McKay Coppins: The Last Temptation of Mitt Romney
Episode Notes
Transcript
Romney’s journey from the party’s standard-bearer to its pariah is also a story of the dramatic transformation of the GOP. And his nomination in 2012 was a false indicator that the center would hold. McKay Coppins joins Charlie Sykes to discuss his new book, “Romney: A Reckoning.”
show notes:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Romney/McKay-Coppins/9781982196202
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
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Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. Just a few minutes ago, we learned that this book will be debuting on the New York Times best seller list, so we’re very fortunate to have the author, Mckay Copen, staff writer, for the Atlantic Back on the Bulwark podcast. First of all, congratulations.
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Thank you. Thanks for having me.
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It’s not always that a book about somebody who lost a presidential election and is hiring from the United States Senate makes the best seller list. I mean, I think one of the interesting things was that Romney had all of these notes and journals and records and he decided that he wasn’t gonna write his own memoir because he figured, who wants to read a memoir of a loser. And yet, he turned this over to you, and it’s a very, very compelling read at a rather extraordinary moment in political history.
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Yeah. That’s why I thought he would make for a compelling subject. I didn’t start out knowing that this book would be a best seller. You know, I just found him personally really interesting. His kind of journey from presidential nominee in standard bearer of the Republican Party to essentially a pariah in his own party within ten years, fell to me like a pretty interesting story but I didn’t know if anyone else would find it interesting.
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In fact, it would always tell me, you know, like, I don’t know who’s gonna read this. Like, like, you can count on my to buy some copies and your family to buy some copies, and that might be it. So I think I’ve been really gratified to see the attention it’s gotten.
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Yeah. I mean, he has a keen sense of history, which is interesting, and it comes through in your book. And part of that keen understanding is how quickly famous people are forgotten. How you can be this dominating figure, and you become obscure very, very quickly. And a few decades later, people go who I was gonna ask you the question.
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How is he gonna be remembered by history? Is he going to be remembered as Alf landon, or is he gonna be remembered as Margaret Shade Smith? And then I realized Even among our listeners, ninety eight percent probably go market Chase Smith. What is that about? Mhmm.
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Right? History is a tricky thing.
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History is a ruthless editor. Right? And, you know, very few people end up getting remembered. Where Mitt Romney kind of landed on this question? Cause I would ask him about it periodically.
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And he was very much in a mode of thinking about his legacy and thinking about, you know, his obituary And I think that’s part of why he’s been able to take these sort of lonely principled stands in the last few years. But what he finally decided was even if you only get one line in history, you want it to be a good line. And his feeling is, you know, I didn’t become president. I’m not going to be in a ton of history books But if I can be remembered for these last few years at least where I tried to do what I thought was right, even though it was politically inconvenient, even though it effectively ended my political career, I’ll be happy with that.
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The New York Times, written review of your book the story of Mitt Romney’s political careers and especially clear window onto the forces that over the last decade have transformed the Republican Party Once a business friendly bastion of conservatism, it has now become a cauldron of anger, fear mongering, and demagoguery. And there’s just no room for people like Mitt Romney. Let me just read you a passage from the review in the Washington Post, because I think this is a very interesting distinction. The easy story to write about Romney today, is that of the courageous apostate, the lone Republican senator who voted to convict Donald Trump during the first impeachment trial, the throwback to a vision of a party that barely exists today, fiscally conservative morally upright constitutionally conscientious. Washington journalists love tales of party bucking mavericks and Romney Fitz the Park.
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Yet, that is not the sole story that copies a staff writer at the Atlantic has chosen to tell. Instead, he, you, explores the extent to which Romney wrestles with and intermittently accepts his role in what the Republican Party has become. When Copins asked Romney, if he would still have taken that courageous vote in Trump’s impeachment trial, had the senator been thirty years younger With many campaigns and elections still ahead of him, Romney Demurs. I don’t know the answer to that. He admits.
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I think I recognize now my capacity to rationalize decisions that are in my self interest. I thought that was interesting as how he wrestles with his conscience that you go back to the compromises he makes, the times when he did sacrifice his principles. So What do you think his greatest regret is? Look, every single Republican has made compromise. Every single Republican has gone along with something they look back on and go, Jonathan Last stupid.
