Romney Fears “Creeping Authoritarianism Within the GOP”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: The dysfunction in Washington may have been interrupted by the election at last of a house speaker, but Republican Mike Johnson is a vocal Trump supporter, an election denier, and key to the attempts to overturn the 2020 vote. Someone who’s always tried to rise above the political chaos in his own party is Senator Mitt Romney. And he’s the subject of a revealing biography by journalist McKay Coppins, who joins Hari Sreenivasan now to discuss Romney’s colorful career in politics and his tangles with Trump over the years.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. McKay Coppins, welcome back. Your book, “Romney: A Reckoning,” is out now. And I guess the first question I think of when you’re looking at cataloging the life of this senator, former presidential nominee governor, is where was or where is the reckoning? Is this a reckoning through his whole life? Is there a specific moment?

MCKAY COPPINS, AUTHOR, “ROMNEY: A RECKONING”: You know, I think that he is at a point now where he’s looking back on his life and career and also on the last 30 years of the Republican Party and taking stock of what’s changed. There was a moment after January 6th where he watched many of the leaders of his party instigate you know, what he considered an attempted insurrection. And it shook loose something in him. It made him alarmed about the fragility of American democracy, alarmed about what he believes is the creeping authoritarianism within the GOP, but also start to ask difficult questions of himself. He wanted to really have a conversation about whether the mainstream establishment Republicans, like himself, had any complicity or responsibility for allowing the extremist forces on the right to basically take over their party. And so, over the course of the two years I was working on this book, that was the conversation we had. I would go to his house one night every week and we would ask those tough questions and he would look back on his career and life and tell me all of the stories that he had never told before.

SREENIVASAN: So, he had agreed to sit down and work with you on this. Did he think you were going to do a memoir? I mean, this is something that people don’t do until, really, they’re out of office and he had not announced his plans for — to not seek reelection until recently.

COPPINS: That’s right. No. In fact, I was surprised that he accepted my conditions. I approached him and said, I basically want to have all the access that an authorized biography would have, right? But it won’t be authorized in the sense that you won’t have any editorial control, right? I want to all your journals. I want all your e-mail correspondence. I want full access, but I get to decide what goes in the book. And I have to say, I expected him to bulk, right? I expected him to be like, maybe we revisit this after I retire. Instead, he almost took my conditions as a dare. He said, OK, let’s do it. And he immediately blocked off weekly interviews. And like I said, he gave me journal entries that were incredibly candid, often damning portraits of members of his own party without even having reread them. And so, the result is, I think, a pretty unusual product where you have a still sitting senator sort of unburdening himself to a biographer over two years and the result is, I think, a pretty interesting insight into this moment in American politics.

SREENIVASAN: You document the different times that he, Mitt Romney, had met Trump earlier in his career, even jotted down in his journal his thoughts about Trump, that Trump was a guy who says 100 percent of what he thinks, and he actually makes him laugh.

COPPINS: Yes, I thought that was fascinating. And in the 2012 election Romney spent a little time with Trump and he wrote down after one of his phone calls with Trump that, you know, he likes him. He — to his surprise, he thought Trump was, you know, funny and gossipy and entertaining, that he would — that their phone calls were outrageous, but they would lift his spirits. And, you know, when I found that entry in his journal, I took it back to Romney and said, so, what do you say about this now? And I think he was a little embarrassed, but you know, he said, there is something seductive about Trump’s charisma. And I think it is important to understand how he has brought so many leaders of the Republican Party into his camp and kind of brought them in line because when you’re in the room with him, he can be, you know, magnetic and you want to be friends with him. And that’s part of what makes him so dangerous, frankly.

SREENIVASAN: I think a lot of people will remember what was a humiliating kind of tryout for secretary of state that Donald Trump put Mitt Romney through. And what does he think about that? Even though he’s harboring these feelings of how capable or how competent Donald Trump is, why did he go through that?

