A new book explores the senator’s pained realization that even a Trump antagonist like him might bear some blame for the current GOP mess.
“I have learned through my life experience,” Mitt Romney said, “that it’s human to rationalize what’s in our best interest.” | J. Scott Applewhite/APMcKay Coppins sat across from Mitt Romney in the senator’s Capitol Hill office looking for a higher level of alarm.
Romney acknowledged he was — because of Trump, because of Trump’s “Big Lie” — “but I don’t know how widespread that is,” he said. “I’m not at the point of moral panic,” he added. “I do think that people fundamentally don’t want to be dishonest and acknowledge to themselves that they’re a dishonest person, that they’ve lied, and that they’ve thwarted democracy.”appear in Coppins’ biography of Romney, which is just out today.
Coppins on June 13, 2021, was sitting in adult Sunday school in the gym of his Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints in Oakton, Va., when he received an unexpected text message from Romney. Coppins had launched the work for the book, and Romney was a willing participant in the project. “Thought this might set the stage for our chat,” the text message from Romney said.
There are different ways to take in this book. It’s an astonishing, nearly unprecedented catalog of intraparty critique. Steadily more depressing the deeper one reads, it’s a reminder of the grave current state of the republic.
As for the insidious, racist and Trump-led “birther” smear? Romney “did not see” that having “a racial arc to it,” he told Coppins. “And perhaps I’m not as sensitive in that regard as I should be.”By 2016, having lost and owing Trump nothing, Romney was freer to offer his true thoughts about the shocking presidential hopeful.
Coppins had figured Romney would have misgivings mostly about what he had said about his fellow Republicans — about Ted Cruz , about John Kasich , about Scott Walker , about Rick Perry , about Rick Santorum about Michele Bachmann , about Bobby Jindal …“The stuff that he was more focused on was just this idea of his rationalization,” Coppins told me.
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