Mitt Romney Reflects, Regrets, and Retires
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2023
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As Mitt Romney heads into retirement, is the idea of a moderate Republican being retired as well?
Guest: McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of Romney: A Reckoning
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Transcript
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| 0:28.2 | today. McKay Coppins has just written the kind of book that Washington and a whole lot of people |
| 0:39.6 | outside of Washington cannot stop talking about. It's called Romney, a reckoning. |
| 0:47.4 | This book is a 328 page biography of former Massachusetts governor, current Utah senator, and erstwhile presidential hopeful, |
| 0:56.2 | Mitt Romney. It's filled with dishy details. The kind of details you'd think a politician would regret sharing with a journalist. |
| 1:05.0 | So he read the book and it was funny. I wondered when I gave it to him if he would sort of sit back and, you know, process and then kind of give me his thoughts. |
| 1:13.0 | Instead he was live texting me his reactions as he read it. |
| 1:17.0 | No. |
| 1:18.0 | Which as you can imagine made for like a very unnerving weekend for me. |
| 1:27.0 | McKay did not know exactly how open Romney would get, and then suddenly he just was. |
| 1:30.0 | The fact that he gave me his journals pretty early on in the process that that was the first indicator for me that he was taking it really seriously. I remember sitting in church actually and getting a text from him saying, hey, McKay, check your email, I'm sending you something that might be interesting for you to look at and it was just hundreds of pages of his personal journals that I hadn't even asked for and that I later found out he hadn't even |
| 1:55.2 | taken the time to reread before giving to me. He really trusted you. He trusted me. I think he also was sort of ready to just unburden himself. |
| 2:05.0 | Romney has always been a bit of a black sheep in the GOP. |
| 2:09.0 | But since Donald Trump first fired up the Republican base. |
| 2:13.0 | Romney's really been on the outs. |
| 2:15.3 | And in two years of conversations with McKay, |
| 2:18.2 | it became clear that Romney doesn't really care for his Republican |
| 2:21.4 | colleagues much either. He used adjectives like frightening, |
... |
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