The Dispatch Podcast - McKay Coppins on Mitt Romney

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

Steve and Sarah sit down at Dispatch HQ with McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the forthcoming Romney: A Reckoning, a biography of Mitt Romney's political career. Coppin's unique access to the soon-to-be-retired Senator turns a traditional political biography into a near-psychological thriller covering Romney's torment after losing the 2012 presidential election, the psychic currency of a senate seat, and his vote to convict Donald Trump. Show notes: -Get The Skiff feed to listen to Steve's extra question -Steve's extra question -McKay Coppins profile at The Atlantic -Romney: A Reckoning Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes with Sarah Isker and we're joined today by McKay Coppins, a writer with The Atlantic who has a new book out called Romney A Reckoning. We spent more than an hour talking about his book and his tremendous access to Mitt Romney. Coppins was given Romney's journals, his emails, his texts. He had extensive interviews with him, more than three dozen interviews with Mitt Romney. And what he produces is a portrait of, Romney as a senator, as a presidential candidate before that, as a religious man, as a family man, a deep, detailed, and contour biography of Mitt Romney. We had a great conversation. Sarah brought it to a very professional close by asking Coppins about Mitt Romney's legacy and how he would be remembered. A perfect ending, but I thought there was more to get. So I ruined it and asked a couple more questions, in particular about what Mitt Romney is doing right now in advance of the 2024 presidential election, and also the prospect of political violence, which is a theme that

runs throughout the book. We've saved that part of the interview for the SCIF, which is our members-only podcast feed. If you want to hear that and you're not a member, we encourage you to join. We will put a join link in the show notes. And if you are a member, click on over to the Skiff, and you can hear the rest of the interview. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes, and today is a treat. We are talking to McKay Coppens about his new book, Romney A Reckoning. McKay, thanks for joining.

Thanks for having me. A few things before we get started. One, I worked for Mitt Romney, both in the 2008 campaign and the 2012 campaign. So that's a disclosure, but also, boy, was this interesting for me. And second, you and I have worked together several times over the years and sort of come up in D.C. together in a lot of ways. So this is really fun. Yeah.

I think we got to know each other when I was a young BuzzFeed news reporter and you were at the R&C. Is that right? You had milkshake dates. That's right. At bull feathers. That's right. We would meet at bull feathers. And I would try to get you to give me some really minor scooplet and you would charmingly resist, as I recall.

I just felt like we were kindred spirits because all these reporters would ask me to go to coffee. And I don't drink coffee. And you don't drink coffee. And so our like milkshakes. So let's drink a 700 calorie milkshakes because we treat our bodies as temples. Right. So I don't read political biographies when left to my own devices. I don't enjoy them.

And I was about five pages into this book that is my job to read. And I put it down, looked up at my husband and said, what the F is this? This is not a normal political biography. I'm very glad that that was your reaction because I did not want to write a normal political biography and it turns out that Mitt Romney was on board with that this was a very different kind of process I think quite why don't you just tell us the access that you had

before we jump into what that access gave you sure well I approached him shortly after January 6th actually It was so early 2021 and pitched him on this idea of writing his biography, but with a couple of my own conditions attached. I said, I feel like you are in a really interesting headspace right now. You are clearly rattled by what happened at the Capitol. You clearly seem to be alienated from large segments of your party, and you seem to be grappling with big questions about your own career and about the country and about the Republican Party. and I want to talk to you about it all. But the thing I said at the very beginning was,

I only want to do this if you're ready to be fully candid. Like if you're ready to actually tell all the stories that I know you have, right? And if you're not ready, then let's revisit it down the road or whatever, right? And to my pleasant surprise, he decided to act like I was like challenging him to a, you know, duel or something. And immediately, so he, once he was, on board, he told a scheduler to block off weekly meetings with me, usually in the evening at his house near Capitol Hill. Those interviews would sometimes go for hours. I tried to keep

them short because I didn't want to exhaust him, but often I would reach the end of my questions and he would be like, so what are you reading lately? You know, he was barely isolated in Washington and I think he enjoyed the company. So I got a lot of time with him. I think by the end, it was close to 50 interviews. He also gave me his journals. He gave me thousands of emails that he had written to and received from prominent Republicans and other political leaders. He at one point took a crowbar to a filing cabinet in his private office to pry it open

because he couldn't find the key and just deposited the contents on my laugh one day. And it was just like tons of stacks of papers and notes from his campaigns and legal pads and memos and just said, here, maybe you'll find this interesting. So he was to an extent that I had never experienced as a journalist and I profiled a lot of people just ready to fully engage and be as much of an open book as possible. And he had a lot of these materials that he had collected and safe because he had contemplated writing a book of his own. Yeah. And he decided not to. Why did he decide not to? Well, it's interesting. What he said to me in our very first meeting was, you know, I thought about writing a memoir. There are some people in my kind of inner circle who tell me I should just write a memoir, but I don't think I can be objective about my own life, which is a kind of,

you know, unusual amount of self-awareness on the part of a leading political figure. But even more than that showed a willingness to give up a certain amount of control because the other condition that I attached to all of this was I want all the access that would be given to me for an authorized biography, but it's not going to be authorized in the sense that you have any editorial control, right? Like I get to decide what goes in the book. I will let him, I'll let you read it. That's what I told him. I'll let you read it before it's published. And if you want to have a good faith conversation about anything that you think is unfair, lacking context. I'll get into it. But ultimately, I get to decide with my publisher what goes in. And again, to my pleasant surprise,

he went along with that, which is unusual to say the leads. There's a lot of threads in this book that I think we want to pull on, certainly. You mentioned some of them in the beginning about, you know, the larger questions about the country or one's political party or one's just role in history. But if you were to say what you believe the narrative of this book is, who's Mitt Romney? Yeah, it's a good question. It's funny because I'll confide this now. When we were pitching the book to publishers, we really leaned into the idea that this would be a story of the, you know, changing Republican Party over 30 years, which it is, right? It told through the eyes of this one, you know, prominent member of the party. But the thing that I

