Romney: A Reckoning

Utah senator and 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney resists his party’s sharp right turn in this probing biography. Atlantic journalist Coppins (The Wilderness) recaps Romney’s success running Bain Capital’s private equity fund, which was criticized for shuttering heartland factories and laying off workers; his term as a liberalish Republican governor of Massachusetts, where he instituted a universal health insurance system that became a model for Obamacare; his ill-fated 2012 presidential campaign, which floundered because of his image as a “cold-blooded, out-of-touch plutocrat”; his horror at Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP in 2016, which he denounced in a controversial speech; and his current Senate term, during which he bucked his party’s rightward drift (he joined a Black Lives Matter protest march in 2020), cast the lone Republican vote to convict in Trump’s first impeachment trial, and rejected Trump’s 2020 election denialism—all at considerable cost to his political fortunes. (After the election, Coppins notes, Romney found himself on an airliner full of Trump supporters chanting “Traitor!”) In Coppins’s telling, Romney is a decent, dutiful man, eager to apply technocratic fixes to government. But he also makes Romney an apt symbol of a GOP establishment focused on staid business conservatism that was baffled and terrified by the erupting populist rage of its base. The result is a penetrating analysis of the ongoing Republican civil war through the eyes of one of its last embattled centrists. (Oct.)