Will Mitt Romney be remembered as a ‘good Republican’?
2023-10-27 00:30:01
Every Friday, Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent, Jonathan Freedland, invites experts to help analyse the latest in American politics. From politicians to journalists covering the White House and beyond, Jonathan and his guests give listeners behind the scenes access to how the American political machine works.
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It took more than three weeks, but the Republicans have finally managed to get their act together and vote in a new speaker of the House.
Johnson, age 51, became the Republicans fourth nominee for the speaker late last night after Tom Emmer of Minnesota withdrew after opposition from right-wing Republicans influenced by former President Donald Trump.
Republican Mike Johnson of Louisiana became the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives on Tuesday. With Democrats very quick to bring up his support for Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
So I want to just thank all of the supporters that I have, and I want to thank all of the supporters that Mike has. And again, he'll be a great speaker, I think you're going to be very proud of him.
And while most Republicans will just be happy this fiasco is over for now, there might be some in the party wishing they'd made another choice. Take Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who spent his time in the Senate angering his Trump-supporting colleagues by voting to convict the former president twice in both of Donald Trump's two impeachment trials and speaking out against him on multiple occasions.
Well, there's no question, but the Republican Party today is in the shadow of Donald Trump. He is the leader of the greatest portion of the Republican Party. It's a populist, I believe, demagogue portion of the party.
Romney announced he was retiring back in September. And this week, a new biography of the former Republican presidential nominee is published. Detailing his life in politics and how he's fallen out of love with the Republican Party of today. This week, I speak to Mackay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Romney a Reckoning. I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.
I approached him in early 2021 and once he decided to do this, he basically blocked off. One evening every week when he was in Washington for me to come over to his townhome near the U.
S Capitol Building. And those interviews would stretch for hours. Sometimes we. I got the sense that he liked the company. I think he has been pretty isolated in Washington.
He doesn't have a lot of friends in his own party, and when I wasn't with him, he would often just spend his evenings alone at his house. And so, by the end, I think it was close to 50 interviews that I had done with him. And they would veer from being, sort of, you know, dishy gossip sessions to therapeutic or cathartic at times for him, and then sometimes even almost bordering on the confessional.
Yeah, and you describe his kind of bachelor pad there, where he's eating, you know, frozen food, and, you know, slathering it with tomato ketchup. He's, you know, he was. He does cut quite a lonely figure. The Mitt Romney you sat with.
Yeah, and I was surprised by that, obviously. I mean, he's a very prominent, you know, American politician. You would think that he, as a U.S. senator, would be spending his nights at, you know, functions and events or dinners, but he really did kind of spend his nights alone. He had this huge TV that he put up on what was the dining room wall in his townhome, and then he put a leather recliner in front of it.
And he told me he would eat dinner there and just kind of watch Netflix, you know, better, call Saul Ted Lasso and eat dinner alone while leafing through briefing materials. And, you know, he had hoped that his family would visit him there. They didn't really come very often. And over time, the townhome kind of took on this sort of Bachelor pad quality. There were crumbs on the counters and, you know, stuff all over the floor.
It was a pretty strange sight for somebody who had not that long ago been the standard bearer of one of America's two major political parties.
Yeah, because he was the presidential nominee of the Republicans not that long ago, 2012.
And yet he makes an unlikely subject for a major political biography in the sense of he was never a president. He was, just as I said, an unsuccessful nominee. Why were you drawn to him as a subject?
He expressed the same questions when I approached him about this. He said. You know, who wants to read about a loser, right? I lost the presidential election, nobody wants to read about him.
My fascination with him basically came down to the fact that.
He in a very short period of time went from presidential nominee and leader of his party to effectively a pariah. Because he did not get on board with Donald Trump. He was one of very few prominent Republicans who wouldn't support Trump, who routinely spoke out against him as senator. He was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump in the first impeachment trial. And he lost a lot of friends, lost a lot of supporters, became a villain in the conservative media. And all basically because he chose to follow his conscience. And so I wanted to understand why that had happened, what had changed for him.
Because Mitt Romney, before these last few years, had sort of been known as a calculating, cautious, highly controlled politician. As a presidential candidate, he often seemed to craft his positions based on whatever the conservative base of his party wanted. And so for him to make this kind of latent life transformation to voice of conscience and dissent in his party. I thought was pretty fascinating and I wanted to understand what had happened.