I found most compelling was his own evolution and his own kind of reckoning, you know, to use the word from the subtitle, with with his own career. And, you know, he, like, I think the story of Mitt Romney is of a guy who is pretty earnest, pretty idealistic, sometimes to a fault, sometimes to the point of naivete, who also can be very cynical in the way that he engages in politics. And those two things are intention because he wanted to be president. You know, most of his political career was reaching for the presidency. Part of that was trying to fulfill the kind of unfinished business of his father's presidential campaign. And part of it was because he has this compulsion to rush toward, in the words of his wife, emergencies and

catastrophes. He likes to be in the middle of a crisis. He has a lot of belief in his own ability to solve problems. But he, but in seeking the presidency, he often found himself confronted with moments where he felt like he had to compromise a little on his ideals or cross an ethical line here or there or kind of fudge what he really believed to win over certain voters. And, and eventually in these last kind of six or seven years, has been able to be more honest with himself about that. and is now reached the point where he's unconstrained by his pursuit of the presidency. He knows he's not going to be president. And because of that, it feels liberated to actually follow his conscience and put that

above political convenience in a way that has been fairly dramatic and also, I think, pretty interesting. So if you go back, I mean, I want to talk about this change, because I think it's one of the most interesting aspects of the book. You go back, you, I was covering the Romney. campaign 2008, 2012, the presidential campaigns. So I didn't cover him as governor of Massachusetts, but covered him later. And it's fair to say that the view, the public view that emerged of Romney was someone who was driven primarily by huge personal ambition and wealth. Was that wrong at that

time? At the time he was running for president, I would not say he was driven by wealth anymore. In fact, you know, I write in the book about how he left probably, you know, half a billion to, or even more on the table to leave Bain and go take over the Olympics in Salt Lake City. He was also already very wealthy. So, you know, when talking to his wife about it, about whether he should take this job, she said, what do we need more money for? So I don't think he was driven by wealth. He did have enormous personal ambition. And, you know, that's rooted in both. self-interest and kind of noble factors, I think a lot of, like, he, like a lot of people in politics is motivated by both, you know, good and bad things, right? But he also, he also genuinely has this kind of sense of moral obligation that he thinks he inherited from his father. You know, his father was the governor of Michigan, a kind of liberal Republican,

marched for civil rights activists, denounced very Goldwater during the Republican convention, had kind of these big moments of splitting with his party. And Mitt sees himself as always kind of being inspired by and haunted by his dad's legacy, right? Because on the one hand, he wants to, he idolizes his dad. He wants nothing more than to live up to his dad's legacy. On the other hand, he's kind of aware, especially during those presidential campaigns, of the times when he's not quite living up to it, when he's being calculating and cautious where his dad was almost recklessly honest, right?

But he thought of himself as, you know, kind of the George 2.0 in some ways, right? I'm going to take all the good things I inherited from my dad, but I'm going to be more savvy. And I'm going to be the one who actually gets to the White House because I'm not going to wage these quixotic battles for the soul of my party. I'm just going to meet the voters where they are. And in doing that, I think he came across to a lot of people, as you're pointing out, as inauthentic and, you know, primarily ambitious. But I think there was, you know, behind that kind of an idealism that was often in tension with the way that he had to run his family. Well, there was another, there was another part of the way that he campaigned that I think contributed tremendously

to that inauthenticity. And it comes also from his father. When you talked to Mitt Romney, you watched him or you saw him in the debate stage, he seems to be carefully measuring every single word. He did not want to ever say the thing that would get him in trouble. And there's a reason that he came to that position. Well, his dad famously, when he was on his way to the Republican nomination. He was seen by a lot of people as the likely next Republican nominee in 1968. But his dad, during an interview, had this moment where he was asked about why he had changed his position on the Vietnam War. George had initially been in favor of it and had become more critical of the war. And so he was asked why. And what he said was that the generals and the

military had brainwashed him into buying an untrue story of the war. And, you know, people didn't take that much issue with the substance of what he was saying. I mean, some people did. But, you know, in retrospect, a lot, I think most people would say he was right about that. It was the word brainwashing that kind of went, you know, 1960s version of viral, right? Like, it was everywhere. It was in all the newspapers. Republican leaders denounced him.

military people denounced him, and it kind of put the nail in the coffin of his campaign. It was the end of his campaign. And Mitt saw that all happen. And the lesson he took was my dad's most admirable trait, his, you know, kind of reckless truth telling is also the thing that ended his campaign. I'm not going to make that mistake. And he told me, you know, I was always, when I was running for president, I was always on guard against saying something that would end my campaign.

It was like that was going through his head all the time. And he gave me his journals that he kept during the 2012 campaign, which were pretty detailed. And I can't tell you how many entries are him fretting over something he said earlier that day that might end up getting used against him at some point. And a picture that was taken of him, you know, in some unflattering way that could, you know, go viral on Twitter. Like it was almost kind of depressing how much a major party presidential candidate had to be thinking and agonizing over that. stuff while he was running for president. It's funny just from a like historical standpoint, growing up in the era that we grew up in,

I think it's really weird to read the George Romney brainwashing quote because you're like, I don't get it. Like, I really didn't get it for a long time. Like, because we've never used brainwashing in a literal sense in our era. But they were take, they thought he literally meant brainwashing. Like, it's still, I'm pretty confused by it. But I just accept that it was a different time. You and Mitt would get along.

because I can't tell you how many times Mitt, like, launched into, like, this rant that he's clearly given a hundred times before about, like, it was ridiculous. People knew what he meant and, you know, like, he's still mad about it. But I think he's right. I think he's right. Tell us something about the media, frankly. I think this is one of the earliest examples of media bias going after Republican for one word that shouldn't have mattered. Yeah, that's pretty obvious, not pretty obvious, like, so confusingly obvious in context that I don't even understand. But, so do you know, you and I both have children and so maybe I just think about kids stuff too much now.

But like, you know, those books were like, if you hold it this way, it's one book. But if you like flip it over, you can read it the other way. And it's like a different book. I think that's this book for adults. Interesting. Because there's part of my brain as the political operative that reads this as a fascinating history of the moment of our politics and these type things, right? Like how the media covers a campaign in 2020. 12 that is so obsessed with Mitt Romney's gas.

