The Bulwark Podcast - McKay Coppins: The Last Temptation of Mitt Romney

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

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

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This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself? Like you were hiding behind a mask? BetterHelp online therapy is convenient, flexible, and can help you learn to be your authentic self so you can stop hiding. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. 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 bestseller list. So we're

very fortunate to have the author, McKay Coppin, staff writer for The Atlantic, back on the Bulwark Podcast. First of all, congratulations. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's not always that a book about somebody who lost a presidential election and is retiring from the United States Senate makes the bestseller list. I mean, I think one of the interesting things was that Mitt Romney had all of these notes and journals and records, and he decided that he wasn't going to 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.

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 bestseller. You know, I just found him personally really interesting. His kind of journey from presidential nominee and standard bearer of the Republican Party to essentially a pariah in his own party within 10 years felt to me like a pretty interesting story. But I didn't know if anyone else would find it interesting. In fact, Mitt would always tell me, I don't know who's going to read this. You can count on my family 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. 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? And I was going to ask you the question, how is he going to be remembered by history? Is he going to be remembered as Alf Landon, or is he going to be remembered as Alf Landon or is he going to be remembered as Margaret Chase Smith? And then I realized even among our listeners, 98 percent probably go, Margaret Chase Smith, what is that about? Right. History is a tricky thing. 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, because I would ask him about it periodically.

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. The New York Times wrote in a review of your book that the story of Mitt Romney's political career is an 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 fits the part. Yet that is not the sole story that Coppins, 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 Coppins asked Romney if he would still have taken that courageous vote in Trump's impeachment trial had the senator been 30 years younger, with many campaigns and elections still ahead of him, Romney demurs. I don't know the answer to that, he admits. I think I recognize now my capacity to rationalize decisions that are in my self-interest. I thought that was interesting is 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, God, that was stupid. 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? 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.

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 unless he takes a pro-choice position. He personally is opposed to abortion for moral and religious reasons, but he walked me through the painstaking process of finding his way to a pro-choice position. It 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. He says to the crowd, when I'm elected, we're going to 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's 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? 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 $5 million or whatever. 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 that. And he understood that in real time though. Yes. Well, and that's what's so interesting about it. 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 and the economy, right? But the crowd, and this is 2006, 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 that to slip stream behind it, at least for a while, he went along with it. That's right. I mean, it's almost something alchemical that 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 primaries. He's trying to win the next election. 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. Every day. 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? 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. But he understands those incentives and how they work. You know, one of the things he told me was that Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the RNC, also his niece, he told me that he tries to avoid talking politics with her because they obviously disagree on a lot and it 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 6th was legitimate political protest.

He called up Rana because he was so angry about it. And he was like, what are you guys doing? 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, quote unquote, establishment Republicans, they're all playing with fire. And they think that they can kind of appease and appeal to these MAGA 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. Yeah, this is his lived experience. Yeah, exactly. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your dread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our dread experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with the Michelin X-Ice Snow Tire.

Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself? Like you were hiding behind a mask? BetterHelp online therapy is convenient, flexible,

and can help you learn to be your authentic self so you can stop hiding. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. 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, you 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. 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 why do you write that he struggles to answer that question? Because it sounds like the whole book is answering that question in some way. 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 a straight line toward perfect enlightenment, right? He would, in some interviews, seem to confess

some complicity in what had happened to the Republican Party. And then the next week, he'd sort of walk it back. 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? 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 is pretty remarkable. And I think he deserves credit for that, but it was hard for him. 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 the one thing he regretted? It was a target rich environment. So speaking of those moments, I think I know where you're headed here. Well, there's there's two of them. 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, 2012, he's running for president, he has a lot of, a lot of pressure on him to get Donald Trump on board. Donald Trump had been peddling the birther conspiracy theory. And he was 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 him with all of that. So he stands there. And we all remember that moment when Donald Trump endorses Mitt Romney and Mitt Romney accepts Donald Trump's endorsement at a time when already, I mean, Donald Trump had not become the dominant figure he 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.