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But Mitt Romney, in many ways, is different because He had a very well developed conscience. So what do you think his greatest regret is?
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That’s a great question. I don’t know if there’s one story that he would identify as his single greatest regret, but the book contains several examples of him at various points in his political career, especially as he was pursuing the presidency where he took positions on issues that he wasn’t sure he really believed, or he did things to kind of indulge the far right elements of the party. Yeah. But there were also moments early on. You know, one of his first stories that capture this is actually when he’s running for Senate in Massachusetts, where he is told that he has to be pro choice, that there’s no way for him to win the election in Massachusetts.
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Unless he takes a pro choice position.
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Yeah.
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He personally as opposed to abortion for moral and religious reasons. Yeah. But he walked me through the painstaking process of finding his way to a a pro choice position that involved pouring over Mormon scripture and finding loopholes and statements from church leaders and things like that. And we see that same kind of impulse later when he has to court the right wing of his party. He told me one story about being up on a stage in Iowa, I believe it was.
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He says to the crowd, when I’m elected, we’re gonna repeal the death tax. And he tells me You know, I don’t know if I actually believe we should repeal the estate tax. It was one of those things you just say because you have to say it to, you know, get a rise out of the crowd, and you don’t really know what you’re talking about when you’re first running for president. But everybody in the room cheered. Right?
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Everyone in the crowd went crazy. And for him, he had this, like, inconvenient moment of clarity while he was standing on that stage where he looked around and just thought to himself, why are all of you cheering for this? None of you are going to pay an estate tax. Right? The estate tax is capped at five million dollars or whatever.
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And most of the people in this crowd are probably not going to fit into that category, but it’s about tribalism. It’s about partisanship. It’s about our side is for this, and the other side is against it. So I have to stake out this position. And I think there were a lot of times where he did
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that. And he understood that in real time though.
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Yes. Well, and that’s what’s so interesting about it.
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Right. As opposed to looking back and going, oh, I missed all of this. So you tell the story about how he was chairman of the Republican Governors Association. He had to raise funds. And he says he wanted to talk about jobs in the economy.
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Right? But the crowd and this is two thousand six, they wanted to talk about guns, terrorists, and abortion. So he goes to the NRA and he really changed his tone, and he tells you I admit it. You say things that make the audience respond positively. So you really see how the incentive structure had already begun to change and You know, I mean, there have been other politicians that have adapted to that to slipstream behind it.
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At least for a while, he went along with it.
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That’s right. I mean, it’s almost something out chemical that it would happen where because there was this new incentive structure that would take shape, this new persona would form. I don’t know that in the moment he fully asked himself, is this new persona true to who I am? He was just trying to, you know, win the primary. He’s trying to win the next election.
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And part of what makes this book interesting. My two years of interviews with him so interesting is that he’s now looking back on his career, and reflecting on how his story in some ways is a cautionary tale because he sees all of his republican colleagues continuing to do this, right, in the trump era. You can see them rationalizing in real time
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every day.
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No. I don’t really think that Trump is a good president. No. I don’t think he’s fit to hold office, but I can’t say that publicly or I’ll lose reelection. Right?
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And And if I lose reelection, who knows, he’ll come in and replace me, and it’s important for me to beat the Democrats or whatever. There’s all kinds of little compromises that his Republican colleagues are making. Romney reached a point in the last seven or eight years where he just couldn’t do it anymore. You know, kind of all the indignities and small compromises of a life in politics had piled up, and he just reached his breaking point. And so He finally decided to be fully true to what he believed and follow his conscience instead of political incentives.
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But he understands those incentives and how they work. You know, one of the things he told me was that Rana McDaniel, the chairwoman of the r n c, also his niece He told me that he tries to avoid talking politics with her because they obviously disagree on a lot and it, you know, probably wouldn’t go well. But He said that after the RNC put out a statement in which they seemed to say that what happened on January six was legitimate political protest. He called up Rona because he was so angry about it. And he he was like, what are you guys doing?
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And she kind of demurred and said, oh, no. It’s getting taken out of context, whatever. What he told me about that was I understand the kind of fire that they’re playing with. Right? The people who run the RNC, the mainstream at, quote, unquote, establishment Republicans.