You too. You and I have had many a fight over this. And it arguably ruined his campaign. And you can see it from his perspective, too, like he's ruining his campaign over that obsession. And then you, of course, you get 2016, where reporters try to cover the gaffes. And the Republican electorate is basically like,

go jump off a bridge. We love the gaffes. The gaffs made Trump more powerful. That's right. Yeah. I still do. And so, and it's about the Republican Party and that change and that evolution of the Democratic Party. And like, so that's the way that you read it when you're holding it this way.

But if you flip the book upside down, it's actually just this fascinating story about humans. Yes. And their capacity for self-awareness and lack of self-awareness. And the moment that really struck me, and it's relatively early in the book where I was like, oh, wait, there's two books in here. They're hidden amongst each other. And you've referenced it. And it's the part where Mitt Romney was talking about the Olympics. And he says, I just always like running towards crises.

And then he makes this little aside because he knows on the one hand that sounds really admirable. But he kind of knows on the other hand, it's not coming from an admirable place. And I feel that about myself and have struggled with that. That like it can look really great that I love helping friends who are encouraging. crisis or something, but maybe I just really need to be needed. Yeah. And the bigger the crisis, the more I'm neat. You know, and so forget the setting that this book is in.

It's also just a fascinating psychological thriller. Well, I'm so glad that came through because, again, like, that was the thing that I was, I found compelling about the book was more the character study of, the guy you know like the story's there and if you want to come for like the juicy tell all details there are like a thousand of them right

and a lot of them have been in the media and there's even more to come but like the like this stuff the stuff about him is so bad like this kind of tortured guy who is wrestling with his conscience and his father's legacy his own

who am I and am I a good person and these parts of him that he's uncomfortable with and you can see it through when you're writing about the journals and what he's writing in, for instance, you know, 2010 versus what then he responds to you about those journal entries

when you're interviewing him now. And it's not like, well, this is what I meant or I actually am this. No, it's grappling. It's all grappling now. So can I give an example to support that point? Because the same thing jumped out at me. At one point, you write that Romney took his 2012 loss with a quote,

stiff upper lip your words. And then you quote him saying, my life is not defined in my own mind by political wins and losses, end quote. And then right after that, you jump in as the narrator and you say his journal and personal papers told a different story. How often did that happen in the course of reporting this book out? And how did he respond when you pointed that out to him? That was the fascinating thing.

So just to give you a sense of how kind of, you know, open Mitt Romney was to kind of engaging this conversation with me, he gave me the first chunk of his journals without reading. He literally just, I will tell you, I was sitting in church on a Sunday, got a text from Mitt Romney saying, hey, just sent you something that might be helpful before our next interview. and I looked at it and it's just hundreds of journal entries typed out on his iPad. That's how he mostly kept his journals. And so he hadn't read them yet and then what would often happen

is he would give them to me and then he would read them after he had given them to me. And so sometimes he would give me his account of some period of his life based on how he remembers it or how he wants to remember, right? So 2012 is a great example. You know, look, he would say,

I've been a businessman. I have my faith. I have my family. Like, obviously, it was tough to lose a presidential election, but I moved on with my life. You know, he wanted to see himself as that guy. You look at his journals, and he is agonizing over having lost this election, having disappointed so many people, letting his party down. He also is, you know, in the more recent interviews, he would tell me,

look, Barack Obama, we had some disagreements. but I always thought he was a good guy, right? His journals do not show that he thought Barack Obama was a good guy in the heat of the presidential campaign, right? Which I think is very common during campaigns. You have to. You have to think of the stakes is enormously high and you have to think of your opponent as bad, right?

And so he would write about the breathtaking arrogance of Barack Obama and how deeply dishonest he was. And when I would bring those up to him, he would then go revisit the journals and say, you know, in retrospect, I actually, I probably catastrophized the prospect of a second Obama term more than was reasonable, right? And he says also in the years since, you know, I realized how much more important personal character is to a presidential candidate. And, you know, given the Barack Obama successor, I now value those, the fact that Barack Obama, by all accounts, is a good family man and, you know, a good husband and like those things matter a lot to Romney.

anyway, there were a lot of times where he would tell me one story, give me his journals without having read them, I would see that it was a little more complicated than he was letting on, confront him about that. And then to his credit, he didn't usually become defensive or try to dismiss what he had written. He would then go through the difficult work of reconciling those. And sometimes I think he would come to a point where he would be revising his own memories, right? and say, oh, well, yeah, maybe that is, maybe the story I've been telling myself all these recent years is actually not quite right. And again, I'm, I have to say I'm not in therapy, but there was something that seemed almost therapeutic and cathartic for him to go through this

process. But I also give him enormous credit because it's a lot of work, right? And it takes a certain amount of humility to be willing to do that, let alone with a, you know, a journal sitting across from me. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious.

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Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's E-T-H-O-S.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Is it possible, as you think back about that, and I'm sure this has occurred to you and occurred to you as you worked on the book, that what he was writing real-time in his journals was less an accurate reflection of what he was thinking at the time. more the story that he knew he wanted to tell because there's a level of self-awareness. He has, he said, I was thinking about writing a book. I was going to do a memoir. I'm taking copious notes about everything that happens. Like, if you're doing that, as you're going through the journaling process, you can come up with the story that you want to tell.

Wait, quick question. Do you all journal? Not anymore. I have at various points of my life, but I'm not. Same. I dip in and out. Like if I think I'm doing something important, I journal. And then as soon as I'm done, like, you know, I had these like two-year jobs, right, for like most of my career.

So I'll, like, journal in the heat of it. And then when I'm unemployed and like, I don't need a journal that I slept until 1 p.m. today. So my journal has got woken up by my five-year-old extremely early again. So the, the, the, when you write your journals, when you have those important jobs or you're kind of seeing history unfold, are you writing for posterity? Are you writing for some future book? Or are you, is it as candid a reflection as it could be? What do you think? So I just, I find Steve's question fascinating

because certainly at my time in the Department of Justice, I knew that I was potentially writing things that people would need. Like whatever, like, I don't know what else to phrase that. Also, I've never gone back and reread them. So I feel like, there's so many parts of this book where I'm like, am I met from me? I felt like I learned a lot about myself and reading this book. So no, I wasn't trying to shade it,

but I did have this sense that like someone could come back and read this. Maybe it's my children. Yeah. And you are, and this isn't a, this isn't lying. It's just part of human psychology. We're all the heroes in our own story.