Let's just talk a bit about him, as he was known by people who hadn't spent, you know, dozens and dozens of hours with him. And I think I would guess that looking back, people remember him from 2012, when he was the Republican nominee, would say they remembered that he was a Mormon and that he was. But otherwise, his profile was kind of business guy, a corporate downsizer. He'd worked at Bain Capital, he was a crucial figure there. One of these, you know, big financial houses.
And his persona, I mean, partly thanks to the Obama campaign, who framed him this way, was out of touch, rich white guy. And I remember there was a moment. Wasn't there when he appeared to not know about NASCAR racing and sort of, but he knew a guy who owned a team, you know? And yet you paint a very different picture. Does it mean we got him wrong back in 2012?
Or was that actually the man he was back then and he then changed?
He, as a presidential candidate, was heavily shaped by the experience that his father actually had had as a presidential candidate in the 1960s. His father had been a liberal Republican governor of Michigan, who a lot of people at the time thought would go on to be the Republican presidential nominee himself. And his campaign was derailed by an interview he gave where he described his changing position on the Vietnam war. And in the course of explaining his position, said that he had been brainwashed by the U.S military generals into agreeing with the war early on.
And that word brainwashed ended up kind of taking over his campaign. It was seen, you know, it was such an incendiary word. Republicans members of his own party condemned him, and he basically had to drop out over that interview. And the lesson Mitt Romney took from that was, If I'm going to run for president, I'm not going to make the same mistake as my dad. I have to be extremely disciplined, extremely careful.
And so his persona was shaped by this kind of cautiousness that left him seeming sort of plastic and artificial. And voters like you said. They knew a couple biographical details about him, but they got no sense of who he was as a person because he wasn't willing to share that.
And the business persona wasn't wholly negative. I mean, one of the positions or personas he adopted was the man who was the savior of the winter Olympics of 2002. Salt Lake City Olympics, which I think were about to go bust and he had stepped in.
The theme of our games is written on the side of the torch itself. It says light the fire within.
He was in a way the CEO would be president four years before Donald Trump would actually pull that off.
That's right, I mean, he is, by all accounts, a highly competent executive and really not an ideologue. He's technocratic, he doesn't, you know, he told me. I don't really look at problems in terms of what's the conservative solution to this problem. I just try to find the solution and then figure out how to sell it afterward.
Right, but it's funny that you mentioned Donald Trump, because obviously there's always been this sort of fantasy in certain segments of America. That what we need as a president, as a CEO, right? We need a business guy in the Oval Office. And this has been a running theme of, you know, American political discourse for decades. And the fact that when we finally got one, it was Donald Trump kind of drives Mitt Romney crazy because he had known Trump for decades, going back to the mid-90s, actually, when they first met. And he thought of Trump as kind of a cartoon character. And, you know, a kind of celebrity businessman who had, you know, happened into his fortune through inheritance and good luck, but didn't really know anything about business.
And so whenever somebody describes Trump as a businessman, it's the easiest way to set Romney up because he does not consider him a true business businessman.
Yeah, I think that's true of a lot of real business people who've made proper money. They all can't stand Trump posing as one. He played one on TV rather than being a real businessman. But so, you know, that role as a man of finance and of business, that was one part of the Romney image. The other one I touched on was his faith as a Mormon.
And I remember that featuring in his first run for president in 2008. When one of his Republican rivals, governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, said, playing sort of mock ignorance. And said, Oh, don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the Devil are brothers? And I remember that was sort of seen as a signal to evangelicals that they couldn't trust. Mitt Romney. Just tell us about how, what role Mormonism has played in his political life and career.
I think his faith was the one aspect of his persona that he viewed as non-negotiable, right? He would massage his positions to get in line with the more conservative elements of his party. And, you know, some would accuse him of even just outright flip-flopping on some issues, but he wouldn't change his faith, he wouldn't walk it back.
It really is central to who he is.
And I would note that there are people in our nation that have different beliefs. There are people of the Jewish faith and people of Islamic faith and other faiths who believe other things. And our president will be president of the people of all faiths.
