Mitt Romney Is the Coward and Hero of Our Time

Everybody hates Mitt Romney and also, everyone loves Mitt Romney. This is exceedingly clear following the release of an excerpt from a Romney biography by McKay Coppins that was published this week in the Atlantic. In the piece, the Utah senator—who voted twice to impeach Donald Trump—is cast as the very last sane Republican, a man who is leaving politics behind because his own party, the GOP, has left him behind.

“In less than a decade,” writes Coppins, “he’d gone from Republican standard-bearer and presidential nominee to party pariah thanks to a series of public clashes with Trump.” What follows is a horror movie of GOP cowardice and hypocrisy, delivered with astonishing specificity: We learn of Sen. Mitch McConnell describing Trump as “an idiot. He doesn’t think when he says things.” We meet various Senate Republicans who “played their parts as Trump loyalists,” in public, yet in private, “they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics, and made incisive observations about his warped, toddler­like psyche.” Trump briefs a fawning GOP caucus lunch that gives him a standing ovation, then explodes in laughter when he leaves the room.

Except, as the piece meticulously catalogs, it stopped being a joke in early January of 2021. Sen. Angus King had warned Romney that he’d been briefed by someone in the Pentagon about threats of extreme violence—including some specifically targeting Romney—that might occur during the certification of the Electoral College votes. Romney shared the warnings with McConnell, forwarding King’s information: “There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol.” McConnell, according to the book, never even bothered to reply to the plea.  Jan. 6 happened four days later. Romney openly places the blame on Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and other GOP senators who had supported suspending the certification as the rioters took the building—and continued to do so after the riot. His calling out the hypocrisy of the Republicans with whom he served, including the former vice president, is pitiless and meticulous. No one has been “more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly” than Mike Pence, he tells Coppins.

But as the GOP narrative hardened around the fiction that the election had indeed been stolen and the insurrectionists were confused and gentle tourists, things took yet another turn. Romney realized that “there are deranged people among us,” and that in Utah, “people carry guns.” It wasn’t just that Romney found himself isolated and scorned; he was actively afraid of his constituents, worried that they could physically harm him. The fear was not his alone. “One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment,” writes Coppins, “but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety.” Romney recalls that a GOP senator who was mulling voting to convict Trump during the second impeachment had been cautioned, “You can’t do that. Think of your personal safety. … Think of your children.” Romney ruefully notes that he’s been paying $5,000 a day since the insurrection “to cover private security for his family.” Most of his colleagues don’t have car elevators, or private bodyguards, or security funds like Romney. Presumably their decision to shuffle along with Trumpism to protect their lives thus becomes rational.

Whether Romney—who announced this week that he will not run for reelection—is a coward or a hero is thus once again a subject of an intense and insoluble debate.

Michelle Goldberg writes that Romney is taking the gutless way out:

Writing in Time, Philip Elliott sees only courage: “In the end, Romney found comfort in his own skin, confidence in his own character. The skittishness was gone, but so was his belief that he alone could fix what ails this country or even his own party.” Aaron Blake writes: “You can blame him for his late conversion, but it’s difficult to understand that what he’s doing now is based on anything other than conviction, because of the costs involved.”

From my perch, in the long string of Republicans who reluctantly walk away from all that comprises Trumpism but do so far too late to matter, Romney is both a brave man for speaking truth to cowards—and a coward for walking away at all. Which is why perhaps the most arresting aspect of Coppins’ profile is the way in which Romney, as a senator, becomes the receptacle for all the other (bigger) cowards’ hushed confessionals. He recounts Mitch McConnell telling Romney that because of his constituency in Utah: “You’re lucky. … You can say the things that we all think. You’re in a position to say things about him that we all agree with but can’t say.”

Coppins writes that “Every time he publicly criticized Trump, it seemed, some Republican senator would smarmily sidle up to him in private and express solidarity. ‘I sure wish I could do what you do,’ they’d say, or ‘Gosh, I wish I had the constituency you have,’ and then they’d look at him expectantly, as if waiting for Romney to convey profound gratitude.” The paragraph continues: “This happened so often that he started keeping a tally; at one point, he told his staff that he’d had more than a dozen similar exchanges.” I was reminded of the two or three conversations I have every year with someone wishing to unburden themselves about some horrific incident they experienced with then-appeals court Judge Alex Kozinski, about whom I had written. After unloading whatever staggering tale they have to share, they tended to explain why there is no need to tell this story in actual public, but they also seem to wish to be thanked for sharing it with me. The cost for them to tell it themselves would be too high, but they are awfully glad someone else was around to have done something about it.

One is reminded of the ritual scapegoat on which the high priest of the Old Testament unloaded all the people’s sins before shunting the poor creature off into the wilderness—moral expiation by way of the transitive property.

It’s not just that Romney, by speaking out and then walking away, is both a hero and a coward, then. It’s that he is intrinsically a part of the winding daisy chain of cowards who shun him in public and thank him in private. His very existence allows them to believe that in whispering that they are with him even as they roam the world making it safer and safer for Trump and Trumpism, he has become an unwitting enabler of precisely the thing he most deplores. And for every coward that secretly confesses to Romney, there is yet another coward in his shadow, seeking expiation from him, in a seemingly endless chain of people who say one thing and then do quite another, because they want to be famous, or because they want to hang on to power, or because they are afraid someone with a gun will murder their children.

In the parable, it takes only one brave soul to whisper out loud that the emperor is wearing no clothes—the realization that this can be spoken aloud then ripples across the land in a gratifying tsunami of truth. What the parable of Romney proves is that in our present world, when the brave soul whispers that the emperor is naked and, um, also an idiot, he becomes the whipping boy for everyone else, who can exhale because someone braver has spoken the truth, so that they might continue to lie. A system in which everyone in power can be secretly grateful that someone else spoke the truth does not serve truth. It serves only power. The ripple isn’t toward the scales falling off everyone’s eyes; the ripple is gratitude that some sucker took one for the team. Maybe we can still at least be grateful that Romney and Coppins have cast a bright light on a long, terrified, power-mad chain of liars, because more than anything else it reveals that Donald Trump has no magical Svengali-like hold on his minions. Rather, each of these minions is in thrall to the project of keeping the lie alive, complicit in a pathological system of mortification, expiation, and fear that has taken on a life of its own.