And we're never, we're never want to be the bad guy. There's very few people that ever are trying to be the bad guy. And even there, they're like, oh, I'm the bad guy, because it's still part of this overarching narrative of themselves as the hero of their own story. That's what I think, if anything, to answer your question, Steve,

I think that he was telling himself a story to get him through certain periods of his life like the presidential campaign that I don't think he believed was false. I don't think he thought what he was writing in his journal was shaded for future memoirs, though he obviously was thinking of doing that. But I think he had convinced himself of these things because it was the best way to, in his mind, to be an effective candidate. Though I will say, there are also other entries that you can tell he did not think anybody would read.

The one that I think about a lot is after the 47% tape comes out, his journal entries are like truly tortured. It sounds dark. He got really, I think, depressed. I mean, I'm not a doctor. I would say almost clinically depressed. He writes in one of the. that he can't eat, he can't sleep, he can't even, like, deal with music being on

because he's too depressed. He doesn't want to listen to music. His staff gets really worried about him, and his wife actually arranges for him to meet with Tony Robbins privately, which I don't think was ever public, but just to see if this, you know, kind of motivational speaker can, like, pep him up and it doesn't work. And at one point, Mitt writes,

in his journal that he calls, it's late at night and he's agonizing over how, how could I have done this? I'm, you know, I'm going to lose this election and I let so many people down. And I don't even believe these things. Why did I say this in a stupid fundraiser? And he actually calls up Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist of his campaign, and says, I think I need to drop out of the race. This is six weeks before the election. I mean, and that wasn't, this is new to me. I don't think this was ever reported. He actively made the case to his chief strategist that he should drop out and they should slot in Chris Christie or Rob Portman and, you know, the party can try to win without me. That is how dark he got. And I don't, I don't think that he was writing those journal entries

for, you know, to burnish his legacy. He doesn't look. I mean, I actually feel like something very human is going on there and there's something tragic there because in some ways he was heeding the mistake that his father had made, he feels like he made this, like, gaff that now is going to end his own presidential campaign. But I don't think there was any shading going on there. I think that was just him venting his raw kind of emotions into his journal. All right. I want to move to the political side of the book, the political version of this book when you read it. There's a lot to talk about. Okay, so there's this moment in myth of the documentary. You know, I teach at George Washington

and one of the things I make the students watch is that mid-documentary because there's a lot of reasons. Greg Whiteley, he's the filmmaker who kind of embedded with him. I actually just met with him last week and he had a lot of Mitt stories to tell too. We'll talk about him later.

It must be you too like talking about your kids off of college, like, oh, remember when he did this? So that movie, the reason I want my students to watch it is because, A, they're too young to actually remember the 2012. campaign and I want them to like sort of get more inculcated in recent political history. But also they need to remember that these people that we're talking about and covering are humans and they just they make human decisions and not everything is some grand strategy.

And there's this moment in the movie where he's talking about his flip flops on Obamacare. He's getting whacked on that, you know, Mittcare and Massachusetts. And he says, you know, if that's going to be such a problem, maybe I'm not the right candidate for the Republican Party right now. And it really struck me in reading this book. You know, lots of Republicans play this parlor game all the time. You have a, you know, a few glasses of bourbon. Could anyone have won the 2012 election?

Was the 2012 election? Could Mitt have won the 2012 election? Was it Hurricane Sandy? Was it the 47%? Was it that Mitt Romney was a fundamentally flawed candidate, which is what he says in the movie about himself as a question mark, not as a statement? You know, could Chris Christie have won if it had been a different candidate? whatever that is, you don't answer that question in this book at all, but you tantalizingly

lean into it. The question of whether he could have won or whether it was winnable. The 2012 election was winnable for Republicans and whether Mitt Romney was simply, as the Republican party had moved into its Tea Party phase from its Reagan phase, was Mitt Romney just, you know, a great candidate for 1992? Yeah, I think that, you know, there's a very. strong case to be made that Mitt Romney 10 years earlier even would have been a great candidate and maybe could have won the nomination more easily without having to kind of stand on a stage

with Donald Trump, for example, damaging him later in the election, and that he could have won the presidency. You know, I think that Romney, though, on some level, he acknowledges this now, is not good at and does not like campaigning. And so even if he his resume... Neither did Barack Obama. Barack Obama was good at it.

He sort of bathed in the adulation Obama did. And Romney... Well, and Romney, Romney did, to a certain extent, too, but he also could feel, you know, there are moments in this book where he talks about being on stage talking to conservative audiences and saying things that he knows he doesn't really believe, but he's

trying to give the audience what they want. We understood at the time that that was happening. Yeah, it was very clear. And that's exactly the problem. In fact, I was also giving these lines. Severely conservative. Like, rabble-rousing like, let's cut the deficit. Everyone's like, okay.

But I think, but I think that. Or the death tax. Right. Well, the death tax is the moment I'm talking about. There's this one moment where he's speaking to a crowd in Iowa. And he says, we're going to cut the, we're going to end the repeal the death tax when I'm in office. And everybody cheers.

And then he has this, like, like inconvenient moment of clarity where he's like, why is everybody cheering for this? No one in this crowd is ever going to pay in a state tax most likely. I have no idea why you support this. I don't think I even support it. He told me it's one of those things you just say when you're running for president and you don't know what you're talking about.

And like it was this kind of this fleeting moment of like grim clarity where he just tried to immediately kind of put it out of his mind. but he had these moments a lot. And like you said, voters could tell. Voters aren't stupid. They can tell when a candidate is kind of pandering to them in a way that is not authentic. Sometimes in the case of Trump, like, they appreciate it. They see it as like it's, you know, you're being, you're demonstrating your loyalty to us, right?

