The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins is out with the first excerpt of his highly anticipated biography of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), timed to the 2012 GOP presidential nominee’s announcement today that he will not seek re-election.
Why it matters: Romney — the only GOP senator to vote to convict former President Trump in his first impeachment trial — was brutally honest about his Republican colleagues over the course of two years of interviews with Coppins, a fellow Utahn.
Highlights:
- On Jan. 2, 2021, Romney texted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to warn about extremist threats law enforcement had been tracking in connection with pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. McConnell never responded.
- Romney kept a tally of the dozen-plus times that Republican senators privately expressed solidarity with his criticism of Trump. “You’re lucky,” McConnell once told him. “You can say the things that we all think.”
- Romney shared a unique disgust for Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who he thought were too smart to believe Trump won the 2020 election but “put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”
- He also was highly critical of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who reinvented his persona to become a Trump acolyte after publishing a best-selling memoir about the working class that Romney loved. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney said.
Zoom in: After House impeachment managers finished a presentation about Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, McConnell told Romney: “They nailed him.”
- Taken aback, Romney said Trump would argue he was just investigating alleged corruption by the Bidens — the subject of House Republicans’ present-day impeachment inquiry.
- “If you believe that,” McConnell replied, “I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.”
The bottom line: Romney said he never felt comfortable at a Senate GOP conference lunch after voting to convict Trump in 2020. “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” he told Coppins a few months after Jan. 6.
I could tell you are a bothsideser, but thanks for being transparent about it so it wasn’t just me speculating.
What are the stakes Democrats have laid down, again? Let’s give a few examples here where the Democrats are being clear about having a no-compromise position. Is it just that they don’t want to let McCarthy and McConnell endlessly change the agreed upon Congressional budget by threatening national default if they don’t 100% get their way every year?
I make compromises ALL THE TIME. I voted for and defend voting for Joe Biden, after all. Most of the left is willing to make INTENSE compromise. But it’s never good enough for the right. You meet them half way only to see their backs as they sprint away. And Romney is part of that. If he wants to claim he’s not, there is a straightforward way to do it – either change party or call them out and leave politics. He’s doing the latter, so he gets credit from me there, but it’s not nearly enough to undo the harm he has wrought by helping keep a veneer of normalcy on a radical right that has none.
You want compromise in politics? Only one “side” is doing so. The other isn’t, and that’s Romney’s.
But Romney did…