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They’re all playing with fire, and they think that they can kind of appease and appeal to these mag elements of the party while staying in charge. And they say to themselves, well, if I just cross this one line, I’ll be able to stay in power. Right? And he said the problem is if you’re a Republican, the line just keeps getting moved and moved and moved.
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Yeah. This is his lived experience.
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Yeah. Exactly.
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So you’re right. The one question that Romney would struggle to answer even a decade later was whether he had been true to himself in his pursuit of the presidency. Why would he struggle with that? Because, you know, he also, you know, report that when he speaks to student groups, one of the things that Romney tells them is never, ever, ever trade away your integrity for political gain it’s not worth it. Believe me.
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Mhmm. So that sounds like somebody who looks back at all of those compromises, all those times he was not true to himself. And he regrets it. So what when he write that he struggles to answer that question? Because it sounds like the whole book is answering that question in some way.
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You know, I write at the end of the book that the process of our interviews was often kind of messy. It wasn’t like straight line toward perfect enlightenment. Right? He would, in some interviews, seem to confess some complicity and what had happened to the Republican Party. And then the next week, he’d sort of walk it back.
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And sometimes he would get angry and defensive, and then some weeks, he would be introspective and soul searching. And I think that he deserves enormous credit for doing that work. I recognize this, by the way. Anybody who’s been in therapy who’s been in any kind of marriage counseling. Right.
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This is a very human messy process. And The fact that he was willing to do it with me, a biographer, with it all on the record, and without any editorial control over how the final book came out Right. Is pretty remarkable. And I think he deserves credit for that, but it was hard for him.
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Well, this is also part of the process. Right? I mean, talking to you, part of this process of this reckoning of looking back in his life and the choices he made, it sounds like his interviews with you and the process of creating this book was the way that he worked through it and thought through it and came to terms with the decisions he made. Now I asked you that question. What was one thing he regretted.
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It was a target rich environment. So speaking of those moments.
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I think I know where you’re headed here.
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Well, there’s there’s two of There’s two big ones. I’m really interested in them, which is at the time, it didn’t seem like that big a deal, but in retrospect, twenty twelve, he’s running for president. He has a lot of, you know, pressure on him to get Donald Trump on board. Donald Trump had been peddling the birther conspiracy theory, and You are, you know, he’s getting a lot of pressure to get Trump’s endorsement because his religion, being a Mormon was alien to voters. I don’t know how Trump helps them with all of that.
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So he stands there, and we all remember that moment, when Donald Trump endorses Mitt Romney and Mitt Romney accept Donald Trump’s endorsement at a time when already, I mean, Donald Trump had not become the dominant figure he, you know, has since become, but it was pretty clear that he was somebody who was trafficking some of the ugliest rumors. So talk to me about that decision and how he thinks about it afterwards.
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So this is a really interesting moment. I actually was there as a reporter when that happened. And I think the piece that I wrote at the time ten plus years ago The headline was the humiliation of Mitt Romney, and it was because you could see he was embarrassed to be there. He couldn’t believe that he was standing on the stage with Trump. He in fact when Romney went to the microphone, he said there are some things in life you just can’t imagine happening and this is one of them.
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And so The very strong subtext there was that he couldn’t believe he was there. Talking to him about it now and doing some reporting about it, talking to the people who are involved in that decision. It was clear he didn’t wanna do it at the time. He said no multiple times. His advisers eventually convinced him that he had to do this or else Trump would go endorse Rick Perry or new Gingrich and stretch out the primaries.
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But it’s funny because Romney It’s clearly chagrin that that happened, and I’m sure wishes he could take it back. But at the same time, he becomes a little defensive when you ask him about this, in the context of did you give credibility to Trump? Did you help trump win the nomination four years later? Because he just fundamentally disagrees that his accepting Trump’s endorsement had any effect on Trump’s ability to win the Republican nomination four years later. His argument is that Trump wrote this, you know, once in a generation populist wave into the White House, and that Mitt Romney had very little to do with it.
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And I’ll add this too. My characterization would be that I think Romney struggles to accept too much blame for the rise of Trump when he did more than almost any other Republican to oppose Trump’s rise and none of them accept any responsibility. So that’s a hard thing for him.