I think that didn't come across that way with Mitt Romney. And in fact, I write about this one email chain that got. I love, this is like for real political wonks will be interested in this. But there's this email chain toward the end of his 2008 race. When it's clear he's going to lose the primaries, he's about to bow out. And all of his consultants enter into recrimination mode. And he has too many consultants at this point, which is a big problem, right? But it's like all these guys are on one email thread just like yelling at each other, right?

And blaming each other for various strategic failures. But what, you know, one of the consultant says that we should have been more deliberate in positioning Mitt Romney as the heir to Reagan. And then Stuart Stevens comes in and says, the problem with that is he's not a movement conservative and voters can tell. And the more that we do that, the more obvious it is to everybody that he's being an authentic and we just have the same problem over and over again. And so it's just, it's kind of a fascinating document, right? But this speaks, Sarah, to, like, what you're asking about, which is, like, he was a man fundamentally out of step with his party at the time that he ran. He was more of a, you know, the thing is, though, even his reinvention as a Reaganite wasn't totally real, you know, or at least not at first. I think he does now, you know, he admires Reagan and Reaganite fusionism is something that he basically believes in.

But he was more of a George Romney Republican, and George Romney was on the other side of the, 1960s, 70s divide in the Republican Party, right? It was Goldwater and Reagan on one side and, you know, George Romney and Rockefeller on the other side. And I think Mitt in his heart identifies more with that kind of old-school, moderate to liberal, northeastern wing of the Republican Party that kind of doesn't exist anymore, you know? Absolutely.

Well, outside of Massachusetts, maybe, right? So can I ask about some of the United States? something that sort of leapt off the pages at me as you told it. And again, this is probably because I spent a lot of time reporting on it at the time. But I wonder, as you describe these changes that we see from Romney, who's, you know, oversimplifying the narrative. I mean, I think you do a very good job at making sure the nuances carry us through. And it's not just sort of the simple oversimplified. He was this and now he's this. It's like you walk us through it and we see it. But if you look at the 2008, 2012 Mitt Romney as more calculating, more willing to make

compromises, more concerned with his political future, more focused on his own ambition. And you look at his choice for running mate in 2012. It doesn't fit. Paul Ryan is not the person you would have chosen if your goal was only, I need to win this election right now. There was something different happening there. And the way I read it, I mean, this is the way I thought about it. Before I read your book, then I read your book, of course, as supporting my presumptions. So of course, I think you're right and brilliant. But you didn't dwell on it as much, which is one of the reasons that I'm asking. Is it accurate to see his choice of Paul Ryan, which entailed a lot of risk, right? He was hearing it from Stuart Stevens, people inside the campaign, people outside the campaign. You had

conservative media types like us at the Weekly Standard. We wrote an editorial, I think, two weeks before he picked Paul Ryan saying, you've got to pick Paul Ryan. But that was not a popular sentiment in the campaign. Why did he pick Paul Ryan? I think two things were going on there. One was, you may be right that Paul Ryan was a bad choice to win the general election, but by the time that Mitt Romney was in the process of picking his running mate, he had basically spent six to eight years doing nothing but court the Republican.

base. And I think it was hard for him to shift his mindset, right? That weekly standard editorial, I don't know. I bet it meant, you know, I bet it cut through in Boston campaign headquarters. He, he was paying attention to what the conservative media wanted, what conservative activists wanted. And, and he, like, even though he should have been in a place where he was now thinking about the general electorate, I think in the back of his mind, he was always trying to, you know, figure out what he could do to get the right wing of the party on board with him. That said, the other thing that happened is he just genuinely liked Paul Ryan. And like, you know, he wrote in his journal at the time, like, this guy is like me on steroids.

He like loves spreadsheets and like numbers and like, and I think they just like vived. Like they liked like sitting around and talking about the budget and, you know, the deficit. And, you know, it also I think helps that Paul Ryan's. kind of demeanor, especially at that point, was that of, you know, somebody compared it to like a first year Bain associate, like just like polished and clean cut and tall and, you know, white and handsome and, you know, like he almost would have fit in with Mitt Romney's sons. Like if you just put him in the holiday card, would you have noticed that he wasn't a Romney, you know? So I think there is something about that too. Mitt just, you know, really liked Paul Ryan. And so there were moments.

And I would say the 2012 campaign, he was closer to his real self than he was in 2008. And part of that was because... Wait, you think he was closer to his real self in 2012 than in 2008? I think in 2008, if you go back and look at some of the stuff he was saying, he's just throwing culture war stuff at the wall to see what sticks. 2012 only in the sense that the campaign was more about the economy because of where the country was, he was able to spend more of his time talking about economic issues. but the one difference is that by 2012, the Tea Party is ascendant,

and he just fundamentally miscalculated what the Tea Party was. This is an aside, but you alluded to it. Like, he thought the Tea Party, he convinced himself he could win the nomination in 2012 without kind of selling himself out because the Tea Party was really about deficit reduction. He was like, if you think about it, the Tea Party movement is just about fiscal issues.

I'm the fiscal issues guy. I'll just talk to him about the deficit. Then what he found was that when he got in front of those audiences, they didn't want his like very carefully crafted plan to gradually reduce the deficit over 20 years or whatever. Like they wanted red meat and then, you know, he over time realized like, oh, they actually don't care that much about the deficit. This is an expression of something else. Right. But a fun one. I have been spending some of my free time really digging in to the economic side of the actual tea party,

like of the Boston Tea Party, because the school version that we get is accurate, but like not the point. Yeah. Like there actually was a reason they needed to throw the tea into the water. It wasn't like, ha ha, ha, F you. Like, there were, they had to get the tea off the boat in order to get the boat out of the harbor and without paying the duty and without unloading the, allowing them to unload the tea into Boston

where they would commandeer it and sell it anyway. Super interesting. History Corner with Sarah. There's a great history that doesn't suck podcast episode on this very thing, and it's fascinating. I need to go find that because I'm really into it right now, probably because I, again, like, is this book about me or Mitt Romney? I feel like I come of age in the Republican Party,

actually when Mitt Romney starts, you know, he's a few years ahead of me when he's running for Senate in Massachusetts. But yeah, like, you can watch me go to the R&C and be like, the Tea Party is really about fiscal issues. That's what I am. Yeah, for sure. Oh, it's not. Can I ask one more follow up on the Ryan question just to finish the thought?

