What did Mitt Romney say about his Republican colleagues in the biography ‘Romney: A Reckoning’?
A new biography of Mitt Romney hit bookstore shelves on Monday in which speaks candidly about his GOP colleagues and about what the party has become.
Mitt Romney is retiring from the Senate at the end of his current term but before walking out the door he bared all to Atlantic writer McKay Coppins. In a new biography of the one-time Republican party’s candidate to be president, which hit bookstore shelves on Monday, he speaks candidly about his GOP colleagues and about what the party has become today, one in which he feels he no longer has a “home”.
The senator from Utah and author met almost 50 times over two years, often late at night. Romney didn’t hold back approaching the project in “a spirit of introspection” in the words of Coppins. The candor about his views on fellow Republicans comes from “a profound frustration at what his party has become and seeing old friends and allies kind of rally around Donald Trump in a way that he finds pretty dispiriting,” Coppins told Morning Joe.
What did Mitt Romney say about his Republican colleagues in the biography ‘Romney: A Reckoning’?
Senator Romney shared candid opinions on numerous members of today’s Republican party with the author which he had jotted down in personal journals that he handed over and didn’t review beforehand. As well as during the scores of meetings with Coppins over the past couple years which began a couple months after the January 6th assault on the US Capitol that the senator barely escaped from.
That infamous day “informed our conversations” said Coppins. When Romney entered the Seante in 2019, he thought “that he could steer the party back toward its sensible recent past” and that all his party needed was “a voice of sanity.”
The biography’s author said that the senator told him: “‘I thought there were more of us and just a few of them,’ speaking of the kind of the pro-Trump Maga-wing of the party.” However, with time Romney came to the realization that “there’s way more of them and only a few of us left.”
About his colleagues present and past in the Senate, according to the biography he considers Ted Cruz “frightening, scary and a demagogue.” While former Senator Rick Santorum, who also ran for the presidency in 2012 and 2016, Romney said is “sanctimonious, severe and strange.”
The former contender for the White House didn’t hold back about the current runner-up for the GOP nomination Ron DeSantis. “There’s just no warmth at all,” says Romney. However, he concedes that the Florida Governor is “much smarter than Trump,” but like the former president has authoritarian tendencies and poses the question, “Do you want an authoritarian who’s smart or one who’s not smart?”
Romney says “Trump represents a failure of character”
Romney considers himself a Republican in the style of the three GOP presidential predecessors of Trump as well as former Senate colleague the late John McCain. However, of the former US president and current front runner for the GOP nomination Romney, speaking to CBS News Sunday Morning, said: “Donald Trump represents a failure of character, which is changing, I think in many respects, the psyche of our nation, and the heart of our nation. That’s something which takes a long time, if ever, to repair.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard a single member of my caucus, the Republicans in the Senate, say ‘you know, Donald Trump is great. Aren’t we lucky to have him as our leader?’” he told Norah O’Donnell.
“Character counts, the character of our leaders makes a difference, and it shapes the character of our country,” he added. “That’s the party I’ve come from, and I don’t recognize that in the great majority of our party today.”
Romney “sees [Donald Trump] as one of the most destructive forces in the Republican party and in American life,” Coppins told Morning Joe.