ROMNEY

A portrait of an old-school conservative politico who found new resolve as an anti-Trump Republican.

Atlantic writer Coppins, author of The Wilderness, opens on January 2, 2021, as Romney tried to alert Mitch McConnell to reports that something bad was brewing around the Capitol. Four days later, Romney would be among the besieged politicians. Clearly, it’s not company he relished: Coppins shows how the Utah senator holds most of his Republican colleagues in contempt. Romney considers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz the smartest people in the Senate, but in their support of overturning the election and abetting the rioters, he notes, “they were making a calculation…that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.” Coppins allows that he showed Romney a draft of the book with the understanding that his subject had no editorial control over it, and that the senator objected only that the author had “made too much of his transformation in the Trump years.” Yet that transformation was both complete and multifaceted. When he ran for president in 2012, Romney solicited Trump’s endorsement, which allowed Trump to boast, “I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees,’ [and] he would have dropped to his knees.” From the moment Trump announced his candidacy, Romney knew that he was a danger to the republic. Though one report Coppins offers as fact has been the subject of vigorous objection—he writes that Oprah Winfrey offered to run an independent campaign with Romney in 2020, while Winfrey says she didn’t offer herself as running mate but did in fact encourage Romney to run—the writing is solid, and the author provides a useful study of a man who, witnessing the disintegration of his party into demagoguery and lies, decided to stand for the truth.

A vigorous, highly readable account of politics—and ethics—in action.