In 'Romney: A Reckoning,' journalist McKay Coppins gets unfettered access to the senator’s journals, emails and dozens of private interviews to unpack what led Romney to combat the GOP’s embrace of Donald Trump.
Senator Mitt Romney speaks to the media as he arrives during the impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill January 29, 2020, in Washington, DC.
Over the course of more than 40 interviews, Romney shared with candor almost unimaginable for a politician, his personal reckoning in the age of Donald Trump and the reckoning that he hopes and prays will come to the Republican Party. And McKay Coppins joins us now. McKay, welcome back to the show.CHAKRABARTI: I want to start off with an image of the Mitt Romney that maybe most people don't know, but it just rings so clearly in your book.
That the future of democracy in America and around the world is something that we all take for granted. But that we probably shouldn't, given what we've seen, especially in the last several years.But I also was so struck by the access that he gave you, McKay. And you describe, I don't know, there's scenes of profound loneliness in the book. Especially in 2020, 2021, you describe his Washington condo, I guess, he's basically living there alone.
And I would sit down, and I would often get to the end of my questions and then he would want me to stay longer. Like he would say,"What are you reading?" Or,"Are you watching anything good on TV?" His kind of loneliness worked to my advantage to a certain extent because he enjoyed the company.CHAKRABARTI: Did you sense a kind of lament or regret in him?
And so I could sense that he was asking those difficult questions. As a writer, that's the perfect place for your subject to be in, right? That headspace is really compelling. And what I found so compelling about him is that he didn't have all the answers, but he was asking himself these hard questions that very few people who are still in office, sitting politicians, are willing to ask themselves.
He was an advocate of civil rights. He was an opponent of the rising Barry Goldwater right wing movement. And Mitt accompanied his dad to that convention and watched as the party kind of transformed around them in real time, right? George Romney thought that he could get to that convention and insert a plank in advocating for civil rights to the platform.
Because he saw his dad's courageous stand as something to be admired, but also recognized that there were many times in his own career when he didn't live up to that same legacy and it ate at him in some way. And to my beliefs. Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they're right, so be it.
I believe it was in South Carolina. Where one of them said flatly,"Look, you seem like a nice guy. I agree with you on a lot of issues, but at the end of the day. I'm not ever going to support you because I believe that if a Mormon becomes president, more people will go to hell." And so that's what Mitt Romney was up against, right?
CHAKRABARTI: But of course, these are personal belief in one's faith and political ambitions aren't necessarily two things that you can draw a clean line between, right?CHAKRABARTI: Because, of course, we should note that Senator Romney spent quite a few years as governor of the state of Massachusetts.
And he was personally opposed to abortion for moral and religious reasons, but he decides that he needs to talk himself into a pro-choice position, and he walked me through the painstaking intellectual gymnastics that he went through to find his way to taking a stance that he didn't really fully believe in. And it involved pouring over statements by Mormon church leaders and Mormon scripture.
And what I think is this is honestly one of the themes I found most fascinating about his career. And you'll see it pop up again and again in the book. Is that he really provided an interesting window into the psychology of our political leaders.
CHAKRABARTI: Mitt Romney, February 2012. McKay, say you were to play that moment once again to Senator Romney now. What do you think his bodily or facial reaction might be?I can say with some certainty because I've asked him about this and pressed him to relive it a couple of different times over the course of our interviews.
He talked himself into it. And you see this happening again and again, his argument at the time, and still even now, he can become defensive about it. Is that Donald Trump at that time wasn't a serious political figure. He was a loudmouth celebrity. If Democrats can take endorsements from their own loudmouth celebrities, why can't I have the Celebrity Apprentice host, endorse me?
In 2012, as you note, he thinks, Trump is a joke, but still has to go and get his endorsement. In 2016, he looks at Trump again and initially thinks Trump's campaign is a stunt. So what I don't understand is how could such a consummate Republican insider like Mitt Romney, maybe he has a lot of personal political savvy, but he didn't have enough political savvy to see over the course of decades what was happening with the Republican Party.
And I think that he his inability to see that is emblematic of the whole kind of Mitt Romney wing of the party, right? There is this, the establishment of the party for so long had this idea that they could essentially coddle and court and indulge those far-right elements of the party and harvest their votes and harness their energy during elections.
And to get to 50.1% of the vote, sometimes means draping your arm around unseemly characters and coddling voters that you would never want to spend time with when you're not running for president. And he sees that now in a way that he just refused to see it when he was running.CHAKRABARTI: McKay, I just really love the way you share how Romney summed up the 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls. He wanted Paul Ryan to run, but Ryan wasn't running.
CHAKRABARTI: Right. Because once Trump was left as the last candidate standing in the field, that's when we get a sense of how public Senator Romney is willing to be, about his concerns for the party, his concerns for the country. Think of Donald Trump's personal qualities. The bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third grade theatrics. Now imagine your children and your grandchildren acting the way he does. Would you welcome that?
All of those things combined give me increasing hope that president-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us to that better future. And it's interesting because, it's not long after Trump takes office that he's approached about running for Senate in Utah. And the reason he decides to do it is effectively that he thinks he can get to the Senate and steer his party away from Trumpism, right? He has this kind of fantasy that Trump is going to be remembered as this one-off fluke and there's still a lot of good people in the party.
COPPINS: This was the thing that really frustrated him. He believed from his own study of constitutional scholarship and the Federalist Papers; he had this very sincere approach to an impeachment trial. And he believed that senators were called upon to set aside their partisan prejudices and act as impartial jurors in a trial.
Like his vote, I will say, it was really difficult for him to take. He wanted very badly to vote with the rest of his party to acquit Trump because he knew it would be easier for him. His family wouldn't face any blowback. He could just go along with his party. Like he had for a lot of his political career.
And he says it's amazing that a democracy can function like this. I don't know, McKay, when I read that quote, I just kept wondering how naive was Mitt Romney? Until very recently. Because I think a lot of Americans have seen for years, decades even, that the need for re-election holds primacy in how a lot of members of Congress behave.
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