It seems to me that you can look at that choice as Romney being much more 2016 Romney and 2016 and beyond Romney where he basically just says, I don't know, this guy took a risk. he's making big arguments about that matter to the future of the country. This is about debt and deficits. This guy went out on a limb and proposed these entitlement reforms. I'm going to take this risk, putting him on my ticket, against the advice of virtually all of my political people, because it's the right thing to do. Am I over stating that? I think that it is, to a certain extent, an example of him following his own instincts over his consultants.

and choosing the guy he liked over maybe the more, you know, expedient choice. I like, but what I was trying to say is that in 2012, it's not as simple as saying, I think this is the point you're making, that like he was, you know, this completely inauthentic, you know, false, made in a lab, presidential candidate. Like, there were a lot of moments throughout his campaign where he, he did what he thought was right instead of the most politically expedient thing to do. There was a moment early on when some people told him he should just disavow the Massachusetts health care plan, right?

And he actually won in one of those, the legal pads that he gave me, he's taking notes from the conversation with his aides about that. And he writes mass health care stick with 100%. Now, you could argue whether he actually really stuck with it 100%. but he didn't disavow it. And it's because he was proud of it, you know. And so there were definitely moments of him trying to follow his conscience or stick to his principles or whatever throughout his both presidential campaigns.

That's what makes him so interesting. It's not as simple as saying like he was just a, you know, sociopath trying to get power. Like that's not true. But the tension between where politics was pulling him and where, his conscience was pulling him is kind of what makes the story. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place.

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I have a theory that campaigns and candidates are never worse than when they're almost about to win or think they're almost about to win. So I actually, I do disagree on the 08 versus 12, Mitt Romney, because I think you've also seen a repeat in Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is an incredibly talented candidate until it actually looks like he might overtake Hillary Clinton there for a second. And then they get really risk-averse. They start listening to their consultants even more and they feel like any error will cost them this thing

that now is within reach. It's much more fun. It's much easier to take risks if it's a long shot. But once they see it in front of them, all of a sudden, they become really risk-averse and it turns out the worst thing you can do at, especially the end of a campaign, has become super risk-averse.

You get really boring, right? Yeah. And because that's when you get consultancy speak. You know, it's this true. Even Donald Trump at the end of the 2016 election, because I covered that campaign, it's interesting because the last few weeks of the campaign, the last month maybe,

he's just giving the same speech over and over again. And sometimes he would toss in like some crazy thing. But like compare him in October of 2016 to like January of 2016, it's pretty different, you know. It's this idea that people think, you know, compromise is the safest way when, in fact, oftentimes compromises the worst of all the options. You should just do A or B. There is no A.5 letter. And I just from inside the Romney campaign felt like we did a lot of A.5, like not a real letter. I want to talk about one part of this book,

though, that I think will surprise people who supported Mitt Romney and maybe disappoint them, which is Mitt Romney. Part of the reason, like, you love Mitt Romney, if you're a Romney person, is that he's a he's a good guy he's the nice guy and throughout this book this is like a burn book from mean girls um i don't have a full list of all of the people he craps on and pretty like you know if he looked different or didn't sound as nice would we have a totally different impression of him i mean just to walk through a few of them

um uh chris christie john casick cockaby Rick Perry Ted Cruz Josh Holly I mean it goes on and on Joe Biden Barack Obama at points

so it's not all Republicans though it is mostly Republicans because that's who he's dealing with and who I think he's most disappointed by and it's not like oh I you know this person wasn't very nice to me one day it's like this person's a psychopath

this person's morally corrupt a lot of people are stupid well so I think it'll come off as I think it'll come off as disappointing so what I would say is it, you know, in the run-up to this book's release, there have been a couple, you know, the New York Times, Politico have gone through the book

and created these stories of like, literally the New York Times headline, I think was Mitt Romney's Sickest Burns or something like that. And it was just a list of... And I'm getting text messages from former Romney staffers. And I'm sure Mitt Romney is getting those text messages too. Yeah. Here's what I'll say.

He, I'll give you a process answer and then a kind of bigger picture answer. Process answer is that, a lot of those quotes that are out there are kind of detached from context. A lot of them came from his journals, which again, like, I don't know that when he wrote those things in the heat of a campaign or whatever, he was venting to himself. And really, that is how he used his journal a lot of the time. I don't, and he gave me his journals without reading them.

So he may or may not have known everything that was in there that it would end up, you know, out there in public. In fact, I don't think it's betraying confidence to say that. when he did read the book before it was published, that was the thing that gave him the most hard burn. Not everyone. There was petty. J.D. Vance, he was not worried about.

Josh Hawley was not worried about. But there were some people who, you know, he says some pretty harsh things about that he kind of, he was like, look, if I had any editorial control, I might lean toward toning some of this down, but I get that that's not my place. So that's the process answer. Some of the things he did tell me directly,

but a lot of them were in his journals. But the bigger picture answer is, look, he is enormously disappointed in most of the prominent figures of his party. And I don't think you can really escape that. Like, you know, he likes Chris Christie, for example. Like, he got annoyed with him in 2012, but he... Who amongst us is not an annoyed at Chris Christie at this table. But he also thinks he's like a fun guy to hang out with. And he's enormously politically talented in a lot of ways.

But, like, when Chris Christie decided to become the first major Republican to endorse Donald Trump, Romney was, like, sick to his stomach over that. And you see in his emails that they go back and forth over this. And Romney kind of spends weeks pestering Christy to rescind the endorsement every time Trump does a new outrageous thing. And Christy responds in this sort of kind of smug way, says, if you want to have a rational conversation about this, feel free to call me. his voice. It was like, exactly. Of course. And it's so ironic looking at it now as Christy is once again running as inside Trump. What's so funny is what Mitt Romney writes back to him is like brutally scathing. I don't have it in front of me, but I can paraphrase. It's basically Donald Trump is horrible. He's racist, misogynistic, clearly mentally unstable. And you are

significantly morally diminished by having endorsed him. And I think that you need to rescind that endorsement now, like, just totally leans into him. You know, I think some people will see that and say, geez, Mitt, like, settle down a little bit. But it speaks to how frustrated he is with his party for going along with Donald Trump. I've got the, I've got the, okay, you're going to read it. The quote. Romney writes to Christy about Trump. He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic, vulgar, and prone to violence. There is simply no rational argument that could lead me to vote for someone with those characteristics.

