Mitt Romney to mull Republicans’ ‘slide toward authoritarianism’ in biography
In a new biography, the Utah senator and former US presidential nominee Mitt Romney will reportedly consider the Republican party’s “slide toward authoritarianism” and how he may have helped empower extremists.
The book will be called Romney: A Reckoning and will be published in October. News of its release comes after the senator made headlines by confronting George Santos, the New York fabulist who has rocked the House Republican party, before Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
Romney said Santos was a “sick puppy” who did not belong in Congress. Santos, who faces investigations and calls to resign but remains a key vote in support of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, responded by taunting Romney over his failed presidential ambitions.
Romney’s biographer, McKay Coppins, told Axios of the senator’s “candor”.
“I’ve been covering Senator Romney for more than a decade,” Coppins said. “When I approached him two years ago about writing this biography, I told him it would only work if he was ready to be completely forthcoming.
“He reacted like it was a dare. I was astonished by his level of candor.”
Axios said Romney’s cooperation extended to giving Coppins “private emails, text messages and diary entries … including real-time communications among many of the most powerful figures in American politics”.
Emails and journal pages, it said, covered the 2012 presidential election. In that contest, Romney, a financier and former Massachusetts governor regarded as a Republican with appeal to middle America, lost conclusively to Barack Obama.
In 2016, Romney first opposed Donald Trump then flirted with working for him as secretary of state.
Elected to the Senate in Utah in 2018, Romney returned to opposing Trump as a more moderate voice in the congressional Republican party.
Romney was the only Republican senator to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial, for seeking political dirt from Ukraine. He was one of seven senators who voted to convict in Trump’s second trial, for inciting the Capitol riot.
According to Axios, Romney considered a memoir but opted to cooperate with Coppins, without editorial control, because he felt he could not be “objective about my own life”.
Coppins, the site said, will now “show Romney himself reckoning with what he considers his party’s slide toward authoritarianism and what role he may have played in empowering the extreme forces within the GOP”.