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, 10 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. 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. 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 were involved in that decision, it was clear he didn't want to do it at the time. He said no multiple times. His advisors eventually convinced him that he had to do it at the time. He said no multiple times. His advisors eventually convinced him that he had to do this or else Trump would go endorse Rick Perry or Newt

Gingrich and stretch out the primaries. But it's funny because Romney is clearly chagrined 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 rode this once-in, once in a generation populist wave into the White House and that Mitt Romney had very little to do with it. And I'll add this to 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. I remember this, the endorsement. And you know, this was one of the things that I imagine his consultant said, Look, you want to be president, this is the kind of dirty thing that you need to do to become president. He looks chagrined, as you point out, but in his own journal, May 2012, this is a private journal. He writes about Trump, no veneer, the real deal. Gotta love him. Makes me laugh. It makes me feel good. Both. What the, was this, I'm trying to talk himself into it. Was this the process of rationalization? 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? And they would do fundraisers together, he would get on the phone with Trump. Some of it was kind of ego maintenance, right? Trump wanted to be very involved. The campaign was trying to keep him at arm's length. Yeah. But part of it, I think was real. I remember finding that journal entry 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. 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. Like Trump, one on one in a room, there is a seductive quality to it. 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. 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 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. 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 2012. Interesting. 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. If you ask, okay, well, how do you justify putting somebody on who is spreading the thing? 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 kind of get sucked into this. By the way, one of the interesting little tidbits in your book that I had completely forgotten about was election night, 2012. Yeah. After Romney lost the role that Trump played, 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. Now that is years before January 6th. But isn't that so interesting? Because I had forgotten about that

too. You had forgotten about it. I think most readers, when they come to that portion of the story, this is the election night, 2012, they'll almost have to, you know, check back. Wait, what year is this? Right. But it speaks to how unserious Donald Trump was at the time that it barely registered. 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, that element of their party, that ugliness took over. It was always there. That's the thing that we've talked about before. I'm going to go back to this Washington Post review of your book, which is very favorable. But he writes, there's a certain obliviousness to Romney's campaigning, especially so during the 2012 presidential run when the candidates still regarded the Tea Party as merely a movement of fiscal discipline. Well, there was a lot of people who thought that, at least early on. His campaign strategist, Stuart Stevens, who has become extremely anti-Trump, harbored

no such illusions, telling Romney at the time that the primary was not about, this is 2012, that the primary was not about policy or ideology, but about grievance and tribalism. The base, this is what Stephen 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. That's totally right. I mean, 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? It was still when Mitt Romney

first ran for president in 2007, it was still possible for him to think that his healthcare 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 going to be something that propels me to the Republican nomination. He quickly ran into the reality of 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. And what he represents now feels anathema to what the Republican Party

is, but it's not that he became a liberal, right? This is the confusing thing for him. He still feels like he's a conservative. He still is a believer in personal responsibility and character and values and, you 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. You know, it occurs to me that his nomination in 2012, 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 Donald 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. You know, Michelle Bachman 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. 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 Stuart Stevens and all those people on his campaign in Boston, they figured out how to execute the heist by the skin of their teeth, were they able to kind of beat the Rick Perry's and Newt Gingrich's and Rick Santorum's. 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. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your dread's worn down or you need a new wheel. Wherever you go, you can get it from our Dread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy.

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See, I am old enough to remember George Romney, governor of Michigan, a really lengthy paper 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 by the experience of his father. So just talk to me a little bit about the role that George Romney plays in this story. His dad looms large in Mitt Romney's life and career. I can't tell you how many times he would bring up his dad in these interviews, in his journals. His dad is a really important figure. He was a liberal Republican governor of Michigan in the 1960s. 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 60s, especially the early 60s. He was in the mold of kind of a Dwight Eisenhower and Rockefeller. He was an advocate of civil rights. He marched with civil rights activists. He eventually ran for president and during the Republican primaries had to deal with race riots in Detroit, which became national 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. What he said, he delivered this address saying 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 1964 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 Mitt, as a teenager, was at that convention. 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 George Romney, 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. 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. Wow. See, this is like the heart of the whole paradox, 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 want to do this. I mean,

this is the thing that the crucial misstep you write was George's compulsion to speak his mind and stick to his beliefs. 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 going to be president again. So Mitt Romney had those two voices in his head, didn't he? 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 was kind of being pulled in both directions. He had, like you said, a very kind of overactive conscience. 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 father's. It's really been this last seven or eight years where he knew he wasn't going to be president. I think that was part of it. And also his party reached a point that he just couldn't 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. 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 you regretted the most, I don't know whether you thought I was going to ask you about this, but there was the endorsement of Donald Trump. But then there is the most cringeworthy picture in the history of American