But it hurt him as a politician, you know, as a Republican presidential candidate. In a party whose base is dominated by evangelical Christians, there's a long, you know, theological rivalry between Mormons and evangelicals. And Mitt Romney experienced that routinely on the campaign trail. You know, you mentioned the Mike Huckabee thing.
There was Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, who ran against him in 2012. Had a high-profile supporter and surrogate who was a Megachurch pastor who, you know, called mormonism a cult. It did hold him back, but, you know, I think to his credit. That was one thing that Mitt Romney, just even as his advisors, urged him to maybe distance himself from his church in one way or another, he declined.
So he lost that election in 2012 to Barack Obama, you know, whether the mormonism was part of it or not, he didn't win.
I so wish, I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction. But the nation chose another leader, and so Anne and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this great nation.
Thank you and God bless America.
And in a way, that was the last people heard from him until Trump won in 2016.
And there was that famous few days when Donald Trump was receiving visitors come to pay tribute to the new emperor in Trump Tower in New York City. Where people were coming, sometimes as supplicants, really wanting a job, and one of those people was Mitt Romney, and they were. There were photographs of the two of them dining together.
The thought was that Mitt Romney was being auditioned for secretary of state to Donald Trump.
Well, look, I really like the idea that Mitt Romney is sitting down with Donald Trump. OK, that's major point number one. It's a unity measure.
They haven't been, shall we say, the best of friends during this campaign, so I think that's a big plus.
I'm just wondering whether Mitt Romney really wanted the job. And also, as Donald Trump alleges to this day, that Mitt Romney is in part a critic of Trump. Because he is bitter that he didn't get that job, even after he had again, some people would say, sort of abased himself before Donald Trump in order to get it.
Romney gave me his journals from that period and described some of the meetings that he had during that time. And basically, what he told me was there were two motivations. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, there was a very strong sentiment among America's political class that this was an emergency. Right. That Donald Trump was manifestly unqualified. And that many of the people he was talking about putting in his cabinet would be, you know, very dangerous. In those roles, in fact, at the time, he was floating Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, as secretary of state.
And I think a lot of people saw that as kind of a red flashing warning sign. And so Mitt Romney felt like there needed to be an adult in the room. That was part of the calculation, but he also frankly told me there was another part of his calculation there, which is that he wanted the job he wanted to be in the action.
And, you know, throughout the book and throughout our interviews, he often reflected with me on those moments. Where his ambition, his kind of desire to be in a prominent, powerful role, where he could really have an impact on U.
S policy sometimes led him to make compromises or do things that he wouldn't otherwise do. And I think he looks back on that episode with Trump as an example.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that makes the book I think very valuable is it gives that on quite honest assessment about an insight into how politicians do operate, and in a way, it comes from Romney himself. I mean, you write that your words meld of moral obligation and personal hubris may have been his defining trait. So it's there, that kind of combination. But I'm just wondering about whether in the events that then followed, and how he did become this lone voice of dissent on the Republican Senate benches. Particularly in dramatic form when Donald Trump was impeached the first time over his attempt to strong arm the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, trying to dig for dirt on Joe Biden.
This is who he anticipated correctly, as it turned out, would be his opponent in the 2020 election. Mitt Romney could have decided to be a good soldier for his Republican colleagues who had, you know, tough races to run in the elections that were coming. But instead, he decided to take that big risk.
I will only be one name among many, no more, no less. To future generations of Americans who look at the record of this trial. They will note merely that I was among the senators who determined that what the president did was wrong, grievously wrong.
In that case, in other words, the moral obligation sort of trumped. If you'll pardon the pun, the personal hubris to use your formulation, how do you explain that?
I think that that moment where he had to decide whether to vote for conviction or acquittal was a defining moment for him. And, you know, once again, reading his journals from that period, you can see how anguished he is. Because he knows on some level that if he breaks ranks with the Republican Party in this moment and votes to convict Trump, that is basically the end of his political career, it's the end of his time in the Republican Party. In fact, there's one entry where he kind of writes out the worst case scenario of what could happen if he votes to convict Trump. And, you know, he writes about worrying about his family's safety.
