Did Mitt Romney Save His Soul?

Mitt Romney and his family are gathered inside a budget hotel room. It is January, 2008, and the New Hampshire primary is just days away. Romney, a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination, sits in a high-backed chair, clad in his usual armor: a navy-blue tie, a gleaming white shirt with cufflinks, and dress pants. His wife, Ann, is seated next to him; two of his sons and a daughter-in-law are arrayed around them. Romney’s campaign is going poorly. He lost badly to Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, in the Iowa caucuses, and in New Hampshire he appears on track to lose again, this time to Senator John McCain. “Maybe you just wait a few years?” one of Romney’s sons suggests. Romney seems to dismiss the possibility. “When this is over, I’ll have built a brand name,” he says. “People will know me. They’ll know what I stand for.” He pauses. “The flippin’ Mormon,” he says, his face broadening into a half smile. There are some titters from his family, more deflated than amused. Later, the clan kneels on the floor to pray. Romney bows his head, his elbows resting on the chair. In her prayer, Ann thanks God for His blessings and says that the family desires only to “serve Thee and to bring greater light to this earth.”

This moment, captured in the 2014 documentary “Mitt,” encapsulates the enduring paradox of Mitt Romney. After serving as a moderate governor in Massachusetts, where his signature accomplishment was enacting universal health care, he went through an ideological and tonal makeover as he labored, during two failed Presidential campaigns, to navigate the rightward lurch of his party. He never shed the aspersion that he was a flip-flopper, a man lacking true conviction. During a Republican candidate forum in New Hampshire, in 2008, McCain turned to Romney and said, “We disagree on a lot of issues, but I agree you are the candidate of change.” On the hustings, Romney often came across as starched and stiff, like his crisply ironed dress shirts. Voters struggled to get a genuine sense of him. And yet his core has always been evident to those granted entrée to his world. It was evident in that New Hampshire hotel room, and it’s evident throughout McKay Coppins’s instructive new biography, “Romney: A Reckoning,” in which the politician’s Mormon faith emerges as the substrate that nourishes all else in his life.

It is no accident that both Coppins and Greg Whiteley, the director of “Mitt,” are fellow-members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Coppins relies on dozens of interviews with Romney, as well as hundreds of pages of personal journals and private correspondence, to narrate Romney’s interior journey as his ambitions and principles increasingly come into conflict. The result is a rare feat in modern-day political reporting: an account in which the subject engages in actual introspection. Romney spent years contorting himself for the hard-right elements in his party, eventually becoming the G.O.P.’s standard-bearer during the 2012 election. In interviews, he spoke about the rationalizations he’d made over the years and his “capacity for self-justification,” as Coppins puts it. But when Donald Trump won the Presidency––the moment of “reckoning” in the book’s title––Romney decided to fling himself into the fray. The forces of populism and outrage had already overtaken the Republican Party. The question was whether Romney could find redemption for himself.

The Epistle of James admonishes believers to be “doers of the word, not just hearers.” Without “works,” the epistle explains, faith is empty. The manner in which faith becomes works in politics, however, can be like an intricate knot, with many folds. Black evangelicals and white evangelicals share theological beliefs but diverge on their partisan affiliations. There is a rich social-justice tradition in Roman Catholicism, yet many conservative Catholics are foot soldiers of the right. Religion offers a compass but not a map. Universal health care? Balancing the budget? Protecting the border? The Scriptures and other religious texts are silent. One can identify broad principles––and sometimes even these are contradictory––but specific policies must emerge from human wisdom and processes.

