--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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 vote shows President Biden and Donald Trump are tied in a hypothetical 2024 rematch, though they're both running 50 points behind Kilmeade. But somewhere down the ballot, one big name in American politics will be conspicuously absent. Romney. 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's today. What's today? It's today explained. And in light of today's sad circumstances, I asked 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?
--:-- McKay Coppins: Tell me about the map hanging in Mitt Romney's office, McKay.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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 HistoMap. The idea is that it basically charts the rise and fall of the most powerful civilizations throughout human history.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What Mitt Romney has to tell us about how our government works and doesn't on Today Explained.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: He still had this kind of quaint belief that the Trumpian turn of the Republican Party was, you know, 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: He actually made this list of all the issues he wanted to address legislatively as a senator. 29, 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But when he got to the Senate, he was sort of disappointed to find that not a lot of his colleagues 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: Rough. Pretty rough. Not great proportions. But Mitt kind of quickly realized that that was true. Like, most of his Senate colleagues, you know, at least according to him, were more interested in getting on TV or, you know, making noise or performing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that frustrated him because he had this sort of maybe 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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 impeachment trial we declare that you alone are our hope Mitt Romney approached the prospect of an impeachment trial in the Senate very seriously.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, it's kind of interesting to watch it now because you can tell he is very emotional as he gives this speech. You can also tell he's so exhausted.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does anyone seriously believe that I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded of me.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's sorry that he had to vote with his conscience Which meant he would agree to impeach the president He thought there was something sketchy About the phone call with Zelensky
--:-- McKay Coppins: Oh, there's got to be something about Mitt Romney Romney There's just something about Romney
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: More with McKay in a minute on Today Explained.
--:-- McKay Coppins: Support for Today Explained comes from Chime. Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime. And Chime gets that, says Chime. Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: And they were worried about a lot of things among them Mitt Romney personal safety because he had become a villain in certain corners of the internet especially kind of the MAGA world
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there were all kinds of plans to you know wreak havoc in Washington D on the day of this rally that President Trump was holding.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Mitch McConnell never responds.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He kind of says, I'm not going to leave right now. You know, let me know if they get inside the building.
--:-- McKay Coppins: And then just a couple minutes later, he gets a text saying they've overcome the barriers. They're, you know, they're going to be inside.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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 chamber.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He says, this is what you've gotten, guys. This is your fault.
--:-- McKay Coppins: You ask an interesting question in this book, and you also spent a lot of time with Mitt Romney. So I wonder if you posed the question to him, Was some of this maybe Mitt Romney's fault?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That question kind of hovered over all of our interviews over two years.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And had his kind of indulgence of those voters or his embrace of them, you know, played any role in what had happened to the GOP in the Trump years.
--:-- McKay Coppins: And he wrestled with it a lot. He kind of flatly admits now that he didn't understand the Tea Party in 2012, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: And what he quickly realized was that they didn't want to hear about that stuff. They wanted him to be angry and mean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: I remember one instance stood out so incredibly to me, I had to read it twice in the book, which was 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: Why do you think that is? You know, I think that he is especially well attuned to authoritarian personality types.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: And 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: Mormons believe that the founding documents of the United States were divinely inspired.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: Mitt was inspired by that
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And once he realized he wasn't going to be president he finally found himself sort of reaching for his dad's legacy
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: Is there no room for someone like Mitt Romney, at the very least a somewhat independent thinker in today's Republican Party?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'll be interested to see who takes his seat in Utah.
--:-- McKay Coppins: It is so hard for a rising star in the Republican Party to follow the course of Mitt Romney and expect to get reelected.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You wrote that he wasn't totally happy with how the book turned out. Are you comfortable sharing why?
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think to understand the psychology of somebody who makes those compromises is really useful.
--:-- McKay Coppins: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: His party went bad, God, 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: Oh, there's got to be something about Robert Romney, Romney. There's just something about Romney.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- McKay Coppins: Our show today was produced by John Ahrens, who also did the music. We were edited by Amina al-Sadi, fact-checked by Hady Mawajdeh, and mixed by Rob Byers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let me ask you something.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Would you say there's something about Mitt Romney?
--:-- Jonathan: Yeah. What is the something about Mitt Romney?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, I don't know. You don't know?
--:-- Jonathan: Jonathan, I thought you read a whole book about Mitt Romney.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, I did. So why can't you tell me what's about him?
--:-- Jonathan: I don't know. There's just something about him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jonathan, tell me one thing about this, Romney.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, his name is Mitt.
--:-- Jonathan: Jonathan, I knew that. Okay, I know you did. But here's a little more. His party went back up. He'd had enough for that. So he went home to Utah and is never coming back To that place that was so scary On the 6th of January
--:-- Jonathan: Oh, there's got to be something About it, Romney Romney There's just something about Romney
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
--:-- Jonathan: 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
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Teams all across your business will be psyched to collaborate and create amazing presentations, videos, social posts, flyers, and more. Meet Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.
--:-- Jonathan: Learn more at adobe.com slash express slash business.