He thinks he might have to move out of Utah, a conservative state with a lot of Trump's supporters. He is genuinely almost frightened by what will happen if he votes this way. But on the other hand, he just feels. If there isn't any Republican who stands up and says that what Trump did is wrong. And we have to draw a line here, then it'll create a terrible precedent for future presidents. He couldn't bring himself to cross that ethical line of voting in a way he didn't believe. And I think it probably will be the thing that he is remembered for.
Well, and your closing thought in the book is, if there's only one line that history writes about you, make sure it's a good one.
The next dramatic moment comes in the following year, after Donald Trump has lost the 2020 election and those events of the 6th of January. And it's striking hearing you now say that Mitt Romney feared for his own safety. Because in some ways, that was prescient. He realized that the Trump movement had something had been unleashed that we would then see in very dramatic form. On the 6th of January, and indeed, it is how your book opens. Just talk us through what the 6th of January entailed for Mitt Romney. Both sort of in the moment and then afterwards.
Well, interestingly, it sort of started a few days earlier for Mitt Romney when he received a text from a fellow senator asking if he could call him because it was important. And he called. And the senator told him that he had been talking to a high-ranking Pentagon official who had been tracking intel chatter in right-wing extremist corners of the internet. And that there was conversation about Mitt Romney being a target. And Mitt Romney sent a text to Mitch McConnell, who is the Republican leader of the Senate, effectively saying, Mitch, Look, I'm hearing some really bad things about what could happen on January 6th. I'm worried that. And he says, among other things, people might try to storm the Capitol. This was on January 2nd that he sent this text.
Mitch McConnell never responded to that text message.
Which is so damning, isn't it that he doesn't even reply?
Quite damning. And four days later, we know what happened. On January 6th, the mob broke through police barricades, got into the U.S Capitol.
Mitt Romney was in the Senate chamber with his colleagues at that moment when they were evacuated. And there was a moment when Mitt left the chamber and started heading toward his hideaway, which is a little windowless room near the chamber. And right at that moment, a Capitol police officer was sprinting the other way and told him to turn around because the mob was coming that way. And so Romney turned around and started to run.
What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the President of the United States. Those who choose to continue to support his dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy.
That moment, I think, almost had kind of a radicalizing effect on Romney. He could see the culmination of all these lies and all these efforts to indulge Donald Trump. It really made him angry. In fact, that day, there are accounts of Mitt Romney turning to some of his right-wing Senate colleagues who were engineering this kind of plot to overturn the election. And just screaming at him, he said, You know, this is your fault.
This is what you've gotten, guys. And it was shortly after that day that Mitt Romney agreed to talk to me for this book.
And it's unexpected that moment, partly because he's, as you describe him, such a sort of controlled person who holds in all his anger. And then it's unleashed. But equally unexpected is that he asked himself a question after that, which is, was he in some way responsible for creating this monster of Trump and Trumpism? And now that you've looked at the whole sweep of his political life, I mean, what's your answer to that? Is there in any way what Romney did? And I think that he's talking there about the sort of compromises he made through his political career.
Does he, in any way, bear responsibility for what's happened to the Republican Party, which reached such a dramatic climax on the 6th of January 2021?
Yeah, this was sort of the question that hung over our two years of interviews and I thought about it a lot. And he grappled with it too. I think Mitt Romney now realizes that he fundamentally misunderstood the base of his party. He told me, You know, I used to think that, for example, the Tea Party movement in 2010 11 12. That what they cared about were fiscal issues. They wanted lower taxes and, you know, deficit reduction.
And he thought that he could appeal to them that way, and what ended up happening was that they didn't care about those issues. They wanted a strong man, they wanted, frankly, an authoritarian, they wanted somebody who would go after the people that they hate.
And Mitt Romney, I think now, you know, looks back on those times and with some regret. I think that it's hard to saddle him with too much blame for the rise of Donald Trump, only because he's one of vanishingly few Republicans who did anything to stop him or to stand up against him. But I do think that, in general, the wing of the party that he represents, they did a lot to lay the groundwork for Trump's rise, even if it was inadvertent.
And what about now? Does Mitt Romney think there's anything that can stop Donald Trump being the nominee again in 2024? I know that, of course. Donald Trump is in court again this week over those fraud charges. On Wednesday, he was fined $10,000 after the New York judge, who's overseeing the civil fraud trial. There, said that Trump had for a second time violated a gag order that is meant to bar him from disparaging court staff.