I believe your endorsement of him severely diminishes you morally, though probably not politically, and that you must withdraw that support to preserve your integrity and character. It is brutal. Now you can look at that and say, this guy is, you know, way out of line. He's being judgmental. And there is a side of Mitt Romney that is judgmental. Like, I can say that as his biographer. Like, there were times or even I was like, whoa, you know, that's kind of a harsh assessment of this, you know, whoever.

But, but, you know, I think there's something righteous about his indignation. Like he is, he can't, he, and especially at that time, that's 2016, but really for the last, you know, seven years, he has had to watch as one prominent figure in his party after another has, in his view, sold out their principles, sold out what they've believed to line up behind. this clearly unfit presidential candidate and president. And then on top of all of it, he enters the Senate and hears all these guys in private kind of sidling up to him and saying, hey, I really appreciate all the stuff you're saying about Trump and public. I wish I could say that, but you know, I can't. And it drives him crazy. And like, I know how he feels. I can say, Steve has gone, like, Steve's off his rocker at this point. If Steve is crazy, it's because

of that. I know, I know well how he feels. I mean, I would say just as a journalist trying to cover this time, and we've talked about this on this podcast before, one of the most difficult things is, you know, you, I don't know how many. I have four, five, six dozen Republican elected officials I've had conversations with who have said to me exactly what they said to Romney in private. And then we'll literally, in some cases, go on and hold a press conference touting this or that Trump thing or, you know, become an early endorser of Trump. 2024 when I've had drinks with them at a hotel a few months earlier and they trash him and believe he's going to ruin the country. Yeah. It's it is there there is this sort of jarring disorienting. I think you use the word disorienting to describe how Romney feels about it. And

and he's right. I mean, I think that's maybe where I it's not just that he's righteous. It's that he's right. Yeah. In in in these assessments in in many of these cases. And you know, I think that this was something that he uh you know the the hypocrisy that he witnessed especially in the senate um i write about this a lot is you know i think it's what motivated him to um to finally kind of go on the record with all these stories with me but it was something he he went back and forth on and i will say he's not the only source in this book i i talked to a lot of people you know i talked to his staff I talked to longtime advisors, friends, all his family. I also talked to critics and people have worked with him throughout his life and career.

And so, you know, some of those stories I would get from others and then bring them to him and say, hey, I heard, for example, that Paul Ryan called you right before your impeachment vote and tried to talk you out of it. And then I went to Paul Ryan and asked him about it. But it's not as if he was, you know, every, he served up every story in this book. on a silver platter for me. I had to do some reporting on my own to get to get some of it out. I think that that's clear if you spend the time reading it. I want to talk about impeachment, the first impeachment in particular. You spend a lot of time on it. There's a ton of reporting

on it. And I find it fascinating for all of the reasons that we've just been discussing, but many more. I mean, in a sense, what he goes through in that first impeachment is what we see him go through again with some others, with some company in the second impeachment. and this sort of return to Trump by the Republican Party that you see really comes through. You have a passage here. I've got four different pages, Mark, I'm going to try not to bog us down by reading all of this stuff. But I'm particularly interested in his interactions with Mitch McConnell. In light of what we see Mitch McConnell do after January 6th in the second impeachment,

McConnell has this moment where Romney has gone to an Atlantic festival and criticized his fellow Republicans on some things. He says as a way of explaining why they're sort of reluctant to criticize Trump, particularly in the context of this first impeachment, Romney says, I think it's very natural for people to look at circumstances and see them in the light that's most amenable to their maintaining power and doing things to preserve their power. Not, I mean, I think it's a gentle way of conveying an obvious reality. This is true about the way that people operate in Washington. And when he sees McConnell at the Capitol after this,

McConnell says don't impugn the conscience and integrity of your colleagues. Fine to disagree with them, but don't question their motives and judgment. And then in rapid succession in the next 10, 12 pages, you provide evidence that Romney was exactly right to have done what he done, to have questioned those photos. And at one point, it's Mitch McConnell who says that he wishes, he could say, he wishes he was free to say the kinds of things that Mitt Romney says. And a few pages later, he says he brings Romney in and walks him through why he doesn't

want Romney to vote to convict Donald Trump. And then you provide evidence, you provide these other people, other Republican colleagues in the Senate. Corey Gardner is one, Martha McSally is another, who say? Notably, not still senators. Not still senators, but they say, I can't do this because I need to be in the Senate. Yeah. So it's exactly what Romney has said.

And McConnell comes off in this section as somebody who is almost singularly focused on maintaining the majority and protecting, as he sees it, protecting his members without regard to the substance of the charges on impeachment. And at one point, says to McConnell, you know, McConnell presents some. or Romney presents some argument to McConnell about, that's a quasi defense of Trump. Well, the defense might say this. And McConnell says, you know, if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. Making very clear, he was with Romney on the substance of all this.

McConnell, in fact, when the impeachment managers had laid out their case, when they finished their case, McConnell walks by Romney and goes, they nailed him. That was McConnell's take on the case. case against Trump, right? Basically, yes, he is guilty of these things. That is not relevant to how I'm going to vote or how I'm going to urge my caucus to vote. I should say, asked McConnell about this. His office says he doesn't recall these conversations the same way that Romney does and that he was fully aligned with the Trump White House throughout this process. So just a little

caveat. If I can say that, having done contemporaneous reporting about it at the time, no, that's not I mean, I'm sorry. It's just not true. And it's not true of the second impeachment either, where McConnell was calling people. He was floating the possibility that he would vote to convict. He was calling people and telling them. Trump was guilty of all of the things that he's being charged with and that people should be able to vote to convict if you wanted to. And then he just lost his nerve, I think is the answer. The insight that Romney, that I found most interesting about the Senate that Romney gave me, because he was a newcomer to this institution, right? And he got to the Senate with like a lot of optimism.