COPPINS: This was one of those moments where he was really introspective with me in an interesting way. He said, you know, when I considered joining the Trump administration as secretary of state, I was motivated by kind of two dueling impulses. On the one hand, he says that he was motivated by a desire to help the country. He thought that Trump’s election was a crisis. He worried about the caliber of people he would appoint to his administration. At the time in the immediate wake of the 2016 election, one name that was being floated for secretary of state was Rudy Giuliani and Romney thought that that would be a disaster. And so, he felt that there needed to be adults in the room. And you know, he wasn’t a supporter of Trump, but if he could get in the room and maybe help steer American foreign policy, that’d be a good thing. But Romney also told me there was this other motivation and he admitted to it. He said, there was a part of me that just I wanted the job. I wanted the power. I — you know, he said, I wanted to be president and I tried twice and I couldn’t get it. So, if you can’t become president, secretary of state is a good consolation prize. And so, he sort of acknowledges that, you know, at various points in his career, that desire for the top job has made him do things he wouldn’t otherwise do. The book contains the behind-the-scenes story of his negotiations with Trump over that job. And I think what’s interesting is that the breaking point and the reason that Romney didn’t get it was that ultimately Trump demanded that he retract everything that he had said about Trump during the 2016 election. And Romney said, you know, I just can’t do that. I think I would look ridiculous, and I’m not going to walk back everything I said, and that was the deal breaker.

SREENIVASAN: You know, there’s a section in there that is a quote from Mitch McConnell to Mitt Romney telling him, hey, you can say the things that we’re all thinking that, but we can’t, right? That, we agree with you, but we just can’t say it. And even now, as we’re in the — we’ve been watching a selection for House leadership, we see an enormous amount of control that Former President Trump exerts from the sidelines.

COPPINS: That’s right. One of the things that bothered Romney the most about his time in the Senate during the Trump years was he would often have these Republican colleagues sidle up to him. He actually took account. He said this happened at least 12 times. But Republican colleagues would sidle up to him and say, hey, I wish I could say the things that you’re saying. I wish I had the constituents you did. I wish I was in the same political position as you, but I just can’t. And Romney became so annoyed with this that he developed a go-to answer where he would say, well, there are worse things than losing an election. Believe me, take it from me, right? I think what we’re seeing in the house now is an example of that, that even as Donald Trump is out of power, he hasn’t been president for years, he still is the leader of the party. He still commands the loyalty of the base. And because of that so many members of Congress who really know better, I think, are afraid to cross him and afraid to do anything that would, you know, earn an angry press release from the Trump campaign. And Trump’s continued influence in the party is one of the reasons that Romney just feels that there’s no place for people like him anymore.

SREENIVASAN: You know, where do you think he gets that streak from? I mean, you had a chance to talk to members of his family and you tell the reader a little bit about his dad. I mean, what does it take to stand up and say that, I’m going to be basically the only Republican that will stand in for impeachment of the existing president, a member of my own party?

COPPINS: I think you can’t understand how, you know, Mitt Romney’s psychology without understanding his father. His dad was the governor of Michigan in the 1960s, and was seen as a leading presidential contender for the Republican nomination. And he planted himself firmly in the liberal wing of the party at a time when Barry Goldwater and the conservatives were sort of taking over the party. And rather than join the right-wing or, you know, at least indulge some of their, you know, excesses, he pushed back against them. He stood up against them. He marched with civil rights leaders. He refused to condemn, you know, black protesters amid race riots that were very unpopular with white conservatives. In fact, at the Republican Convention in San Francisco in 1964, George Romney refused to endorse Barry Goldwater, the party’s nominee, and offered this sort of thundering indictment of the extremist forces that he believed were then taking over the party. Mitt Romney was at that convention as a young man, he was a teenager, and he saw the entire convention standing to applaud Barry Goldwater while his dad sat quietly and refused to clap. And he was moved by that courage. And, you know, at various points in Mitt Romney’s life, he has, I think, been haunted by that moment because he felt like he wasn’t following his dad’s example, and it’s been in these last few years that I think he’s been really trying to live up to his father’s legacy, and I think that’s a big part of what’s motivated him.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you dive pretty deeply into his earlier life before politics, and you point out how influential kind of, I guess, maybe two different strands that I see helping motivate a lot of his thinking. One is kind of the problem solver business consultant that he was a bank capital and he made a ton of money doing that. And then, also, it seems like the other recurrent theme is his faith and, you know, sort of the guidance that it has. And I wondered, are they kind of at tension with each other? Are they complimentary to one another?

