Early this year, we learned that Mitt Romney was secretly working on his biography with The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins. The senator offered unprecedented access, sitting for more than 30 interviews over two years and turning over hundreds of private emails, texts, and diary entries. The result, Romney: A Reckoning, was billed by a publishing source as “Romney’s lively and at times devastating take on nearly every major political figure of the last 25 years.”
The book sounded like Romney’s version of Prince Harry’s Spare. But the Republican senator is a devout Mormon whose wildest moment to date involves ironing his tuxedo while wearing it; could his biography really be that juicy?
Thankfully, the answer is yes, judging from early excerpts from the biography. Here’s a roundup of what we’ve learned ahead of the book’s release on October 24.
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Trump told Romney he was planning to dump Melania.
Romney and Trump attended a New England Patriots game in the early 2000s as guests of owner Robert Kraft. Romney says that while they weren’t close, Trump felt comfortable bragging about what would happen when he dumped then-girlfriend Melania Knauss.
“Trump sidled up to Romney’s son Josh and pointed at a leggy brunette across the room. ‘Have you seen my girlfriend, Melania?’ he asked, smirking. ‘When I drop her, the phone is gonna ring off the hook. Every guy in New York wants to go out with her,’” Coppins writes, per Rolling Stone.
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Romney considered dropping out of the 2012 race over the “47 percent” video.
After video of Romney deriding 47 percent of Americans as freeloaders at a private fundraiser was posted online, he and his campaign said publicly that his comments were inelegant, but not wrong. But privately, Romney blamed himself and fell into a depression. Coppins writes, per Mother Jones:
He could barely eat during the day and struggled to sleep at night, even after popping a Lunesta. He couldn’t even bring himself to listen to music in his hotel room—“just too sick at heart,” he wrote. When he tried to concentrate on briefing materials, his mind would drift toward the self-inflicted damage he had done to his campaign, and to all the people he had failed. To take his mind off it, he rode the elliptical at a punishing pace.
Night after night, Romney castigated himself in his private diary. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he wrote. …
“Awful, shameful, sorrowful,” he wrote.
“How I will have let so many down,” he wrote. “I can’t dwell on it—it is overwhelmingly depressing, even agonizing. I am so, so very sorry.”
A month before the election, Romney called Stuart Stevens, his chief strategist, asking if he should drop out and give another Republican a shot at running against Obama. Stevens shut down the idea, telling Romney that if he lost it wouldn’t be because of the video (though in hindsight, that’s debatable).
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Romney considered running with Ted Cruz to stop Trump in 2016.
Romney famously made a speech denouncing Trump as a “phony” and a “fraud” in 2016. According to Romney: A Reckoning, he was also plotting behind the scenes to keep Trump from clinching the 2016 nomination. At one point he entertained a pitch to pair up with Ted Cruz to stop Trump, though he wasn’t a fan of the Texas senator.
“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.”
After Romney rejected this idea he tried to form an anti-Trump ticket with Cruz as the presidential nominee and Marco Rubio as his VP, but the two senators weren’t up for it. Romney then sent John Kasich “a series of increasingly gruff emails” urging him to drop out of the race, to no avail.
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Oprah wanted Romney to join her anti-Trump unity ticket in 2020.
For decades, Oprah Winfrey laughed off speculation that she might get into politics. But halfway through the Trump administration, she seemed to be encouraging chatter about a 2020 presidential run; she said Trump made her realize she didn’t need prior political experience, shared an article about her possible candidacy on Twitter, and gave a rousing Me Too speech at the Golden Globes. Then the Oprah 2020 trial balloon fizzled in February 2018 when she said of running for the presidency, “It’s not in my DNA.”
While it’s never been clear if Winfrey was actually considering a presidential run, Romney told Coppins that the Democratic TV icon suggested they team up to stop Trump’s reelection in 2020 — and he declined. Per Axios:
Coppins writes that Romney told him Winfrey, a Democrat, made a pitch to run together “to save the country,” according to a source familiar with the manuscript.
Romney tells Coppins he dismissed the idea, believing that such a campaign would inadvertently help Trump.
The original report did not contain any details about when Winfrey made this suggestion or even who was supposed to be at the top of the ticket. A day later, a spokesperson for Winfrey told Axios: “In November 2019, Ms. Winfrey called Senator Romney to encourage him to run on an Independent ticket. She was not calling to be part of the ticket and was never considering running herself.” So the mystery of whether we actually came close to an Oprah/Trump face off continues.
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Romney considered running against Trump as an independent in 2020 (sans Oprah).
Former GOP presidential candidates: They’re just like us! Like many Americans, Romney has fantasized about confronting Trump about one of his many idiotic public statements, according to a lengthy book excerpt that ran in The Atlantic:
Romney relished the idea of running a presidential campaign in which he simply said whatever he thought, without regard for the political consequences. “I must admit, I’d love being on the stage with Donald Trump … and just saying, ‘That’s stupid. Why are you saying that?’ ” He nursed a fantasy in which he devoted an entire debate to asking Trump to explain why, in the early weeks of the pandemic, he’d suggested that Americans inject bleach as a treatment for COVID-19. To Romney, this comment represented the apotheosis of the former president’s idiocy, and it still bothered him that the country had simply laughed at it and moved on. “Every time Donald Trump makes a strong argument, I’d say, ‘Remind me again about the Clorox,’ ” Romney told me. “Every now and then, I would cough and go, ‘Clorox.’ ”
Unlike most of us, Romney was in a position to make this dream a reality. “But he abandoned it once he realized that he’d most likely end up siphoning off votes from the Democratic nominee and ensuring a Trump victory,” Coppins writes.
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Romney thinks Trump is an idiot.
