Mitt Romney, get in the game, which isn’t a game at all

Every story has a beginning.

I thought about that as I read the latest offering from McKay Coppins, the Mitt Romney biographer, and one of America’s best political journalists.  

His profile of the election night madness swirling around Steve Bannon and the MAGA creature cantina ranks among the greatest pieces of long-form political journalism ever. It is a definitive character portrait of the madness, which abounds in Donald Trump’s court.

Coppins is the author of “Romney: A Reckoning,” and his latest piece in The Atlantic titled “Mitt Romney Braces for Trump’s Retribution” is a snapshot of Senator Willard Mitt Romney, almost two years after the book’s publication. 

Romney is found in repose, at the edge of retirement, exhausted, worn down, disillusioned and facing his mortality. 

It offers an unvarnished sense of Romney’s pessimism about this moment in American history. It provides a glimpse into the psyche of a consequential man, who has reached a conclusion about his country and himself that is dead wrong. 

Looking back, Mitt Romney in 2008 wasn’t so different than Kamala Harris in 2020. Both campaigns were shattered and dragged down because they were built on a foundation of artifice. Romney ran far to the right of who he had always been. Harris ran far to the left of who she had always been, but neither one’s expediency, faulty strategy, or ambition should ever be confused for anything that truly matters. The inauthenticity was judged at the ballot box, but thankfully for the country, the judgement wasn’t an end, but rather a gateway to greater service. 

History will recall Senator Romney as the last nominee of the old GOP. In some sense, he is a modern Whig, the last of a type at the edge of one political epoch yielding to another. Amongst all of the delusional constructions, assumptions and lazy narratives spun from the accumulation of sandcastle thinking that holds when Trump is defeated everything snaps back to the way it was before. Time only moves forward. The river current carries the stick in one direction. Nothing ever goes back. Ever. 

Sometimes though, we must look back to figure out what to do next. We must look back to set a bearing to move forward and understand the present position, which may or may not yield a reckoning if the heading was faulty — corrupted, somehow. 

Mitt Romney’s life has been filled with many high moments in a life spent in pursuit of measuring up against high expectations placed on him from a very young age. Twenty years ago, when Romney was the recent savior of the 2002 Winter Olympics and the governor of Massachusetts, the legacy of his father George Romney loomed much larger in the public consciousness. The relationship between father and son was the foundation of a great deal of early Mitt Romney profiles as his rise began. 

George Romney, the governor of Michigan and chairman and president of American Motors Corporation, was a man of great rectitude and probity who stood on the right side of the two great moral issues of his time: the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. He has always been the north star who has guided Mitt Romney’s public life, which must be judged in its whole as deeply honorable, despite his worst moment.

Worst moments, something most people have in common, aren’t recorded for posterity for most people, but that isn’t true for presidential nominees. Here was Romney’s worst, and it can’t be said that it couldn’t be seen for what it was in the moment.  I criticized it, and so did Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post. 

Let me take you back to 2012. 

Here is Mitt Romney, as reported by Politico. It helps me explain a journey from point A to point B:

There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life,” Romney told the crowd gathered for the occasion Thursday at Trump’s eponymous casino here. “This is one of them. Being in Donald Trump’s magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight. I’m so honored and pleased to have his endorsement.”

Let’s fast forward 12 years to the present, where the man who spread the poisonous lie that the first Black president of the United States of America was in fact a Kenyan, an alien, a danger, and a threat, is accusing legal Haitian immigrants of eating pets from backyards in Springfield, Ohio. 

Here is Coppins talking about the price Romney has paid for his apostasies, which doesn’t sound like much of a price at all.

Before reading the excerpt below, let me remind you of FDR’s admonitions on the subject:

I ask you to judge me on the enemies I have made.

As reported by Coppins:

It was not lost on me that the publication of my book, Romney: A Reckoning, was a more fraught experience for Romney than it was for me. As a biographer, I’d looked at his stories about the dissolution of the GOP under Trump as a valuable contribution to the historical record. But Romney had paid a price for his candor.

To the extent that there had been any doubt before, the book sealed his status as a villain in MAGA world. Conservative publications ran takedowns with headlines such as “Mitt Romney, We Hardly Knew Ye.” Sean Hannity, a onetime cheerleader for Romney’s presidential campaign, denounced him as a “small, angry, and very bitter man.” Trump himself weighed in with a characteristically rambling post on Truth Social in which he seemed to confuse the biography for a memoir. “Mitt Romney, a total loser that only a mother could love,” the review began, “just wrote a book which is, much like him, horrible, boring, and totally predictable.”

Romney was mostly amused by Trump’s reaction (“Hahaha!” he texted me at the time. “He’s such a whack job!”), but the book’s chilly reception among Republicans on Capitol Hill must have been upsetting. Some of his colleagues made known their disapproval in private. Others, including Senator J. D. Vance, lashed out in the press. “If he has a problem with me,” Vance told a reporter, “I kind of wish he just acted like a man and spoke to me directly, not whining to a reporter about it.” Romney wasn’t exactly surprised by the attacks from people he’d criticized in such withering fashion. (“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” he had told me.) Still, the hostility was unpleasant enough that, after The Atlantic published an excerpt from the book, he opted to skip the GOP caucus lunch.

