He is appallingly late to acquiring principles the rest of us held decades ago.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones
— Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 3
I come to bury Mitt Romney today, not to praise him. Others, I imagine, will do the praising in sufficient measure and with far greater reach than me, anyway. Surely he can expect encomiums from the mainstream media, which was his intent when he announced this past week that not only was he retiring as Utah’s junior senator, but that for the last two years he had also been secretly working with journalist McKay Coppins of the Atlantic to craft a “final political testament” of sorts.
Everybody loves a repentant sinner, I suppose. And yet on the basis of Coppins’s excerpt published this week I see little serious repentance in Romney, only — in this act of essentially hiring out a journalist to praise him for posterity’s sake — an enduring folly that epitomizes Romney’s own fatal personal flaw: his unjustified belief in himself, his belief that he is excused from the concrete political deeds of his life by a latter-day guilty conscience and his inherently “good” native character. Not that Romney lacks genuine virtue — by all accounts he is one of the most personally honorable men serving in Washington. But Mitt Romney, clearly, is also a man with regrets.
Romney’s retirement from politics was inevitable; were it not foreordained after he twice voted to impeach Donald Trump, intelligent observers knew it was coming by the time Trump had returned to the pole position in the 2024 Republican contest. It’s hard to blame him given Trump’s repulsiveness, or to not sympathize with his disgust at the way Republican politicians live in fear of their constituents when they’re not actively cynical ladder-climbing toadies. (Romney clearly regards Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and J. D. Vance to be in the latter category.) His story is one perfectly calibrated to appeal to sympathetic media audiences: a narrative of political “redemption” wherein a conservative sees the light, contemplates leaving the party, retires in disgust, warns the nation, etc. That this is a tale flattering liberal sensibilities does not, unfortunately, necessarily make it any less apt in the present case. (I share most of Romney’s views on his peers and especially about Trump.)
However, it is impossible to respect how Romney has chosen to leave. Not because of his perceived disloyalty — I step on toes daily in the name of political principle — but because he is so appallingly late to acquiring principles the rest of us held decades ago. The self-assured tone with which Romney delivers a lecture that he never bothers to admit should have been directed at every version of himself to exist between 1994 and 2018 reeks of unearned sanctimony. In the Atlantic piece, it is claimed that Romney said he decided to let Coppins write a memoiristic account rather than set pen to paper himself because he could not “be objective” about himself. On one analytical level, that is certainly true; nobody can. But the far more likely reason is that Romney craves external validation. Having had it denied to him politically throughout his life, usually for reasons of his own doing, Romney sees an opportunity here to rewrite his political life story and append a happier ending. Since he would look gauche praising himself, though he wants very much to be praised nonetheless, Coppins is the necessary third party through which he is allowed to launder his self-regard.
So it’s stunning to hear these “senior statesman”–like condemnations of political cynicism and naked ambition coming from Mitt Romney, of all people, without any serious acknowledgment of his past. This is a man who ran for the Senate in Massachusetts in 1994 against Ted Kennedy by donating to Planned Parenthood and embracing Roe v. Wade so hard that even Kennedy was bemused, and took a similar position during his successful 2002 run for governor. But then, conveniently, after George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 and Romney decided he was presidential timber for 2008, suddenly he was strongly pro-life. This would have been acceptable enough — politicians tell themselves all manner of stories about the need to tack to political winds — had Romney not also surgically and brutally attacked all of his competitors for their insufficient conservatism and principle. (John McCain, a genuinely pro-life senator, never forgave Romney for it and referred to him constantly throughout the 2008 campaign as a “f***ing phony.”)
And Romney’s run for the presidency in 2012 was far worse, because in his desperation to win the nomination he prostituted himself in the one specific way that renders his present act of public shriving so self-serving: No man did more at the time to mainstream and legitimize Donald Trump as a voice within the Republican Party, far more than the Jeff Zuckers or Joe Scarboroughs of the world and long before. This is not seriously discussed by Coppins; it is glancingly mentioned once in the piece. “At the time, [Romney] rationalized the decision—yes, Trump was a buffoon and a conspiracy theorist, but he was just a guy on reality TV, not a serious political figure. Romney now realized he’d badly underestimated the potency of Trumpism.”