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I remember this, the endorsement. And, you know, this was one of the things that I imagine his consultant said, look, you wanna be president? This is the kind of dirty thing that you need to do Yes. To become president. He looks your grand as you point it, but in his own journal, May two thousand twelve, and this is interesting.
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This is a private journal. He writes about Trump, no veneer, the real deal, gotta love him, makes me laugh, and makes me feel good both. Mhmm. What Was this him trying to talk himself into it? Was this the process of rationalization?
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Well, this was after he had accepted the endorsement. And this was a couple months later. Trump was in the camp now. And Romney was having to kind of deal with them. Right?
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And they would do fundraisers together. He he would get on the phone with Trump. Some of it was kind of ego maintenance. Right? Trump wanted to be very involved.
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The campaign was trying to keep him at arms length.
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Yeah.
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But part of it I think was real. I remember finding that journal because Romney gave me all of his journals early on. I later found out that he hadn’t reread them before giving them to me, which is kind of incredible. Yes. It is kind of incredible.
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But I remember finding that entry and immediately being like, I’m bringing this up with him in the next interview. And so I did. I read it back to him and you could tell he got like a little bit of a smirk and kind of was, I think, a little, like, cringing over it. Right? But He said, look, this is actually the reality.
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Like, trump one on one in a room, there is a seductive quality to He has this charisma. He has this ability to win people over, and it’s helpful to understanding how he won over so many leaders of the Republican Party. So quickly, it’s not as simple as they’re just responding to political incentives. That’s part of it. But Trump also is pretty good at seducing you.
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I will make this one other point though. When I brought this up with him, it was the same thing when he talked about accepting his endorsement. He said, at the time, I didn’t think of Donald Trump as a political figure. I thought of him as kind of this dopey celebrity.
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Right.
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Who was outrageous and entertaining and ridiculous, and he had terrible ideas. But, you know, Democrats have all kinds of dopey celebrities with terrible ideas that they accept money from and endorsements from? Why can’t I have the celebrity apprentice host standing next to me? That was sort of the way he talked himself into it.
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As I read this, I had my own flashback. So in the interest of full disclosure, I remember that shortly after this endorsement, I was on the radio in Milwaukee conservative talk show. And the Romney campaign called and said, hey, would you like Donald Trump on your show? So I actually had Donald Trump on my show back in two thousand and
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four. Interesting.
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And I remember him calling in. And, frankly, I probably forgot about it the next day. Did not think about it, did not think that it was significant. Did you ask Okay. Well, how do you justify putting somebody on who is spreading the birth sort of thing?
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It was the kind of thing that happened that in retrospect, it has moral weight but in the day to day, you go along with it. And I think that’s one of the things that comes through is that you kinda get sucked into this. By the way, what are the interesting little tidbits in your book that I had completely forgotten about was election night two thousand and twelve. Yeah. After Romney lost the role that Trump played.
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Trump started tweeting You know, foreshadowing about how the election was stolen, he tweeted things like we should march on Washington and stop this travesty. We are not a democracy.
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Yeah.
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Now that is years before January six.
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But isn’t that so interesting? Because I had forgotten about that too. You had forgotten about it. Yeah. I think most readers when they come to that portion of the story, this is the election night twenty twelve.
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They’ll almost have to, you know, check back. Wait. What what year is this? Right? But it speaks to how unserious Donald Trump was at the time that it barely registered.
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Right? It was, oh, this loud mouth, you know, celebrity is saying stupid things on Twitter, but it speaks to how so much of the Republican Party and political establishment didn’t take him seriously and didn’t take what he represented seriously. And four years later Yeah. That element of their party, that ugliness took over.
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It was always there. That’s the thing that we’ve talked about before. I’m gonna go back to this Washington post review of your book, which is very favorable. But He writes, there’s a certain obliviousness to run these campaigning, especially so during the twenty twelve presidential run when the candidates still regarded the tea party as merely a movement of fiscal discipline. There was a lot of people who thought that at least early on.