Senator Mitt Romney was 71 years old when he ran for the United States Senate in 2018 during the first midterm of Trump’s presidency. So far as I am aware no one held a gun to his head and made him run. His oath of office makes clear the expectations of duty over the entirety of a six-year term, which is unfinished at this hour, 42 days before a presidential election in which a United States senator said the following about what is to come should Trump win:

But when I asked Romney, in the spring, what a Trump reelection would mean for him and his family, he was careful at first. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. If Trump tried to sic the Justice Department on him, Romney told me, “the good news is I haven’t had an affair with anybody; I don’t have any classified documents; I can’t imagine something I’ve done that would justify an investigation, let alone an indictment.”

What about his sons? I asked. Might they be targeted?

“I mean, hopefully they’ve all crossed their t’s and dotted their i’s,” Romney replied, straining to sound casual. “But it’s hard for me to imagine that President Trump would take the time to go out and see if [he] can find something on members of my family.”

“You might need to expand your imagination,” I suggested.

Romney grew irritated. “Yeah, but I’ve got 25 grandkids!” he said, throwing up his hands. “How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids? I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law—it’s like, we’re a big group.” This was clearly a problem to which he’d given serious thought, and realized there was no solution. In the weeks after January 6, he’d spent thousands of dollars a day to protect his family from red-capped vigilantes. But how do you hide a family of 40 from a president hell-bent on revenge?

Recognizing that I’d hit a nerve, I said it was possible, of course, that Trump’s “retribution” rhetoric was all bluster. But Romney didn’t seem comforted.

“I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word,” he told me, his voice suddenly subdued. “So I would take him at his word.”

So, here we are with 42 days left in the presidential campaign, and Mitt Romney is doing the following:

As we chatted, though, I noted a change in his countenance. In the past, his frustration—with the Senate, with the Republican Party, with politics in general—had always seemed tinged with resignation. Maybe he was miserable, but he felt obligated to stay in Washington and do his part. Now, at 77, he couldn’t wait to leave. He seemed lighter in a way, but also more restless. Mormon missionaries have a term for the feeling of distraction and homesickness that sometimes settles in as they approach the end of their service: trunky. I asked if the term applied to him now, and he smirked: “Oh yeah.”

Oh, no. No. No. No. 

Here is what I would like to say to Senator Mitt Romney, with all due respect.

Get in the game, which isn’t a game at all, but an existential choice for the country. Your animus towards Trump does not constitute a position or contribution at a time when acts of courage are required. I appreciate the fact that some of Joe Biden’s policies make you crazy. Personally, every time I read about the student loan forgiveness issue it brings me to the edge of an aneurysm, but even on the things that make us craziest, the hour has come to yield and defer the fight over small things to a different time because what we share in common far outweighs what we differ about.

This is the core of the Harris campaign. It is the policy, and it is the most important conceivable thing that can be talked about in this moment of insanity, division and fear stoked by a fascist who hijacked the party you once led. What you and Kamala Harris agree on is the United States Constitution, free and fair American elections, decency, the rule of law, the danger of Putin, the importance of NATO, the truth, reality, respect, dignity and a thousand other common bonds of basic humanity. What separates you is a letter that is meaningless next to your name. You are an American patriot and someone deeply respected by millions.

Indifference is not an option, and Mitt Romney doesn’t get to retire because the United States needs Mitt Romney to stand up in front of the whole country with Kamala Harris and talk about a bright future and the beauty of dissent, disagreement and the concept of the loyal opposition. It is immoral to pretend there is no meaningful difference between Kamala Harris and the fascist that you think is a threat to your family of 40.

Lastly, what about everyone else’s families? What about mine? What about everyone who dissented and resisted? Get in the fight. It is a worthy one, and the right thing to do means to stand by the flag against your party, which should be the easiest choice in the world for George Romney’s son who became the nominee of the party that elected Lincoln.

Mitt Romney has a terrible job. I appreciate that. I get that scores of members of Congress are counting down the minutes until they can fly the cuckoo’s nest. Most of them don’t matter. Mitt Romney does.

Neutrality is a choice that shouldn’t be confused with lacking a position. Neutrality between Harris and Trump on Romney’s part is an act of surrender to Trump. It is an appeasement, and deeply unworthy of what he could have been, which will be forever defined in his last days. Soon Trump will try and overthrow the government — again. Mitt Romney’s finest hours — or lowest moments — lie ahead of him. He should stop packing and start engaging.

We live in a time during which trust has collapsed in nearly every institution I could conceivably think to name. I’m rooting really hard for Mitt Romney to finish it up the way he should, which is with guts, integrity and conviction. When it comes to feeling unwelcome at the Republican caucus lunch, Mitt Romney should be gratified good fortune continues to smile on him at the edge of his 80th year.

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