Oops, I guess. Now let me remind you of what Coppins is selectively omitting to disguise the enormity of Romney’s political crime: At the time Donald Trump was not merely the host of The Apprentice, or an eccentric celebrity with pungent political opinions and a large megaphone. No, Donald Trump was also the world’s foremost celebrity “birther,” insinuating constantly that Barack Obama was born outside the United States and thus ineligible to be president. This was not a passing phase; Trump volunteered rewards for evidence, later lied about having received “definitive proof,” etc. In other words, he was exactly the same Trump then that he is now.
So when Mitt Romney (after losing South Carolina to Gingrich) crawled on his hands and knees to Las Vegas for Trump’s endorsement in a press conference on February 3, 2012 — after all the birther antics — Romney didn’t just kowtow to Trump but strategically elevated his voice during the campaign. He gave Trump his first taste of playing powerbroker on a national stage, a taste that never left him. Trump considered Romney’s loss to Obama in 2012 to be a personal insult to his pride after he offered him such a strong endorsement, and first began to conceive that he could do better. (As it turns out, he could.) I acutely remember Romney seeking Trump’s endorsement as the moment when I knew my candidate had done something indefensible — how could you defend birther-era Trump? How could you, in essence, endorse that as acceptable discourse? — and it would one day come back to haunt us. I’m sure that Mitt Romney considered it a distasteful thing to have to do at the time as well, for Mitt Romney is an honorable man.
Romney would likely tell you that he “had his reasons,” and that in retrospect he’d have done it differently. But then every man has his reasons (as Renoir said), and if Coppins’s piece is anything to go by, Romney’s hindsight is only selectively acute: 20/20 when it comes to the mistakes of others but glazed over with a self-exculpatory fog when it comes to his own historically disastrous errors. His were the regrettable compromises of an overly analytical servant-leader, and thus excused. Now consider the curious case of Senator J. D. Vance (Romney: “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance”), who has explicitly said he “evolved” from cultural attitudes first laid out in his famous memoir Hillbilly Elegy because he wants to represent and understand his constituents on their terms more than his. That’s an argument that not only would have resonated with Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (as opposed to Utah senator Mitt Romney), it came from Mitt Romney’s own mouth daily as he was defending his liberal record on social matters all throughout his two presidential campaigns. According to Mitt Romney, J. D. Vance is a hack. But Mitt Romney is an honorable man.
Romney may wish to write a noble ending to his own political story. But there is none available, at least not politically, because his tale is a tragedy. Tragic because he has many genuinely great and admirable qualities — outside of the realm of politics, he strikes me as a fundamentally decent man. But in that realm of politics he was, for the vast majority of his life and with devastating effect for the recent course of American history, a very different man, willing to cut any deal he thought necessary to achieve power, switching his views to fit the needs of the moment with zero compunction and, in fact, little thought other than how to most clinically attack his opponents for holding those positions which he only recently discarded. I have to assume he regrets all of that now, because we are not told he does. He seems like the sort of honorable man who would.
How ironic that Mitt Romney casts himself now as Brutus — defender of republican liberty, fated by ill-starred circumstance to lose the fight but allowed to depart on a brave note of conscience — when he is far more akin to Macbeth, who compromised his core beliefs in the relentlessly egotistical pursuit of power, only to discover, too late, that he had forfeited his soul altogether. Or perhaps he is Hamlet, the well-bred heir obsessed with his father’s legacy who, famously in the words of Laurence Olivier, “could not make up his mind” and, as the price of his weakness, was the agent of destruction for all he ever loved. It is a genuinely depressing conclusion to have to reach, but nevertheless true: The faults of Mitt Romney are not in his stars, as he would like to believe; they are, dear Reader, in himself.