Romney’s process came from another deeply rooted identity: the data-driven businessman. In the nineteen-seventies, after graduating with joint M.B.A. and law degrees from Harvard, Romney began working in the burgeoning field of management consulting. He eventually landed at Bain & Company, where he quickly became a star. Bain’s leaders put him in charge of a new investment firm, Bain Capital, which identified ailing companies to invest in, overhauled them from within, then sold them for profit. The firm made Romney fabulously wealthy and helped to launch his political career. It also shaped his governing in Massachusetts, where he saw himself primarily as a “partisan of pragmatism,” not an ideologue. His approach to the health-care issue was illustrative. “I don’t look and say, ‘What’s the conservative point of view on this?’ ” he told Coppins. “I ask, ‘What do I think is the right answer to a particular problem?’ ” When Romney began considering a run for the Presidency, pitching himself to conservative audiences, he had a new set of data points to consider. He remade himself into a crusader on social issues; a lifelong hunter, even though he had gone hunting only twice in his life; and a zealot on illegal immigration. Romney thought little about the authenticity of his new persona. “It was a matter of simple math,” Coppins writes.

Even as Romney was remaking himself on the stump, his faith remained an abiding presence. Evangelical Christians, a crucial voting bloc in Republican primaries, consider Mormonism to be a heresy. Some of Romney’s supporters suggested that he distance himself from his faith. Romney declined. According to Coppins, it was perhaps the only part of his life that he refused to compromise on. He prayed on buses and before debates, read the Scriptures daily, and avoided scheduling campaign events on the Sabbath. Romney even arranged for the Church’s Boston temple to hold a late-night session for him and his family, an unusual accommodation. “Romney craved the closeness to God he experienced during those sacred worship ceremonies,” Coppins writes. “Swapping his presidential-candidate costume for the simple white clothing of the temple that night, he felt fully, truly like himself.”

Perhaps the most stirring moment in Romney’s campaign came on December 6, 2007, when Romney decided to address concerns about his faith directly, in a speech at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, in College Station, Texas. “I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it,” he said. “Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it. But I think they underestimate the American people. Americans do not respect believers of convenience. Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.” Two months later, Romney’s campaign was over.

When it came time to decide whether to enter the 2012 Presidential campaign, Romney was conflicted. The press generally considered him the Republican front-runner, but most of his family opposed another bid. The right was undergoing a transformation. The Obama Presidency had helped to incite the anti-establishment Tea Party movement, and the G.O.P.’s restive, grievance-fuelled grass roots didn’t seem particularly hospitable to a patrician figure like Romney. He was also resolved to avoid the contortions of 2008. “Of course, I would want to win, but feeling that I have been true to what I believe is even more important,” Romney wrote in an e-mail to advisers.

The campaign decided to relentlessly focus on the economy; Romney had always been most comfortable making his case as a turnaround specialist. But, in Coppins’s telling, Romney’s advisers continued to nudge him to tend to the far right. His rhetoric on immigration verged on nativist; during one Republican debate, he suggested “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants. He also sought the endorsement of Trump, who had spent months stoking baseless conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace. Romney captured the nomination but was trounced by Obama in the election. That night, when one of his advisers raised the prospect of yet another campaign, he insisted, “My time on the stage is over, guys.”

Romney first encounters Donald Trump in the fourth chapter of Coppins’s book. It is 1995, and Trump has invited Romney to spend the weekend at his extravagant estate at Mar-a-Lago. According to Coppins, Romney found the experience “deeply weird,” and figured he would never see Trump again. The magnate’s rise in the polls, during the 2016 nominating contest, befuddled him. He and Ann watched Trump’s rallies, where the spectre of violence seemed omnipresent. “Those people weren’t at our events,” Ann said. When it became clear that Trump might win the Republican nomination, Romney scrambled to stop him, delivering a speech denouncing him as “a phony, a fraud,” and later working behind the scenes to send the nomination to the convention. He had predicted to friends that Trump would win the election. Even so, he was unprepared when it happened.

Yet Romney’s resistance to Trump did not proceed in a straight line. He famously flirted with joining the Trump Administration as Secretary of State. When a photo of the two men meeting over dinner at Jean-Georges, the lavish restaurant inside the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York, went viral, the flip-flopper memes returned. In the orange-and-yellow-hued image, Trump appears to be almost cackling; Romney looks chagrined, his eyebrows raised and his lips drawn together. He later insisted to Coppins that his expression had nothing to do with Trump. “It had to do with the awkwardness of being in a public restaurant and cameras coming and taking pictures,” he said. After the dinner, he told reporters that he had “increasing hope that president-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us to a better future.” According to Coppins, Trump called Romney and told him that he needed to come out with a stronger statement: Trump was “terrific” and would be a “great president.” Romney could suffer the pretense no longer. “Maybe after so many years of allowing the petty indignities and moral compromises to pile up, he had finally reached his limit,” Coppins writes.