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His campaign strategist Stewart Stevens, who has become extremely anti trump Harvard, no such illusions, telling Romney at the time that the primary was not about this is twenty twelve, that the primary was not about policy or ideology, but about grievance and tribalism. The base this is, what Steven said. The base is southern, evangelical, and populist. You are Yankee Mormon and wealthy, we’re going to have to steal this nomination, which again says that, you know, he was kind of a last gasp of something of a party that had already begun to change.
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That’s totally right. I mean, the this is one of the great ironies of Mitt Romney’s career. He’s become this pariah, not really because he apostatized from the GOP. The GOP just changed dramatically around Mitt Romney within his lifetime. Right?
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It was still when Mitt Romney first ran for president in two thousand seven. It was still possible for him to think that his health care bill in Massachusetts could be a selling point for his nomination. When he started out, he thought Look, the Republican Party is the party of ideas. George w Bush got elected as a compassionate conservative. This kind of innovative solution to getting universal health care coverage in my state is gonna be something that propels me to the Republican nomination.
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You
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quickly ran into the reality that. Right? But at the time, it wasn’t so far fetched. Right? The party just kind of changed very quickly and very dramatically right around the time Romney entered the national stage.
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And what he represents now feels anathema to what the Republican Party is, but it’s not It’s not that he became a liberal. Right? This is the confusing thing for him. Right. He still feels like he’s a conservative.
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He still is a believer in personal responsibility and character and values and
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Yeah. You
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know, free markets and capitalism and promoting democracy abroad Those are the things that he thought the Republican Party stood for. And now it has rallied around a man who stands against all of that. And he’s struggling to figure out where he fits politically.
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You know, it occurs to me that his nomination in twenty twelve in many ways was a false indicator because, the party had already begun to change dramatically, but we were able to tell ourselves as conservatives that the center would hold that this was still the party that would nominate George Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney. So it’s not the party of Pat Buchanan. It’s not the party of Don Trump. I mean, they’re there, but there’s a reason why, you know, people like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich don’t ultimately win. Yes.
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Michelle Exactly. Did not become the nominee. They didn’t go to Herman Cain. The Republican Party was still saying, but maybe this was, again, the false indicator that he was able to pull that out.
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Because he stole the nomination, right, because they were successful. Right? The chapter that I write about that campaign is called Heist. And it’s because he did successfully. He and Stewart Stevens and all those people on his campaign in Boston.
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They figured out how to execute the heist by the skin of their teeth, were they able to kind of beat the Rick Perries and new gingrichs and Rick Santorms But he had to do a lot of things that were out of character for him to win that nomination. And so there was a personal cost as well.
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Okay. So talk to me about George Romney. See, I am old enough to remember a George Romney governor of Michigan presidential candidate in nineteen sixty eight. Who was the front runner for a while crashed and burned after an unfortunate comment, perhaps taken out of context about being brainwashed about the Vietnam or But he plays a really big role in the formation of Mitt Romney, that Mitt circulated a really lengthy paper
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Yeah.
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About how his father had gone from front runner to also ran So just talk to me a little bit about that because I think you described him that he was both inspired and haunted Yeah. By the experience of his father. Talk to me a little bit about the role that George Romney plays in this story.
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His dad looms large in Mitt Romney’s life and career. I can’t tell you how many times he would bring up dad in these interviews and his journals, his dad is a really important figure. He was a liberal Republican governor of Michigan in the nineteen sixties. He had been a pioneering auto executive before that had turned around American Motors, one of the auto companies in Detroit. And He planted himself very deliberately in the liberal wing of the party, which still was fairly robust in the sixties, or especially the early sixties.
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He
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was in the mold of kind of a Dwight Eisenhower and Rockefeller. You know, he was an advocate of civil rights. He marked with civil rights activists. He eventually ran for president and during the Republican primaries had to deal with race riots in Detroit, which became now news. And George Romney refused to condemn the rioters, even as a lot of Republicans and his white constituents were demanding that he do so.
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What he said, he delivered this addressing that we have to look at the root causes of the unrest and address the inequalities that black Americans are facing. So he was really quite progressive. He was also very courageous, almost recklessly so. He went to the convention in nineteen sixty four. In San Francisco where Barry Goldwater won the nomination and kind of famously refused to endorse Goldwater and gave this thundering speech denouncing what he considered the extremist forces that were taking over the party and mid as a teenager was at that convention.
