similarity too obvious could backfire on Trump. But the peril for the G.O.P. is that even if Trump can’t beat DeSantis by harping on his past positions, he will still be reinforcing for swing voters the liberal narrative that (non-Trump) Republicans care only about the rich.In one sense that narrative shouldn’t be too hard for DeSantis to counteract, since his record as governor of Florida is more moderate than libertarian — with increases in teacher pay, support for environmental protection and so on — and it’s not clear that voters care that much about long-ago votes if they aren’t tied to specific policy proposals now.But the question is what exactly DeSantis’s more of-the-moment policy proposals would be, in a fiscal landscape constrained by inflation for the first time in decades. There’s certainly a scenario in which he abjures austerity and embraces pro-family and industrial-policy spending, maybe even finds a few modest tax increases that own the professional-class liberals, and thereby evades the Trump-Biden pincer.But it won’t be easy to pull off. Especially because part of Trump’s strength has always been that he doesn’t need the Republican Party’s donor class in the way that normal politicians do, while DeSantis will need to rally that class if he’s going to dethrone the former president. And the price of their support will be, most likely, something that isn’t particularly popular: not an idea from the fringes like Fair Tax or a big entitlement overhaul proposal, necessarily, but at the very least a budget-eating tax cut that probably won’t be populist in any way.Again, 2012 is an interesting precedent. Part of what killed Romney in that general election was that even though he championed Social Security against Perry and declined to embrace any crankish tax proposals, he still ended up saddled with a tax overhaul plan that donors and activists liked but that was easy for the Democrats to attack.It’s not hard to imagine a DeSantis candidacy that rallies the establishment and defeats Trump only to end up in a similar general‌-‌election position. Which suggests one way in which Trump’s populist attacks on other Republicans could actually be helpful to the party’s chances. They’ll leave no doubt, for DeSantis or any other figure, about the political weaknesses of traditional right-wing policymaking. And they might force an early adaptation that otherwise could come, like Romney’s attempted pivots in 2012, as too little and too late.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Could Matthew McConaughey Be All Right, All Right, All Right for Texas?

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      HOUSTON — When I first heard the rumors that Matthew McConaughey was considering a run for governor of Texas, my reaction was fury. Did he not recall Kinky Friedman, the musician-comedian-novelist-gadfly whose candidacy in 2006 helped blow up the Democratic vote and gave us Rick Perry as governor for 14 years?Did he not understand that being governor of the second largest state involves a lot more than cogitating, as Mr. McConaughey does in a commercial sitting at the wheel of a Lincoln MKC, how to get around Old Cyrus the bull, who blocks his path on a desolate West Texas highway? You can’t always back up, turn around and “take the long way,” mister.Just what, I wondered, has Mr. McConaughey been smoking?Celebrities turned politicians have a very mixed record. See: Davy Crockett, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, Ronald Reagan and, of course, the 45th president. But in a state as dazed and confused as Texas, we don’t need David Wooderson sitting in the statehouse telling us everything is going to be all right, all right, all right.Or do we? Our previous and current governors, Mr. Perry and his successor, Greg Abbott, have done nothing while claiming just that. Maybe Mr. McConaughey could do better.It isn’t news to anyone that many Texans abhor government interference. Mr. Perry seems to think that extends to keeping warm when temperatures drop to record lows. After a cataclysmic storm knocked out the state’s power grid in February, he said, “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business” — a sentiment probably not shared by the friends and families of the 111 people (or more) who died of hypothermia and other storm-related causes.The current legislative session — with Republicans in full control — has been grim. You can’t say they mind government interference when things like women’s reproductive systems or voting rights are involved.What some Republicans call “election integrity” (and others call voter suppression) has been high on the agenda. Despite protests from once powerful conservatives in the business community, the Legislature is looking at proposals that would put new restrictions on early voting, empower partisan poll watchers and the like. And there are moves to make abortion even more difficult for women to obtain in a state that has already imposed severe limits on the procedure and to restrict the rights of Texas’ transgender children and their parents to make their own medical decisions.It was amid this bleak news that I started reconsidering my attitude toward a possible Governor Bongo (For the uninformed: Mr. McConaughey was once arrested at his home in Austin, stoned and naked, for an exuberant session of bongo drumming in the wee hours).Yes, thinking that things couldn’t possibly get worse is never a great way to choose a candidate. But I don’t seem to be alone in thinking that a man who has played a lawyer in the movies might be better for Texas than the lawyers who play at being leaders in the Capitol. An April poll from The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler, revealed that Mr. McConaughey would trounce Mr. Abbott, 45 percent to 33 percent, with 22 percent opting for “someone else” — let’s hope Willie Nelson keeps his hat out of the ring.Since last November, Mr. McConaughey has been hinting about a run. I didn’t consider his memoir, “Greenlights,” a campaign biography, but it could certainly serve that purpose. Some of his pals who interviewed him on the virtual book tour could even serve in his administration: Brené Brown, a self-help dynamo and research professor at the University of Houston, could bring shame awareness education to just about any regulatory board. The voluble Woody Harrelson could replace any Abbott toady remaining on the Public Utility Commission.Mr. Abbott has categorically refused to tap the bloated Rainy Day Fund to help Texans who suffered in the storm, while Mr. McConaughey’s “We’re Texas” virtual concert raised over $7 million in a matter of hours for freeze relief. (A headline in Texas Monthly declared that “Matthew McConaughey and Beyoncé Did More for Texas Than Ted Cruz.”) He can also be a lot more inspirational than his predecessors on his YouTube channel and Instagram; when he wears his glasses and slicks back those sable waves, he looks at least as gubernatorial as Mr. Perry.Mr. McConaughey’s politics are a bit of a mystery, though we can assume that marijuana legalization might get a boost if he were in charge. He’s been fairly vocal about gun control without going nuclear like Beto O’Rourke. But a recent review of Mr. McConaughey’s voting record by The Texas Tribune revealed he’s been a no-show for primary races since 2012.Of the tactics on both sides of the politician spectrum he has said that “it curdles my stomach, man — I have not appreciated it.” Would Mr. McConaughey run as a Democrat or a Republican? That’s as much a mystery as the meaning of his soliloquy at the end of “True Detective.”Texas may not be ready for a philosopher king as a candidate, much less governor, but it sure would be fun to watch Mr. McConaughey debate Mr. Abbott and ambush him with a sensible line like this one from “Greenlights”: “I’ve found that a good plan is to first recognize the problem, then stabilize the situation, organize the response, then respond.”Or this one, delivered with Mr. McConaughey’s interstellar spelling: “Knowin the truth, seein the truth and tellin the truth are all different experiences.”May the best man win, man.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More