Coppins details Romney’s growing alarm during Trump’s first few months in office: the travel ban; the exodus from the State Department; the statement, after a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, that there were “very fine people on both sides.” At one point, Romney jotted down a line from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” written after the First World War: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” This was the new Republican Party, in Romney’s mind. In the fall of 2017, he decided to return to politics, running for a Senate seat in Utah. “Money is motivating when you don’t have it and when you are young,” he wrote in his journal. “A purpose greater than self is what motivates now.” That purpose was to become a counterweight to Trump.

In the Senate, Romney seemed to grow in stature and fortitude. Gone was the caution that had paralyzed him during his Presidential bids. He became one of the few in his party willing to criticize Trump’s excesses. On December 18, 2019, the House voted to impeach the President over allegations that he’d withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to pressure its President, Volodymyr Zelensky, into launching investigations that would benefit Trump politically. Preparing for the Senate trial, Romney studied Federalist No. 65, in which Alexander Hamilton argues that the Senate is the only institution with sufficient independence to handle a trial with “necessary impartiality.” The trial lasted just five days.

Romney was frustrated by his Republican colleagues. “How unlike a real jury is our caucus?” he wrote in his journal. One evening, after the Senate had recessed, Romney returned to his office, knelt on the floor, and prayed. Later, he listed in his journal the potential consequences of voting to convict Trump: he would be ostracized in the Senate; Fox News would tear into him, “stoking up the crazies”; the President would attack him mercilessly, or use the government to hurt his sons; Romney might need to move from Utah. That night, at his town house in Washington, he slept poorly, waking before dawn to review the case again. In his office, he convened his staff and told them that he had reached a verdict.

On February 5, 2020, Romney stood at the lectern in the Senate chamber to explain his decision to become the first senator in American history to vote to remove a President from his own party. “As a Senator-juror, I swore an oath, before God, to exercise ‘impartial justice,’ ” he said. “I am profoundly religious. My faith is at the heart of who I am.” Here, Romney paused for several seconds, his eyes downcast, seemingly overcome. “I take an oath before God as enormously consequential,” he went on. Disregarding that oath for a partisan end, he said, would expose his character to “the censure of my own conscience.” He acknowledged that many in his party and his state would disagree with the decision. He also acknowledged that his vote would not remove Trump from office. “I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability,” he said, “believing that my country expected it of me.”

After the speech, Romney reached Ann by phone. She described watching his address as a spiritual experience. In the days that followed, as vitriol rained down on Romney, he thought of Parley Parker Pratt, an early Mormon missionary and a distant ancestor, who had toiled for months in New York City without winning any converts, but who one day received a vision of assurance from the Lord—that his labor had not been in vain, that his sacrifice had been accepted. Romney wrote in his journal that a huge weight had been lifted, that “the anxiety is gone.”

In the spring of 2021, Coppins and Romney began meeting weekly, in secret, for interviews that sometimes went on for hours. Several months had passed since the January 6th insurrection, and Coppins writes that Romney “often sounded like a spy behind enemy lines.” Romney confided that much of his party “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He was mulling difficult questions, including his own culpability in what had become of the G.O.P.: “Was the rot on the right new, or was it something very old just now bubbling to the surface? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment––people like him, the reasonable Republicans––played in allowing that rot to fester?”

Last month, Romney announced, at the age of seventy-six, that he would not seek reëlection in the Senate. He cited his age in his decision, declaring that it was time for a new generation of leaders. According to Coppins, Romney has had recurring premonitions of his death. His church teaches him that, one day, he will stand before God and face an accounting, for his thoughts, words, and works. He will have to explain his time in politics––the positions he took, the compromises he made, where he chose to stand firm. If Romney is at a loss, he might bring along Coppins’s record of his reckoning. ♦