Why Hasn't Mitt Romney Jumped Ship And Become A Democrat? He Sure Hates Republicans!

The other day, Roland asked me whatever happened to Mitt Romney. He knew he’s still a senator from Utah but he never hears from him anymore. The political media is still into him even if the mainstream media isn’t interested anymore. Then on Friday, the NY Times ran a non-literary review of McKay Coppin’s Romney’s biography, Romney: A Reckoning, which is being released this coming Tuesday. Or one aspect of the book: what Romney had to say about other Republican politicians.

Michael Gold wrote that Romney went “beyond his broad disdain for the party and gives his unvarnished opinion of some of his fellow Republicans.” He called the book a “tell-all” and offered assessments of a handful of well-known political names Romney derided.” Let’s start with Señor Trumpanzee.

Perhaps the freshest revelation in Romney’s book is his acknowledgment that many of his colleagues in the Senate, including McConnell, privately shared his poor view of Trump.

But that harsh assessment— which would set up Romney’s conflict with Trump throughout his presidency— was made most clear in the email Romney sent to Christie in 2016.

“He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic, vulgar and prone to violence," Romney wrote. “There is simply no rational argument that could lead me to vote for someone with those characteristics.”

And speaking of Christie, he isn’t exactly someone Romney has any respect for. Gold wrote that “Romney’s advisers in 2012 suggested that he consider Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, as a running mate, according to the book. But Romney had reservations about Christie’s ‘prima donna tendencies,’ and worried that the governor was not ‘up to the physical demands’ of being on the ticket and was plagued by ‘barely buried’ scandals, Coppins writes.” It didn’t end there.

Gold noted that “The two also came into conflict in 2016 after Christie became one of the first establishment Republicans to back Trump. ‘I believe your endorsement of him severely diminishes you morally,’ Romney wrote in an email. He added: ‘You must withdraw that support to preserve your integrity and character.’ Evaluating Christie’s 2024 campaign, Romney labels him ‘another bridge-and-tunnel loudmouth’ like Trump, saying it would be ‘a hoot’ to watch the two of them spar on the debate stage.”

He certainly is no fan of his Senate colleague Ted Cruz, who he called “‘scary’ and ‘a demagogue’ in his journal, and in an email assessing political candidates in 2016, he said Cruz was ‘frightening.’ He ws also bluntly critical of Cruz’s role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including his perpetuating Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud. Romney said that he believed Cruz and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, another objector, were too smart to believe what they were saying. ‘They were making a calculation that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution,’ Romney said.”

Romney, desperate to see a candidate rescue the GOP from Trump, hoped Ron DeSantis would be that person. But the optimism didn’t last long and, like most normal people, the more he saw of DeSantis, the less he liked him. Hold wrote that Coppins concluded that Romney wanted to like DeSantis and that it was a “no brainer” to support him against Trump. But the reservation started piling up. Romney “worried that DeSantis shared ‘odious qualities’ with Trump, pointing to his penchant for stoking the culture wars and his fight with the Walt Disney Company. And Romney appeared to have objections to the Florida governor on a more personal level. ‘There’s just no warmth at all,’ Romney said. He added that when Mr. DeSantis posed for photos with Iowa voters, ‘he looks like he’s got a toothache.’ Even his appraisal of DeSantis’s positive qualities came with a backhanded sting. ‘He’s much smarter than Trump,” Romney said. But, he added, ‘there’s a peril to having someone who’s smart and pulling in a direction that’s dangerous.’”

In 1994 Romney wasn't too happy about New Gingrich’s rise to prominence. “Romney recalls thinking, according to the book, that Gingrich ‘came across as a smug know-it-all; smarmy and too pleased with himself and not a great face for our party.’ Two decades later, when the two were competing against each other in the Republican presidential primary, Romney was no more impressed. Coppins writes that Romney saw Gingrich as ‘a ridiculous blowhard who babbled about America building colonies on the moon.’ He also had moral objections to Gingrich’s admitted adultery. In his journal, Romney wrote that his wife, Ann, thought that Gingrich was ‘a megalomaniac, seriously needing psychiatric attention.’”

He has to go to work everyday— well a few days a week— and face McConnell, knowing McConnell has read the awful things he said about him.”As he does with many other Republicans in the book,” wrote Gold, “Romney hammers Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, over what he sees as a gap between his public and private statements relating to Trump. Coppins writes that Romney questioned ‘which version of McConnell was more authentic: the one who did Trump’s bidding in public, or the one who excoriated him in their private conversations.’ Still, Romney seems to have respect for McConnell. In January 2021, he said, he believed McConnell had been ‘indulgent of Trump’s deranged behavior over the last four years, but he’s not crazy.’”

You can probably guess that Romney is no fan of Pence’s either, disdainfully labelling him “‘a lap dog for Trump for four years. He seems particularly appalled by what he viewed as Pence’s willingness to compromise his own moral views, or contort them, to be a loyal foot soldier to Trump. ’No one had been more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly, than Mike Pence,’ Romney told Coppins.

Thankfully faded from public consciousness Rick Perry and Rick Santorum both came in for some scathing assessments. Perry he called a “dimwit… [and a] prima donna, low-IQ personality… Republicans must realize that we must have someone who can complete a sentence.” The other Rick he assessed as “sanctimonious, severe and strange… [with] apparently bottomless self-interest… ‘driven by ego, not principle.’”

Gold didn’t cover them but Coppins also wrote that Mike Huckabee struck Romney as a "huckster," a "caricature of a for-profit preacher” while he saw Bobby Jindal as a “twit.”

Coppins wrote that Romney felt that Trump isn’t too bright, “I think he’s not smart. I mean, really not smart,” Romney told him. Referring to Trump telling people to inject bleach to prevent COVID, Romney asked “It’s like, how is that possible for someone over the second or third grade to think that?”

It could have been worse; Trump’s first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called him a “moron,” Chief of Staff John Kelly said he’s “an idiot” and his top economic advisor, Gary Cohn, said he’s “dumb as shit.” Former U.S. Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) said that “When his term is over, I think the debasing of our nation, the constant non-truth telling, and the– just the name calling, the things that I think, the debasement of our nation is what we will be remembered most important, and that’s regretful… I don’t know why he lowers himself to such a low, low standard, and debases our country in a way that he does, but he does.”

Bob Woodward's book, Rage, quotes former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis as saying that Trump “has no moral compass [and that] he has no mental framework for these things. He hasn't read… This degradation of the American experiment is real. This is tangible. Truth is no longer governing the White House statements. Nobody believes— even people who believe in him somehow believe in him without believing what he says.” Matthis himself wrote that “Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people— does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”