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He watched his dad’s speech, then he watched on the last night of the convention as Barry Goldwater stood up. And accepted the nomination and everybody stood up and cheered except Drommy who remained kind of quietly seated. And Mitt looked over at him and said, I knew one thing that if a thousand people were standing and cheering and my dad was sitting, he was right and they were all wrong. But Here’s the interesting thing. As inspired as he was by his dad’s convictions and the courage of his convictions, He also kind of saw in his dad’s career a cautionary tale for his own political rise.
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And For a lot of Mitt Romney’s career, as he tried to become president, he worked very hard not to repeat the mistakes of his father.
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Wow. See, this is like the heart of the whole paradox, mhmm, because he clearly admired and respected his father, and that image you just gave of sitting alone, obviously foreshadows him sitting alone at the lunch table in the Senate, you know, being Mitt Romney alone. Yeah. And yet, he didn’t wanna do this. I mean, this is the thing that the crucial misstep, you write, was George’s compulsion to speak as mine and stick to his beliefs.
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So on the one hand, this inspired him. This was his role model. On the other hand, the point of that paper was, you know what? If you keep sticking to your beliefs, you say what you think, you’re not gonna be president again. So Mitt Romney had those two voices in his head, didn’t he?
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Totally. He was always wrestling with wanting to replicate his father’s courage, but also wanting to do the thing his dad couldn’t do, which was become president. Right? And so he he was kind of being pulled in both directions. He had, like you said, a very kind of overactive conscience.
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So it’s not as if he just bracketed questions of right and wrong. He was always wrestling with them. But for a lot of his career, I think you could argue that he was sort of defining his approach to politics in contrast with his fathers. It’s really been this last seven or eight years where he knew he wasn’t gonna be president. I think that was part of it.
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And also his party reached a point that he just couldn’t, you know, morally abide anymore, that he’s now really reaching for his father’s legacy you can see the historical echoes in his speech denouncing trump, his votes to impeach Trump, even while every other Republican is kind of calling him out and pressuring him to cave. He has this kind of stubborn commitment to his beliefs that his dad had and that he now hopes that he can be remembered for the same way his dad was.
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That’s what makes it such an extraordinary, psychological study before we get to that. Though. When I asked you earlier, you know, the thing that he regretted the most, I don’t know whether you thought I was gonna ask you about this, but it was the endorsement of Donald Trump. But then there is the most cringe worthy picture in the history of American politics. Right?
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That after Mitt Romney had delivered this absolutely scathing, and I can quit eloquent speech denouncing Donald Trump early on trying to derail the nomination. After all of his attempts, to to find ways to have an alternative to Donald Trump. Now as you point out, he did as much as any Republican in America did in twenty sixteen to try to stop Donald Trump. But then there’s that moment. Trump is elected.
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Mhmm. It’s in the transition and over frogs legs, Is that true, by the way? They were in the
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frogs legs. Apparently, according to Romney, it was, there’s something else, but that became part of the lore of it.
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But anyway, He’s sitting there with Donald Trump, and he’s talking about becoming Donald Trump’s secretary of state. How the hell did that happen? And what does he think about that now?
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Well, he’s mostly glad that he didn’t take the job that he didn’t end up in the administration. No. I’m saying that’s that’s his primary, you know, reaction. Like, thank goodness. In fact, I interviewed George w Bush about this who had encouragement to take it, and he said he really dodged a bullet.
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What was happening was after Trump won in twenty sixteen, Romney and a lot of people like him considered it basically an emergency This mad man that has no business being in the Oval Office is one. He’s going to be in control of the United States government, and we need adults in the room. You remember this argument. Right? This was a very common line of conversation.
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You’re gonna hear it again
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in the months after twenty sixteen. And Mike Pence actually was the first one to approach him. Mike Pence called him and said, that president-elect wants to meet with you about Secret Podcast state. Romney initially demurred, and then eventually agreed to at least take the meeting. And it was because he thought that he could help steer the country in the right direction in this very perilous moment.
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It’s funny because asking Romney about it now, he says he kind of admits to me. On the one hand, there was this noble part of my thinking, which is, you know, I I wanna be helpful. I wanna be patriotic. I wanna help the country. But there is this other line of thinking, which is I just wanted the job.
