McKay Coppins, who is working on a biography of Mitt Romney, has an instant outtake from his work released upon the senator’s retirement announcement. Romney is portrayed as the last honest man in the Republican Party, as usual.
Coppins says Romney was driven into retirement by the hypocrisy and cynicism of his own party. He singles out Josh Hawley and especially J. D. Vance.
But as Romney surveyed the crop of Republicans running for Senate in 2022, it was clear that more Hawleys were on their way. Perhaps most disconcerting was J. D. Vance, the Republican candidate in Ohio. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney told me. They’d first met years earlier, after he read Vance’s best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Romney was so impressed with the book that he hosted the author at his annual Park City summit in 2018. Vance, who grew up in a poor, dysfunctional family in Appalachia and went on to graduate from Yale Law School, had seemed bright and thoughtful, with interesting ideas about how Republicans could court the white working class without indulging in toxic Trumpism. Then, in 2021, Vance decided he wanted to run for Senate, and reinvented his entire persona overnight. Suddenly, he was railing against the “childless left” and denouncing Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a “fake holiday” and accusing Joe Biden of manufacturing the opioid crisis “to punish people who didn’t vote for him.” The speed of the MAGA makeover was jarring.
“I do wonder, how do you make that decision?” Romney mused to me as Vance was degrading himself on the campaign trail that summer. “How can you go over a line so stark as that—and for what?” Romney wished he could grab Vance by the shoulders and scream: This is not worth it! “It’s not like you’re going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator. It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?” The prospect of having Vance in the caucus made Romney uncomfortable. “How do you sit next to him at lunch?”
I find I like and loathe Romney in equal measure. I can’t help but admire the size and success of his family. How hard he worked for success (even if he had a leg up on most of us). I wrote about his family vacations in an affectionate way for ESPN Magazine because his sons won me over to him.
But I find this excerpt revealing in a lot of unflattering ways. It’s true that Vance changed his position on Donald Trump — Romney has done that himself. Vance talked about it in terms of mutual loyalty. Vance wants to represent those voters, and those voters love Donald Trump. Trump is “the leader of this movement,” Vance told Time magazine in 2021, “and if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.” Romney finds this intolerably ambitious.
But how would Romney talk about his own ambition? Before running for the Senate in Massachusetts, Romney commissioned a poll that proved to his satisfaction that a pro-lifer could not win in the state. He brought this polling with him to meetings with the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in order to persuade them to accept what he was going to do: argue in front of voters that he was more pro-choice than Ted Kennedy. He argued that the issue was personal to him, because it concerned a close relative. When running for governor he sought the endorsement of pro-choice groups, arguing that he would be a good influence on the Republican Party.
Later as he eyed a presidential nomination, he penned an op-ed about his pro-life epiphany. The New York Times would report, “Critics and even some supporters say there is also little question that he did what he had to do to get elected as governor.”
I do wonder. How do you make that decision? How can you go over a line as stark as that, and for what?
Vance’s story of change was in one sense transactional, but it at least carried a hint of personal humiliation. He had to “suck it up.”
Romney thinks his flip-flops on this issue were all for the greater good — the good of getting a Romney back into contention for the White House. Romney has been able to flip-flop on Donald Trump and make up preposterous contradictory personal stories to explain why he took cynical poll-driven positions on abortion, because Romney’s ambition is about Mitt Romney, God’s gift to America. We’re all just too stupid and wicked to see it.