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.
As did I, which is why I actively debated friends about him. My main concern was that he didn't have a platform and instead was a populist, which is a clear recipe for disaster as it attracts the wrong sort of attention.
However, I still, to this day, don't think he is a fascist. I think he's dangerous and a fascist enabler, but I think he's first and foremost a narcissist that just wants people to remember and praise him. He's not like Hitler, who had a master plan, he just wants attention.
I think our institutions can survive Trump. However, if he somehow overturned the election, that would've set a dangerous precedent.
So I think we're largely in agreement, I just disagree with the urgency. He tried to do something stupid and is now paying for it. Many of his supporters that were present in DC are now in jail, and he's being tried on a variety of related charges. Things could've turned out differently, but they didn't. And I don't think they will, he just doesn't have enough support.
But there's no way I'm ever voting for him, and I have objected to him with friends (most of them conservative) every step of the way.