Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American power, politics and society.

On each episode, I will talk to an American expert or an expert on America about something that's going on in America in

2023.

I am delighted to be joined today by McKay Coppins, who is a writer for the Atlantic and the author

of a New York Times bestselling book, Romney, A Reckoning, which, caused amusement and a lot of interest in recent weeks.

But I think we'll make the theme of this podcast, but it will involve talking about Romney, Mitt Romney a lot.

Make the theme of the podcast about the likelihood of a third-party candidacy in 2024.

Because last week, I think it was, unless time is going by much quicker, and I thought,

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced that he would not be seeking re-election,

but did sort of flirt with the idea or has flirted with the idea of running a presidential bid.

And then stories sort of circulated, Axios did it,

I think others did it too, of a Romney Mansion presidential bid. McKay, tell us, as a preeminent expert on Mitt Romney, is this likely? I would say it's not likely. I pressed him on

this question quite a bit earlier this year when I was kind of finishing up my book. Because it was

interesting, actually, around January or February, I started coming to his house and I was doing these interviews.

I've been doing them for a couple of years.

But earlier this year, when I came to his house, I would often find him sort of scheming about, you know, some kind of third party presidential bid or something that he could do to be in the mix in 2024 and to kind of hold Trump to account in particular. His feeling was that

Joe Biden, in his advanced years, it was not well suited to make a solid case against Donald Trump

in his presidency. And Mitt Romney had this kind of idea of like running a cathartic primal scream of a presidential campaign where he would just sort of be able to be on the debate stage and, you know, take it to Trump and say everything that he thought.

And he considered it seriously until some of his long-term political advisors basically convinced

him that if he ran for president, he would probably end up helping Donald Trump more than

Joe Biden, that the votes he would peel away would probably be Biden voters.

And while he certainly doesn't agree with Joe Biden on a lot and actually doesn't think

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