He still believed when he decided to run in 2018 that Trump might end up being kind of this one-off fluke that the party could be steered away from. He, you know, he wrote it. Again, am I met rum? But he gave me this to do. He gave me his pros and cons list when he was considering whether to run. And he had written at the top of the, uh, the pros and cons list, a line from Gates, uh, the famous line.

that he believed captured the Trump-era GOP, which is the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. And so his belief was, I'm going to get to the Senate and emboldened the best in the party to come to their senses and speak up against Trump. And we can go back to being the party that is, you know, the adults in the room, right? That's who we are. And I'll help steer the party back. what he realized very quickly once he got to the Senate was that the psychology of the Senate,

and this is in both parties, is just so deeply rooted in the importance of getting reelected and holding onto your seat. Like he said, I didn't realize how much psychic currency my colleagues attached to their Senate seat. It's like a lot of them are in their 60s, 70s, even 80s. Like for them, the idea of retiring is akin to death, right? like they need this job. They need the power, the staff, the big office, the relevance.

And if they don't have it, and they will do anything to hold on to it. And that theme runs through all the latter chapters in the book of his time and the son. How will Mitt Romney be remembered? What will his, you know, the first line of his obituary be or, you know, 10, 20, 30, 50 years down the road, Mitt Romney, comma? Yeah. First of all, I'll probably be asked to write his obituary as it's going for wherever I'm writing at the time. It's interesting because he, by the time this book ends, you know, the epilogue is my visit to his family compound up at Lake Winipasaki. And he has a week every summer where all the kids and grandkids descend on this compound.

And it's like, where they take the Christmas card where now you can't even see people's faces anymore because they have to be so far out. just 40, 50 people. I can't remember. I'm literally just dozens and dozens of beautiful Romney's just frolicing by the lake. And I always wonder how they pick which of the now great-bram kids is actually gets to be like closest to. I think it's the cutest. Right? Just kidding.

No, they're all, they're all wonderful. But I don't want to go on the record. Yeah, just the one. No. But no, but the thing that struck me, when he was up there, is that he is, you know, thinking a lot about his legacy these days. He's thinking a lot about history and his place in it. And he's thinking a lot about his family's name, right?

And I think that this final chapter of his career has been an effort by him to do well by the Romney name, by his dad's legacy, by his ancestors, but also to give an example to his posterity. He literally told me part of the reason he agreed to do this book is because he wanted some account of this, you know, his life that he could give to his grandkids. I think that he, you know, history is a ruthless editor, right? Like there is not that much it's going to be remembered about Mitt Romney.

In fact, he says to me, you know, you might only get one line in history, but if you do, you want it to be a good line. And I think he'll be remembered as for this last chapter of this career. I think his decision to stand up to the forces in his party that he believed were, you know, polluting the country, the extremist forces in his party, Trump, while it was enormously politically inconvenient to him and basically ended his career, I think that's what it'll be remembered for. And I actually, you know, when you read this book,

you'll find a lot that you don't like about Mitt Romney, probably. You alluded to some of it, Sarah. But I think there's actually something kind of hopeful about the idea of being remembered for the best moment in your life. And I hope that we're all able to kind of be remembered for when we're at our best. It's so, again, that to me is one of the most human parts of this that as humans, throughout all of human history that we have recorded,

we're concerned about our legacy. We're concerned about what we leave for our children, about the name, about character, and that's what people think about at the end of their lives. And in some ways, that's what this book was about for me. Like, that's the narrative. Is Mitt Romney trying to figure out what's going to be after that comma? It's about him wanting control over that.

and seeing this last chapter of his life. When you think about it, that is the part that made history. He made history as the first person to vote to convict someone of his own party, to buck his party in that way. And maybe I don't subscribe to the great man theory of history very often. I think by and large, it doesn't suit very well with my philosophy. But there are moments, and he might just be one, that it had to be Mitt Romney. Okay, we'll end on a more fun note.

What is Mitt Romney's, like, greatest weakness by which I mean, you know, Twizzlers or Barks Roop Beer or like, what's the thing? You're there late at night. These conversations are going on and on. Like, what can't he help, like, popping in his mouth or whatever?

Man, I wish I had a better answer for this because he is, I write about in the book, he's gotten like very thin, almost alarmingly thin in the last few years. He's been trying to lose weight and slim down because he's trying to live longer. And he has this whole thing about the history of Romney men. They have sudden heart failure and he wants to live as long as he can.

So he's not like a snacker. He does have on his desk in his Senate office a giant like jar of peanuts. And he almost like eats just for like the fuel. Like when he feels the the twinge of hunger is like three peanuts in my mouth, you know. Oh my God. I actually am at Romney, but I use almonds. Well, that's actually slightly healthier, right? At D.J, I went through a 48-hour period where I had seven almonds.

Wasn't that the, by the way, just as an aside, wasn't there a story about how Barack Obama every night after his like business was done, retired to his like his private study and would watch ESPN and eat exactly seven almonds? So maybe you are Barack Obama and not Mitt Romney. No, I mean, his refrigerator is depressing. I will just say that Romney is like I because I went to our routine as I'd come in and he's like oh go grab a drink from the fridge he has his fridge you open it it's like a couple condiments maybe than a ton of cans of flavored seltzer water and caffeine-free diet Coke there was at the beginning and I write about this and it's become slightly notorious in his freezer a bunch of frozen salmon filets that Lisa Murkowski had given him which he

He ate on hamburger buns covered in ketchup. He doesn't like salmon, but he said if I put enough ketchup on, it's okay. Few, I'm not Mitt Romney. I also ate salmon every single night for 18 months. But you like it. I love it. And you don't put ketchup on it. I will have salmon tonight.

Will you put ketchup on it? Oh, my God. I hate ketchup. I think the smell of ketchup makes me nauseous. Few, we end this by realizing I'm not secretly. Congratulations. Thank you. McKay Coppins, the book Romney,

Reckoning has to feel good to get this out there. Man, congrats. I'm excited. Go buy it, please. Thank you.