Today, Explained - There’s Something About Romney

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

On his way out of the United States Senate, Mitt Romney gave one reporter unprecedented access to his emails, texts, and journals. McKay Coppins, author of Romney: A Reckoning, explains why. This episode was produced by Jon Ehrens, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Hady Mawajdeh and Laura Bullard, engineered by Rob Byers and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The election is one year away, and as you may have heard, it's going to be the same two granddads running against each other. A new poll shows President Biden and Donald Trump are tied in a hypothetical 2024 rematch, though they're both running 50 points behind. Kill me! But somewhere down the ballot, one big name in American politics will be conspicuously absent. Mitt Romney's 76 years old. He's had a few careers at this point. Why not retire on top? But according to a new book by McKay Coppins, there's a lot more going on. He also had seen so much hypocrisy and cynicism inside the Senate.

I think he wanted to issue a warning. What Mitt Romney has to tell us about how our government works and doesn't on Today Explained. There's just something about Romney. This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout.

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And in light of today's sad circumstances, I ask my colleague, do we weigh our own political fortunes more heavily than we weigh the strength of our republic, the strength of our democracy, and the cause of freedom? What's the weight of personal acclaim compared to the weight of conscience? Tell me about the map hanging in Mitt Romney's office, McKay. Yeah, in one of our first interviews, Romney showed me this map that is hanging on the wall of his Senate office, and it's called the Histo Map. The idea is that it basically charts the rise and fall of the most powerful civilizations throughout human history. What Romney has taken away from this map, because he looks at it all the time, is that if you look throughout all of human history, almost all of the most powerful civilizations are autocracies of some kind. And democracy is barely a blip on this map. After January 6th,

he became sort of obsessed with it. He would look at it all the time. Sometimes he'd find himself at night in his office just staring at it. He would bring it up in speeches and interviews. It kind of became this alarming illustration of how fragile American democracy actually is. How did Mitt Romney end up in the U.S. Senate anyhow? Well, I mean, it's funny. He had, after losing the 2012 presidential election, had sort of tried to enter into this quasi-retirement where he sat on some boards and gave some paid speeches. But he was extremely restless. I have his journals from those periods. And he's constantly complaining about how bored he is. He feels like he's not doing anything. He didn't really have a purpose until the rise of Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. Romney believed that he could get to the Senate and steer his party away from Trumpism. He still had this kind of quaint belief that the Trumpian turn of the Republican Party was a one-off fluke and that all that really

needed to happen was sane, reasonable Republicans like Mitt Romney to get into positions of power and speak up and that everybody would kind of come back to their senses. One of his ideas was that he wasn't going to spend a lot of time dealing with or talking about Donald Trump. He was like, you know, one of the problems right now in Washington is everything revolves around Donald Trump. I'm going to go in and steer the party away from Trumpism, but basically ignore Donald Trump himself. He actually made this list of all the issues he wanted to address legislatively as a senator. Reducing the national deficit. Number 30, let's address climate change. Number 31, Let's compensate student athletes, I think. Number 32. We got to regulate the vaping industry. Number 30. were interested in rolling up their sleeves and working on legislation. He was actually told early on by one of his Senate colleagues, Mitt, something you have to understand is that about 20 senators

do all the work here, and the other 80 are just along for the ride. Rough. Pretty rough. Not great proportions, right? But Mitt kind of quickly realized that that was true. naive institutionalism that led him to believe that the Senate was a place where there were going to be serious people who, you know, were in rooms somewhere figuring out solutions to the biggest problems facing America. And that was not what he found in the Senate at all. And this is at least partly why, despite his efforts, his time in the Senate does indeed become defined by his relationship to the sitting president. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he got sucked into the Trump vortex pretty quickly. But it was also, I think, you know, the circumstances sort of demanded it. What happened is that in Romney's

very first year in the Senate, Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives. Lord, as our senators prepare to gather for today's impeachment trial, we declare that you alone are our hope. Mitt Romney approached the prospect of an impeachment trial in the Senate very seriously. He had this idea that senators are supposed to be jurors who set aside their partisan prejudices and look at the evidence seriously and study it and basically render a verdict, right? This was, suffice it to say, not how most of his Republican Senate colleagues were approaching the trial. They're on a crusade to destroy this man. And they don't care what they destroy in the process of trying to destroy Donald Trump. I do care. From the very beginning, Republicans were outspoken about the

idea that the trial was a farce, that they were not going to act as jurors. He recalled for me one caucus meeting early on where he was hoping they would kind of get some instructions on how the Senate impeachment process worked. And instead, Mitch McConnell told the Republicans gathered there, this is not a trial, it's a political process, and you are expected to act like politicians. And it drove Romney crazy. Of course, historians in the audience will remember Mitt Romney would ultimately become, I believe, the only Republican in the United States Senate to vote to convict the former president in this trial. What does he say when that happens? He gave this speech that I still think might be

the thing that he's most remembered for in his career. I mean, it's kind of interesting to watch it now because you can tell he is very emotional as he gives the speech. You can also tell he's so exhausted. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the president, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced.

I was not wrong. And having read his journals throughout the impeachment process, I know he agonized over this decision because he really believed that if he broke with his party and voted to convict, it would make him a complete and permanent pariah in his party. I'm aware that there are people in my party and in my state

who will strenuously disapprove of my decision. And in some quarters, I will be vehemently denounced. I'm sure to hear abuse from the president and his supporters. He was afraid he would have to move away from the state of Utah because people would be heckling him in public. He really wanted to vote to acquit, but he just felt, based on the evidence he had seen, that it wasn't the right thing to do and he wouldn't be able to live with himself. Does anyone seriously believe that I would consent to these consequences other than from

an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me. But he makes this point at the end of the speech that I think is kind of an important theme of this last chapter of his career, especially where he says, I will only be one name among many, no more, no less,

to future generations of Americans who look at the record of this trial. They will note merely that I was among the senators who determined that what the president did was wrong, grievously wrong. It echoes something he would tell me later as I was interviewing him for this book. He said, if you only get one line in history, you'd like it to be a good line. And I think for him, this was his line in history. This his conscience Which meant he would agree to impeach the president He thought there was something sketchy about the phone call with Zelensky Oh there's got to be something about Mitt Romney.

Romney. There's just something about Romney. More with McKay in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. explained 2024 explained today explain is back with mckay coppins mckay i'm sure when mitt romney

gave this powerful speech had his line in history voted to convict the former president he was thinking like, glad to get that out of the way. That'll never happen again. But it turns out it did. Yes. What kind of January 6th did Mitt Romney have? I think to understand the kind of January 6th Mitt Romney had, you actually have to go back a few days earlier. On January 2nd, he got a text from a Senate colleague, Angus King, who said that they needed to talk urgently, and Mitt called him. Senator King told him that he had just gotten off the phone with a high-level Pentagon official who had been monitoring extremist chatter online around what was going to happen on January 6th. And they were worried

about a lot of things, among them Mitt Romney's personal safety, because he had become a villain in certain corners of the internet, especially kind of the MAGA world. And there were all kinds of plans to wreak havoc in Washington, D.C. on the day of this rally that President Trump was holding. And so Mitt, after getting off the phone, immediately taps out a text to Mitch McConnell. There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch, to smuggle guns into D.C. and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator, the president, is the one who commands the reinforcements that D.C. and Capitol Police might require. What's interesting about that text is Mitch McConnell never responds.

Fast forward four days, and Romney is sitting in the Senate chamber getting text messages from an aide who's been corresponding with Capitol Police saying, hey, it's getting pretty bad out here. You might need to go to your Senate hideaway. He kind of says, I'm not going to leave right now. You know, let me know if they get inside the building. And then just a couple minutes later, he gets a text saying they've overcome the barriers. They're going to be inside.

And so at that moment, Romney stands up, leaves the chamber, and starts heading toward his hideaway when all of a sudden he sees a Capitol Police officer sprinting in the opposite direction toward him and yells at him, get back inside the chamber, you're not safe here. So Mitt Romney then turns around and starts to run, gets back to the

chamber in time to see the gavel drop and it will stand in recess until the call of the chair all of a sudden the secret service are removing mike pence from the chamber security officials are kind of scampering around slamming doors shut yelling at the senators to get into the middle of the chamber. And there's this really interesting moment where Mitt Romney just kind of loses it. And Mitt Romney is not a person who loses his temper very often, at least not in public. But in that moment, he's so angry. And so he turns to Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who are kind of huddled together in the chamber, and just starts yelling at them. He says, this is what you've gotten, guys. This is your fault. You ask an interesting question in this book, and you also spent a lot of time with Mitt Romney.

So I wonder if you pose the question to him. Was some of this maybe Mitt Romney's fault? That question kind of hovered over all of our interviews over two years. After January 6th, he was taking stock of what had he missed about his party and certain elements of the right-wing base of his party and had his indulgence of those voters or his embrace of them played any role in what had happened to the GOP in the Trump years. And he wrestled with it a lot. He kind of flatly admits now that he didn't understand the Tea Party in 2012. He said that when he would speak to Tea Party voters, he thought that he could get them on board by talking about deficit reduction and low taxes. And what he quickly realized was that they didn't want to hear about that stuff. They wanted him to

be angry and mean. And he now realizes that there was this sort of latent authoritarianism that was lurking inside elements of his party that he didn't recognize at the time and that Donald Trump may have helped activate, but wasn't the full cause of. I remember one instance stood out so incredibly to me, I had to read it twice in the book, which is that Mitt Romney, who was chummy with Donald Trump at the time, didn't believe that Trump's birtherism conspiracy around Barack Obama was necessarily racist. His grandmother was saying that he was born right down the road. And I'm not talking about this country. I'm talking about a totally different country called Kenya. Yeah, it's so interesting. And I pressed him on this. You know, he said, I'm talking about a totally different country called Kenya. Yeah, it's so interesting.

And I pressed him on this. You know, he said, I thought it was ridiculous. You know, I knew it was wrong. And I told him it was wrong. He didn't understand what Trump was tapping into. Trump, in some ways, understood the base of the Republican Party much better than Mitt Romney did in 2012. And what happened is that eventually those far-right elements found their embodiment in Donald Trump, and now they took over the party. They're in

charge now. And I think that really finally became clear to Mitt Romney on January 6th. And then he's the guy who's all alone. He's the one Republican who votes to convict in both of these impeachment trials. Why do you think that is? You know, I think that he is especially well attuned to authoritarian personality types. Back in 2012, when he was running for president, he actually got ridiculed by Democrats and a lot of people in the media for warning about Vladimir Putin and Russia as the biggest geopolitical foe to America. In the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. With Donald Trump, I think he was similarly alarmed by Trump's

kind of authoritarian appeals in a way that a lot of his fellow Republicans were willing to dismiss. And, you know, I think that's rooted in some ways in his faith. You know, Mormonism is actually, because it was founded in America, kind of entangled in the American project from the very beginning. Mormons believe that the founding documents of the United States were divinely inspired. The other thing is that Mitt Romney at this stage of his political career was kind of liberated from the constraints of ambition, right? So much of his career has been him trying to become president. And once he realized he was not going to be president, it freed him up to sort of try to make his decisions based on conscience and principle and less on polls and focus groups and election cycles, right? I think also you have to

kind of understand the role that his dad plays in his life. His dad was a liberal Republican governor of Michigan in the 1960s, an advocate of civil rights. He famously went to the convention in 1964, refused to endorse Barry Goldwater, and denounced the conservative extremists he believed were taking over his party. And had Lincoln ignored the know-nothing extremists of his day, he would not have been president of the United States and saved the nation. And Mitt Romney, as a teenager, was actually at the convention with his dad and watched as, on the final night of the convention, all these other

Republicans stood up to applaud Barry Goldwater, and his dad stayed quietly seated. My fellow Americans, is this the time in our nation's history for the federal government to ban Almighty God from our schoolrooms? I trust not. Mitt was inspired by that, and once he realized he wasn't going to be president, he finally found himself sort of reaching for his dad's legacy. He saw a kind of similar thing happening to the Republican Party, a new set of right-wing extremists taking over the GOP, and saw an opportunity to live up to his dad's example as he saw it and stand up against those people. And I think that's why he was okay with being this kind of lonely, principled, dissenting voice in the GOP these last several years,

even as it led to him becoming more and more isolated. Is there no room for someone like Mitt Romney, at the very least, a somewhat independent thinker in today's Republican Party? At least right now, I don't know if there is. I mean, politics is cyclical. Things could change at some point. But right now, I really don't see how somebody like Mitt Romney can thrive in the Republican Party at the national level. There's not any room for him. There's not any room for dissent. There's not any room for centrism or independence or willingness to work across the aisle. That is not where any of the incentives are. And I'll be interested to see who takes his seat in Utah. It is so hard for a rising star in the Republican Party to follow the course of Mitt Romney and expect to get reelected. You wrote that he wasn't totally happy with how the book turned out. Are you comfortable sharing why? I think that he felt that I had placed too much emphasis at certain points on these moments in his career where he found himself rationalizing

things in his self-interest, right? And I understand that. I don't think his entire life and career are defined by those rationalizations, but the reason that I tended to gravitate toward them is because I feel like those rationalizations are emblematic of sort of a crisis in our country. I think that the road to this moment in American history is paved by a thousand small moral compromises made by people in power who didn't believe they were making compromises at the time. And I think to understand the psychology of somebody who makes those compromises is really useful. It's part of what I hope this book offers to readers is what incentives are out there that are causing our elected officials to kind of set aside their ideals and principles and beliefs and just focus on re-election so that we can have a conversation about how to reverse that?

His party went bag up, he'd had enough of that. So he went home to Utah and is never coming back To that place that was so scary on the 6th of January Oh, there's got to be something about Mitt Romney Romney There's just something about Romney McKay Coppins wrote a book about Romney. It's called Romney, A Reckoning.

Find it somewhere near the one about Britney. They came out the same day. Our show today was produced by John Ahrens, who also did the music. We were edited by Amin Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Hadi Mawagdi, and mixed by Rob Byers. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. So Jonathan. Yeah?

Let me ask you something. Okay. Would you say there's something about Mitt Romney? Yeah. What is there something about Mitt Romney? Oh, I don't know. You don't know? Jonathan, I thought you read a whole book about Mitt Romney.

Okay, I did. So why can't you tell me what's about him? I don't know. There's just something about him. Jonathan, tell me one thing about Mitt Romney. Oh. Well, his name is Mitt. Tatter than I knew that. Okay, I know you did.

But here's a little more. His party went bag up. He'd had enough of that. So he went home to Utah. And is never coming back to that place that was so scary On the sixth of January There's got to be something about it, Romney

Romney There's just something about Romney Thank you. The American Pronunciation Guide Presents ''How to Pronounce Trump'' They're all backing Trump again They don't challenge him They don't contend with him And they do whatever he says And you're disappointed That they're all defending him Let them go into the darkness

Let them learn from their mistakes there Let them go into the darkness Let them go, let them go, let them go Thank you.