COPPINS: I think that’s one of the central tensions of Mitt Romney’s life is that he has this inherent pragmatism. He — you know, as the management consultant, he wants to look at the data, crunch the numbers, figure out what the solution is based on that data. And then, there’s this other side of him that the central part of his identity in life is his faith, which is not based on data. It’s based on, you know, conviction and belief. And I think at various points in his life, he has been, you know, leaned more toward the management consultant side of his personality, right? I think that it’s often how he talks himself into taking positions that he doesn’t totally agree with, right? It’s how he convinces himself to skirt those ethical lines. But at the same time, he has this kind of nagging conscience throughout. And this was one of the things that was — became clarified for me late in the process of working on this book. I had been trying to square those two sides of him and trying to understand that. And you know, there were some moments in his campaign — his presidential campaigns and his career where I would just say, how did you talk yourself into doing this when you knew it was wrong, right? Or at least you had to have sensed it was wrong? And you know, he said, like, what you have to understand is if you don’t have — if you don’t care about questions of right and wrong, you don’t have to rationalize anything, right? Because you just do what is necessary to win. He said, I was always concerned with these questions of right and wrong. I didn’t want to see myself as just sort of sociopathically pursuing power. And so, he was constantly involved in these, you know, self-justifications and trying to square — having to do something to win an election with knowing that it might not be totally right. And his journals are filled with examples of him sort of writing through that tension. And, you know, I think what makes Romney interesting as a subject is, frankly, that this is true of almost everyone in politics. All — everyone is constantly living in that tension between their principles and their ambition. And what makes Romney unique really isn’t that he have — you know, gave into to the ambition at times because all of them have, is that he now sees that clearly and is willing to reckon with it. And I think that that’s part of what made writing the book so interesting, you know, seeing this sitting elected official in real-time, grappling with, you know, his conscience. You don’t get to see that very often.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I wonder, you open the book with the January 6th insurrection and a call that Mitt Romney gets from Angus King and he is essentially relaying the warning to Mitch McConnell, saying, hey, there’s a lot of crazy Intel chatter. We really need to take this seriously. And I wonder during that day, or maybe now after, does Mitt Romney feel any sense of his own personal responsibility of how and why the party got to where it was?

COPPINS: Yes. When he looks back on his two presidential campaigns, what he sees is a story where he thought he could indulge the kind of right-wing elements of the GOP without succumbing to them, right? And it was this constant tightrope walk where he would, you know, speak at these tea party rallies and try to talk about deficit reduction, but the crowd didn’t want to hear about deficit reduction, they wanted to hear him, you know, throw red meat at the audience. They wanted to hear him talk about guns and killing terrorists and the evils of abortion. And he often felt that pull to give them what they wanted. And then he would try to pull back a little bit. And it was this constant dance that frankly, a lot of mainstream Republican leaders like him were doing over the last 10 years. What he didn’t realize, and I think now realizes, is that that flirtation with the more extreme portion of his party had consequences, the Republicans like Mitt Romney thought that they could sort of harness the energy of the right-wing without letting them take over the party and it. And over the last eight years, what has become clear is that that’s not really possible, that eventually those forces will complete their conquest of the party and then, you’re sort of left with the choice of either doing what they say or distancing yourself from them and breaking from them. And Romney has now chosen that latter option. But I think he sees that there clearly were consequences for sort of playing footsie with the extremist forces in the GOP.

SREENIVASAN: The book is called “Romney: A Reckoning,” author McKay Coppins, thanks so much for joining us.

COPPINS: Thanks for having me.