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I wanted to be in the middle of the action. He said to me, wanted to be president of the United States. If you can’t get that job, secretary of state is a pretty good consolation prize. And so he admits that this almost was kind of the last temptation of mid. Right?
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It was like the the last opportunity, the last chance to kind of sell.
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And mission’s a hell of a drug. Right.
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Exactly. And Ultimately, in his version, the reason he didn’t get this job was that Trump basically told him, I wanna give it to you, but you have to go out there and tracked everything that you said about me during the twenty sixteen campaign. You have to say that I’m gonna be a great president that you were wrong about all of
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it. Mhmm.
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And Romney just couldn’t get You know, he said that would be ridiculous. Nobody would believe it, and I wouldn’t believe it. And I’m not gonna do that. And, you know, he tried to. After that dinner, he went out and talked to the press and he kind of went as far as he was willing to go.
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He said, you know, Trump has appointed a lot of great people and I’m hopeful that this administration will do great things, but it wasn’t enough. Trump called him after that and said you have to go further. Romney wouldn’t. After the fact a lot of Trump people
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grovel harder.
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Exactly. And, you know, I
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think Lindsay Graham. Right?
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Well, and, you know, Romney, I think at that point, he wouldn’t give up that much of his dignity to get the job. And what he says is in retrospect, I’m so glad I didn’t because Romney had all these conditions. He laid out for Trump. He said, you know, I’ll do this if we have a weekly meeting. I have veto power over ambassadors.
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That was one of his conditions because he was worried about who Trump would employ as a bachelor’s. He said, I want full control over sub cabinet appointments, and I want foreign policy. To flow completely from the state department. And he said immediately, Trump would have violated all of those, and I wouldn’t have lasted more than a few months. Right?
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It’s an interesting moment, though.
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Let’s fast forward just a little bit. Okay. So he runs for the United States Senate in Utah. He wins. What did he think?
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The Senate was going to be like, what did he think his role in the Senate was going to be? Because as I recall, one of the first things that he did I think even before he was sworn in, was to write a piece for the Washington Post where he said, I may I’m still a conservative. I’m gonna vote for Republican issues, but I’m also not gonna hesitate to call out the character of the president. I mean, he kinda signaled right from the moment he walked in that he was gonna continue to be outspokenly anti trump. So how did he think it was going to go?
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Well, he had this idea, and I re one of the things he gave me was the pros and cons list He had written out for himself when he was considering whether to run for Senate. And you can imagine, you know, a lot of the cons were lifestyle considerations. He’d be away from his wife and family. And the pros were issues that he wanted to address. But in that pros and cons list, he wrote out a line from the Yates poem, the second coming.
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That he felt kind of embodied or captured what the Republican Party in the Trump era was. And he wrote the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. He believed that if he got to the Senate, he was, you know, this elder statesman of the party, the former nominee of the party, that he could get there and kind of empower and embolden the best in the party who still, you know, were good people. They were just sort of afraid of Donald Trump and didn’t know what to do. And he had this idea that he could steer the party away from Trumpism just by being there to encourage them.
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And What he found out once he got to the Senate was that the problem was much more dire than he realized. The situation was much worse. These senators did not want to be steered away from Trumpism. They were so desperately clinging to their seats. And their power and the trappings and their offices and their staffs that they weren’t willing to do anything that might compromise their reelection prospects.
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And that was really dispiriting for him.
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And then he ended up being the man alone sitting by himself at lunch. Nobody wanted to sit with him. I mean, that’s I
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mean, he talks about going into those Senate Republican cock lunches, especially as he became more and more of a target of Donald Trump’s and became more outspoken about you know, his fellow Republicans. He said it reminded him of the high school cafeteria. He would walk into the Senate caucus language. Yeah. And he’d look around and be like, who am I gonna sit next to.
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He often felt when he, like, raised his hand to make a comment that people were rolling their eyes or sort of like whispering about him. He actually became a little paranoid during the first impeachment trial because he would write in his journals that he would see people kind of gesturing in his direction and talking, and he would imagine what they were saying about him. It really was a deeply unpleasant situation for him. And I imagine continues to be so because he’s only become more outspoken, especially since this book has come out.
