Hey everyone, it's Reid. Before we get started, think about this. As you're listening to this,

we are 53 weeks away from the 2024 general election. I can't believe it, and you probably can

either. But all I want to say is thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for participating

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Welcome back to the linkinproject. I'm your host, Reid Jalen. Today, I'm joined by McKay

Coppins, an award-winning author and staff writer for the Atlantic, recovers politics, religion,

and national affairs. His latest book is Romney, a reckoning, biography of Senator Mitt Romney

of Utah, which is available wherever five books are sold. He normally hails from Washington, DC,

but today he's coming to us from what it looks like cloudy and cold Boston, Massachusetts. McKay,

welcome. Hey, thanks for having me. Let me start here. You begin the book by describing

the townhouse that Mitt Romney lives in. And it sounds like a very nice home, but also a very

lonely place. You note that he's set up basically a dining table or a table, I should say, in the

dining room where he's got a giant television strapped to the wall and he eats ketchup covered

salmon sandwiches, which sounds unappetizing to say the least, but for a man who's been married

to his high school sweetheart for as many years as he has. He's got five sons and innumerable

grandchildren, maybe even great grandchildren. This sounds like the saddest bachelor pad one could

describe in print. He is incredibly lonely in Washington. When he leaves Washington, he has a rich

family life and a great marriage and a rich spiritual life. But in Washington, he does not have a

ton of good friends. And this was especially true when I first started working on the book and

interviewing him. This was in, you know, spring of 2021. He was kind of a pariah in his own party.

He didn't have a lot of friends in his caucus, you know, still wasn't really a Democrat. And so he

...