stuck in the mittle

Mitt Romney Mulled Running With ‘Scary’ Ted Cruz to Stop Trump in 2016

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty

Would you team up with Ted Cruz, the most hated man in Congress — working closely with him for many years and even pretending to like him — if it meant keeping Donald Trump out of the White House? Apparently, Mitt Romney strongly considered it.

As we near the October 24 release of the authorized tell-all biography Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins, we’re learning that Romney repeatedly considered bold moves to save America from the Trump administration — but most of them didn’t go anywhere.

To Romney’s credit, he has done more to thwart Trump than most Republicans. In March 2016, the GOP’s previous presidential nominee delivered a scathing speech dismissing candidate Trump as a “fraud” and a “phony.” In his biography, Romney reveals that his efforts to prevent Trump from clinching the nomination did not stop there.

The Guardian, which has obtained an early copy of the biography, reports that five days before the New Hampshire GOP primary on February 9, 2016, Romney received a provocative pitch. Robert O’Brien, Romney’s friend and adviser, and Jim Talent, a former senator from Missouri, said he should make a late entry to the presidential race and tap Cruz as his running mate to unite anti-Trump Republicans. Per The Guardian:

“O’Brien and Talent called this the ‘Robert Kennedy’ strategy — get in late to build momentum, win enough delegates to keep the frontrunner from clinching the nomination, then march into the convention girded for a floor fight.”


Robert F Kennedy entered the 1968 Democratic primary late, tapping a surge of support before being assassinated in California.

Romney told Talent and O’Brien that his “number one priority is to stop Trump.” So he considered making this noble sacrifice, though he found the Texas senator “scary”:

“Romney was willing to wage a quixotic and humiliating presidential bid if that’s what it took,” McKay Coppins writes …


“He might even be able to swallow sharing a ticket with Cruz, a man he’d described as ‘scary’ and ‘a demagogue’ in his journal. But Romney didn’t think the gambit would actually succeed in taking down Trump. The problem was that no one else in the party seemed to know what to do about Trump, either.”

Romney was probably right that he couldn’t have defeated Trump at a brokered GOP convention. But could he and Cruz have stopped him in the general election, if they’d launched a third-party bid? Maybe! It seems, however, that Romney’s No. 1 priority was actually stopping Hillary Clinton. One of his reasons for opposing Trump was that he’d probably lose to the Democrat in November. Romney said in his anti-Trump speech: “A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president. But a Trump nomination enables her victory.”

Though he apparently wasn’t willing to risk boosting Clinton, Romney did keep trying to influence the GOP primary even after he decided not to run himself. He attempted to form an anti-Trump ticket with Cruz as the presidential nominee and Marco Rubio as his VP, but the two senators were “just too self-interested,” Coppins writes. Romney also sent John Kasich “a series of increasingly gruff emails” telling him to drop out of the race, to no avail.

After Trump won the election, Romney got another chance to launch a “quixotic and humiliating” effort to save America from the TV star’s worse impulses — this time not by running against him, but by serving as his secretary of State. Coppins writes that Romney considered the role partly because he felt someone around Trump had to “quell the chaos,” and partly because he just likes to be in the room where it happens. The Guardian reports:

“[Romney] wanted the job. ‘I like being involved and being in the middle of things, and having something important to do,’ he admitted. ‘It’s like, you know, I wanted to be president. If you can’t be president, being secretary of state’s not a bad spot to come thereafter.’”


… According to Coppins, Mike Pence, the vice-president-elect, called Romney with the offer. Romney demurred, then called back and said he would be “honored” to meet with Trump. “Looking back on it later,” Coppins writes, “Romney would acknowledge that his willingness to entertain Trump’s offer was propelled by a mix of noble motivations and self-centered ones.”

During their initial meeting, Trump told Romney he was “right out of central casting … perfect … just what I need”. But Pence made clear that Romney would have to humiliate himself further by telling the media he’d been wrong to attack Trump and “that what you’ve learned has given you much more confidence in him being president.”

Romney did not oblige, and the job ultimately went to Rex Tillerson. Romney was elected as the junior senator from Utah in 2018, and he voted twice to impeach Trump. Then, according to the Coppins biography, Romney considered running for president with Oprah Winfrey in 2020 as part of yet another effort to stop Trump (though Winfrey denies this happened).

So now that Trump seems poised to be the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee, will Romney do something wild and crazy to block his White House return? Probably not! But rest assured that he’ll think about it a lot.

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Romney Mulled Running With ‘Scary ‘Ted Cruz to Stop Trump