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And, of course, the key decision, and maybe the defining decision of his political career was when he decides that he is going to be the only Republican senator to vote to convict Donald Trump in that impeachment trial. He had to know at that point that that was it for him.
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Yeah.
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That he was going to be a pariah, that he was going to be excommunicated. Talk to me about that decision, how hard that decision was for him, and he had to understand that being absolutely alone meant that he was not guiding the party in any particular way, but he was blowing himself up.
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He agonized over it. I mean, I have his journal from that first impeachment trial. He wanted so badly to vote to acquit Trump and just kind of be in the mainstream of the Republican Party. He would often write about the worst case scenarios of what would happen to him and his family if you voted to convict Trump. He was worried about the safety of his family.
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He was worried about his various sons getting audited or getting targeted in some way by the Trump administration.
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Oh, wow.
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But, you know, in the end, he just couldn’t live with himself knowing that Trump was guilty. He had poured over the evidence. He had taken it very seriously. He felt there was no question Trump was guilty of abuse of hour. And he was at a point in his career where he just said, I can’t take another vote that I don’t believe in.
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I can’t keep doing this. Right? The way that every other Republican has just sold themselves out. He decided to do what he thought was right And I think you’re right that he knew that was sort of the end of it for him and the Republican Party.
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So that was the decision that he decided that he was gonna follow the example of his father George from nineteen sixty four, that he would be the one man sitting down. In his case, it was the one man standing up. So that was a real breaking point for him. You tell a story that’s gotten a lot of attention, though, that he got a call from Paul Ryan, his running mate. And Paul Ryan, of course, and I’ve known Paul a long long time.
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He’s been trying to walk this very, very careful line of, you know, pro trump anti trump, you know, staying relevant. So he called him up and try to talk him into not voting to impeach Donald Trump.
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It was actually the last call Romney got before he went out and gave his speech saying that he was gonna vote to convict somehow word had leaked out in Romney’s orbit and Paul Ryan called his cell and basically said I heard you’re gonna do this. Are you sure you wanna do this? And there have been different characterizations of this call. I heard about this first from somebody on Romney’s senate staff at the time. I asked Romney about it.
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I asked Paul Ryan about it later who confirmed that they spoke and confirmed some of the essential details without necessarily confirming the full characterization, but basically what Paul Ryan said on that call according to my reporting is This is gonna be extremely damaging to your place in the Republican Party. You could lose friends, people who supported our campaign, are probably going to cut you off and be very upset with you. Are you sure you’ve thought through the consequences of this? Also, Paul Ryan told him that he didn’t believe that was guilty. He said that I don’t think you should vote.
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That’s different.
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Yeah. So
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so there’s one thing to say. I’m worried about you. It’s another thing to say. I’m actually now endorsing the trunk position.
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Yeah. Two different arguments being made there. I mean, Romney ultimately said, I know what I wanna do and hang up and then went out and gave a speech.
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So what what is their relationship now? What does Mitt Romney think of Paul Ryan? Particularly after your story broke about this.
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I think that Romney has a lot of just personal affection for Paul Ryan. In some ways, I think he thinks of Paul Ryan as like a son. You could tell even reading his journals and talking to him that He was much less judgmental of Paul Ryan’s capitulations to Trump than he was of other Republicans. And I think it just comes down to him really, you know, loving Paul Ryan on, like, a personal level. And I saw that they appeared together at a the Park City summit that Rami holds every year earlier this year after that story first came out.
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So my sense is that their relationship is okay, but This is one of the tricky things about this book. He wanted to document and I wanted to document the hypocrisy and cynicism that he has seen behind closed doors. And I’m sure it’s put a strain on a lot of his relationships, but he felt like it was important enough to
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Well, no kidding.
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Risk those things.
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Mc K Hopkins. It is an outstanding book. The book is Romney a Rekening, and it is definitely worth your time, the K Hopkins. Thank you for coming back on the Bulwark podcast. I appreciate it very much.
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Hey. Thank you so much, Charlie. Thanks for having me.
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And thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we’ll do this all over again. The Boer podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, an engineered and edited by Jason Brown.
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