You’ve probably surmised this already, but in the book Romney colorfully describes his assessment of Trump’s intelligence, per HuffPost:
“I think he’s not smart. I mean, really not smart,” Romney said of Trump at one point, according to the book.
“It’s like, how is that possible for someone over the second or third grade to think that?” he said after Trump suggested that Americans inject themselves with bleach as a treatment for COVID-19 during a White House press briefing in the early days of the 2020 pandemic.
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Romney tried to start a new political party with Joe Manchin.
Are Americans crying out for a new centrist political party? Joe Manchin’s plummeting approval rating suggests they are not, but that didn’t prevent Romney from floating the idea to his Senate colleague from West Virginia, as Coppins wrote in The Atlantic:
So, in April, Romney pivoted to a new idea: He privately approached Joe Manchin about building a new political party. They’d talked about the prospect before, but it was always hypothetical. Now Romney wanted to make it real. His goal for the yet-unnamed party (working slogan: “Stop the stupid”) would be to promote the kind of centrist policies he’d worked on with Manchin in the Senate. Manchin was himself thinking of running for president as an independent, and Romney tried to convince him this was the better play. Instead of putting forward its own doomed candidate in 2024, Romney argued, their party should gather a contingent of like-minded donors and pledge support to the candidate who came closest to aligning with its agenda. “We’d say, ‘This party’s going to endorse whichever party’s nominee isn’t stupid,’ ” Romney told me.
It seems Romney hasn’t yet ruled out this idea. “The last time we spoke about it, he was still in the brainstorming stage,” Coppins writes. But, he says, Romney was quite clear that he no longer feels at home in the Republican Party. “Throughout our two years of interviews, I heard Romney muse repeatedly about leaving the GOP,” he writes.
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Romney warned McConnell about the Capitol riot and was ignored
On January 2, 2021, Senator Angus King warned Romney that a high-ranking Pentagon official told him law enforcement was tracking online chatter among right-wing extremist about committing violence on the day of Trump’s Stop the Steal rally, according to the Atlantic excerpt. Romney had been mentioned as a potential target, and King was worried about his safety.
Romney immediately texted Mitch McConnell, thinking he’d take some kind of stand to at least protect himself and his colleagues. Per Coppins, Romney wrote:
In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th. There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.
McConnell never responded.
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Romney thinks Hawley and Cruz put politics above the Constitution.
On January 6, 2021, Romney famously shouted at his Senate colleague Josh Hawley that the Capitol riot was his fault. (Romney told Coppins he couldn’t remember exactly what he told Hawley, but it was something like “You’re the reason this is happening!” or “You did this.”) He elaborated on his disdain for Hawley and other GOP election deniers in his interviews with his biographer, per The Atlantic:
What bothered Romney most about Hawley and his cohort was the oily disingenuousness. “They know better!” he told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”
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Romney really dislikes J.D. Vance, too.
What’s the Mitt Romney version of a sick burn? “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” apparently. Per the Atlantic piece, Romney told Coppins that he was impressed by Vance’s best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and thought the Ohioan was interested in wooing white working-class voters to the GOP without engaging in Trumpism. So Romney was disgusted when Vance underwent a MAGA makeover during his 2021 Senate campaign:
“I do wonder, how do you make that decision?” Romney mused to me as Vance was degrading himself on the campaign trail that summer. “How can you go over a line so stark as that—and for what?” Romney wished he could grab Vance by the shoulders and scream: This is not worth it! “It’s not like you’re going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator. It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?” The prospect of having Vance in the caucus made Romney uncomfortable. “How do you sit next to him at lunch?”
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Actually, Romney has bad things to say about a lot of Republicans.
Playbook rounded up some other choice remarks from Romney’s burn book:
Mitt on RON DeSANTIS: “There’s just no warmth at all.” On DeSantis posing for selfies with Iowa voters: “He looks like he’s got a toothache.” More: “He’s much smarter than Trump … You might point out, ‘Mitt, DeSantis is real smart — do you want an authoritarian who’s smart or one who’s not smart?’ … I realize there’s a peril to having someone who’s smart and pulling in a direction that’s dangerous.”
On NEWT GINGRICH: “A smug know-it-all, smarmy, and too pleased with himself” … TED CRUZ: “Frightening,” “scary,” “a demagogue” … MIKE HUCKABEE: A “huckster,” a “caricature of a for-profit preacher” … BOBBY JINDAL: A “twit” … RICK SANTORUM: “Sanctimonious, severe and strange” … RICK PERRY: “Republicans must realize that we have to have someone who can complete a sentence.” … JOHN KASICH: “Lack of thoughtfulness, lack of attentiveness, ego. No wonder he and CHRIS [CHRISTIE] spark.”
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Romney has a lonely life in Washington.
When Romney was elected to the Senate in 2018, he “settled” for a $2.4 million townhouse and had a decorator fix it up so his wife and sons would be comfortable when they visited. But they rarely do, and unsurprisingly, many Senate Republicans don’t want to socialize with their smack-talking, anti-Trump colleague. Coppins says Romney’s place gradually developed “an unkempt bachelor-pad quality,” and he often spends his evenings alone, binging TV and eating oddly garnished salmon sandwiches:
In the “dining room,” a 98-inch TV went up on the wall and a leather recliner landed in front of it. Romney, who didn’t have many real friends in Washington, ate dinner alone there most nights, watching Ted Lasso or Better Call Saul as he leafed through briefing materials. On the day of my first visit, he showed me his freezer, which was full of salmon fillets that had been given to him by Lisa Murkowski, the senator from Alaska. He didn’t especially like salmon but found that if he put it on a hamburger bun and smothered it in ketchup, it made for a serviceable meal.
This post has been updated.
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