politics, right? That after Mitt Romney had delivered this absolutely scathing, and I can quite eloquent speech, denouncing Donald Trump early on, trying to derail the nomination, after all of his attempts to find ways to have an alternative to Donald Trump, you, trying to derail the nomination after all of his attempts to find ways to have an alternative to Donald Trump. As you point out, he did as much as any Republican in America did in 2016 to try to stop Donald Trump. But then there's that moment. Trump is elected. It's in the transition and over frog's legs. Is that true, by the way, that they were having frog legs? It's actually not frog's legs, apparently. According to Romney, it was something else, but that became part of the lore. 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? 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 his primary reaction. Thank goodness. In fact, I interviewed George W. Bush about this, who had encouraged Mitt to take it. And he said he really dodged a bullet. What was happening was after Trump won in 2016, Romney and a lot of people like him considered it basically an emergency.

This madman that has no business being in the Oval Office has won. 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. We're going to hear it again. In the months after 2016. And Mike Pence actually was the first one to approach him.

Mike Pence called him and said, the president-elect wants to meet with you about secretary of 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. 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 want to be helpful. I want to be patriotic. I want to help the country. But there is this other line of thinking, which is, I just wanted the job. I wanted to be in the middle of the action. He said to me, I 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 Mitt, right? It was like the last opportunity, the last chance to kind of sell out. Ambition's a hell of a drug, right?

Exactly. And ultimately, in his version, the reason he didn't get this job was that Trump basically told him, I want to give it to you, but you have to go out there and retract everything that you said about me during the 2016 campaign. You have to say that I'm going to be a great president, that you were wrong about all of it. And Romney just couldn't get there. You know, he said that would be ridiculous. Nobody would believe it. And I wouldn't believe it. And I'm not going to 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. 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. Grovel harder.

Exactly. He had to go full Lindsey Graham, right? Well, and 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. That was one of his conditions because he was worried about who Trump would employ as ambassadors.

He said, I want full control over subcabinet 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. It's an interesting moment, though. 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 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'm still a conservative. I'm going to vote for Republican issues, but I'm also not going to hesitate to call out the character of the president.

I mean, he kind of signaled right from the moment he walked in that he was going to continue to be outspokenly anti-Trump. So how did he think it was going to go? Well, he had this idea. And 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 Yeats poem, The Second Coming, that he wanted to address. But in that pros and cons list, he wrote out a line from the Yeats poem, The Second Coming, 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. 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. And that was really dispiriting for him. 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 mean, he talks about going into those Senate Republican caucus 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 lunches and he'd look around and be like, who am I going to sit

next to? 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 just 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. 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, 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. He agonized over it. I mean, I have his journals 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 he voted to convict Trump. He was worried about the safety of his

family. He was worried about his various sons getting audited or getting targeted in some way by the Trump administration. 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 power. 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. 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. So that was the decision that he decided that he was going to follow the example of his father, George, from 1964, that he would be the one man sitting down. In his case, he 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, he's been trying to walk this very, very careful line of pro-Trump, anti-Trump, staying relevant. So he called him up and tried to talk him into not voting to impeach Donald Trump. It was actually the last call Romney got before he went out and gave his speech saying that he was going to 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 going to do this. Are you sure you want to 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. 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 going to 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 Trump was guilty. He said that I don't think you should vote this way. That's different. Yeah. So it's one thing to say, I'm worried about you. It's another thing to say, I'm actually now endorsing the Trump position. Yeah. Two different arguments being made there. I mean, Romney ultimately said, I know what I want to do and hung up and then went out and gave a speech. So what is their relationship now? What does Mitt Romney think of Paul Ryan, particularly after your story broke about this? 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 the Park City Summit that Romney holds every year earlier this year after that story first came out. 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 risk those things. McKay Coppins, it is an outstanding book. The book is Romney A. Reckoning, and it is definitely worth your time. McKay Coppins, thank you for coming back on the Bulwark Podcast. I appreciate it very much. Hey, thank you so much, Charlie. Thanks for having me. 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 Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin TreadExperts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations.