The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins is out with the first excerpt of his highly anticipated biography of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), timed to the 2012 GOP presidential nominee’s announcement today that he will not seek re-election.
Why it matters: Romney — the only GOP senator to vote to convict former President Trump in his first impeachment trial — was brutally honest about his Republican colleagues over the course of two years of interviews with Coppins, a fellow Utahn.
Highlights:
- On Jan. 2, 2021, Romney texted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to warn about extremist threats law enforcement had been tracking in connection with pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. McConnell never responded.
- Romney kept a tally of the dozen-plus times that Republican senators privately expressed solidarity with his criticism of Trump. “You’re lucky,” McConnell once told him. “You can say the things that we all think.”
- Romney shared a unique disgust for Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who he thought were too smart to believe Trump won the 2020 election but “put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”
- He also was highly critical of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who reinvented his persona to become a Trump acolyte after publishing a best-selling memoir about the working class that Romney loved. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney said.
Zoom in: After House impeachment managers finished a presentation about Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, McConnell told Romney: “They nailed him.”
- Taken aback, Romney said Trump would argue he was just investigating alleged corruption by the Bidens — the subject of House Republicans’ present-day impeachment inquiry.
- “If you believe that,” McConnell replied, “I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.”
The bottom line: Romney said he never felt comfortable at a Senate GOP conference lunch after voting to convict Trump in 2020. “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” he told Coppins a few months after Jan. 6.
I hope you’re wrong about the GOP’s direction, for all our sakes.
And yeah, I’ve known the GOP wasn’t actually in favor of small government for at 10+ years now, back when I switched my party affiliation to Independent. I’m only registered Libertarian now because I hope that communicates to someone that the two party system is broken. I disagree with a fair amount of the Libertarian Party lately, especially since the Mises caucus took over and seems to be turning it into some weird GOP alternative.
I don’t know much about Chuck Marohn, but after looking into it, he sounds up my alley. I’m a huge fan of dense towns and people-focuses transit, instead of sprawling suburbs and stroads everywhere. I watch Not Just Bikes on YouTube and generally agree with the presenter. I think people would be more happy if the US worked more like the Netherlands than the Western US.
Maybe I’m a hippie, IDK, I just want smaller government, which means fewer laws, simpler services, and more transparency. The GOP is against at least two of those, and my impression is the Democratic party is as well.