Obviously he's in and out of court with multiple cases against him, and we should say that Donald Trump denies all the charges. From your reading, does Mitt Romney think that Trump can be stopped? Does he feel it's a lost cause?
He still is doing everything he can to prevent Trump winning the nomination. He just a couple weeks ago gathered a group of influential Republican donors and told them that they need to pick an alternative to Trump and coalesce around that candidate quickly. But I think Romney is at the point now where he's pretty dispirited by where his party is. He said recently that he doesn't know if he has a home in the GOP anymore, and he does expect that Trump will be the nominee again.
And he thinks there's at least a 50-50 chance that he'll be president.
And now his retirement came, I'm guessing you knew about that before we all did that, that was coming.
I did yes.
You did. And so. In announcing it, he said it was time for a new generation to step up and shape the world they're going to live in.
And to make the decisions that will shape American politics over the coming century. And just having a bunch of guys that were around, the baby boomers who were around in the post-war era. We're not the right ones to be making the decisions for tomorrow.
And he also added that a second term in the Senate in his 80s didn't seem right to him. I mean, that could be a dig at Donald Trump, who would also be a president in his 80s, or it could be a dig at Joe Biden. Who do you think he was having a go at?
Honestly, it was probably aimed at both of them. Though, he is much more alarmed by the prospect of a second Trump term. He's actually gotten to know Joe Biden over the last couple of years. And I write in the book about this kind of unlikely friendship that they've struck up. But, you know, he frankly believes that Joe Biden is too old to be president as well.
And he's kind of mystified by the fact that we're about to enter another presidential election cycle. Where the two candidates are in their mid to late 70s, that neither party can field a better, younger candidate.
I wonder if he'll go the way of some other never Trump Republicans who we've spoken to on here, the likes of Bill Kristol and others. And whether he would ever cross the floor completely and endorse Joe Biden and even say, Yeah, I'm voting, becoming even a Democrat, if that's what it takes to stop Donald Trump.
I wonder that, too, you know, I've talked to his sons. He has five adult sons, who all of them have left the Republican Party. And I asked one of his sons, You know, why is your dad still a Republican, given how kind of isolated and alienated he feels from his party? And his son said, You know, I think that he still feels this obligation. That goes back to his dad. To try to save the GOP, to try to steer it back toward sanity.
And I think Romney himself is seeing increasingly how sisyphean that task is. But he, he's still, I think it's hard for him to to walk away completely. He sees himself as a problem solver. And, you know, I think he still believes that there might be some way to solve this problem. If he can just stay there and figure it out.
McKay We do always like to ask our guests on the podcast a What else? question? Something different going on in American politics? Although, of course, there is a tight link here, which is that. The Republicans in the House have now managed to elect a speaker in the form of Mike Johnson, newly elected Republican speaker of the House of Representatives. And some interest in his back catalogue, because it turns out he is a pretty serious election denier about 2020. Just the kind of guy Mitt Romney was standing against and opposing in a way. What do you make of the new speaker of the House?
I think that it is a symptom of a deeply dysfunctional political culture. What? What's happened in the House over the last few weeks was bound to happen because of the deal that Kevin McCarthy made to assume the speakership a year ago. And I think that the way things are structured now, any Republican, if they get fed up with him, can call for a new call for a new speaker. And that we could be going through all of this again in a few months. So I would not expect things to return to any kind of normal in with this new speaker.
The book is called Romney A Reckoning. The author is McKay Coppins McKay. Thanks so much for joining us on Politics Weekly America.
Thank you so much for having me.
There'll be a link to where you can buy the book on today's episode description on the Guardian website. But that is all for me for this week. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know about Guardian Jobs. Guardian Jobs connects you with like-minded people, building rewarding careers founded on shared values. It's a very good place to go to find a company that ticks all the boxes, whether that's flexible working, salary or whatever else is important to you.
So do search Guardian Jobs to find your next role. But for now, it's goodbye. The producer is Daniel Stevens and the executive producer, Max Sanderson. I'm Jonathan Friedland. Thanks, as always for listening.
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