O
n a swampy afternoon this past spring, I met Mitt Romney in his soon-to-be-vacated Senate office. It was strange to see him in person again. For two years, we’d talked almost every week as I worked on a biography that would cement his reputation as a Republican apostate. Since the book’s publication last year, we’d kept in sporadic touch—mostly through texts, the senator’s preferred medium for venting about politics—but we hadn’t spoken in much depth.
Some things hadn’t changed. Romney was, as ever, acutely attuned to his own mortality. “I saw an article this morning saying that they find your chances of getting Alzheimer’s are significantly increased based upon two things,” he told me as soon as we sat down. One factor was alcohol consumption; the other was stress at work. The latter had him worried. Romney is a teetotaler but has been addicted his whole life to stressful jobs. “I mean, I’ve felt high stress in my work since—” He thought about it. “Well, since I went to grad school.” He’s stepping down when his term ends in January. Retirement, he told me, would be good for his health.
[Read: ]What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate
As we chatted, though, I noted a change in his countenance. In the past, his frustration—with the Senate, with the Republican Party, with politics in general—had always seemed tinged with resignation. Maybe he was miserable, but he felt obligated to stay in Washington and do his part. Now, at 77, he couldn’t wait to leave. He seemed lighter in a way, but also more restless. Mormon missionaries have a term for the feeling of distraction and homesickness that sometimes settles in as they approach the end of their service: trunky. I asked if the term applied to him now, and he smirked: “Oh yeah.”
This essay was adapted from the new afterword for the paperback edition of Romney: A Reckoning.Romney had mentioned to me repeatedly, in those brief exchanges over the preceding months, that life in Congress was getting worse. He wasn’t alone in feeling this way. His planned departure was part of an unusually large wave of retirements from Congress in 2024—52 as of May—and the phenomenon had prompted much discussion about why lawmakers were rushing for the exits. “It is the worst year of the nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress,” Ken Buck, an outgoing Republican congressman from Colorado, told CNN. “And having talked to former members, it’s the worst year in 40, 50 years to be in Congress.”
When I asked Romney why his colleagues seemed so miserable, he surprised me by launching into an uninterrupted, seven-minute diatribe about everything that was wrong with Washington. He talked about growing polarization, and the radicalizing effects of the primary process, and the institutional dysfunction of the House, and the indignity of serving in Congress during a presidential-election year.
To illustrate this last point, he offered an example. Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers had negotiated a bill aimed at restricting illegal immigration. It had been written at the behest of Republicans, who said they would fund new Ukrainian military aid only if Congress also tackled the “crisis” at America’s southern border. Then Trump came out against the immigration bill, having reportedly decided that the crisis at the border was good for his reelection prospects, and Republicans promptly fell in line. To Romney, it was clear that the priority for most of his colleagues was “to do whatever their nominee wants”—not to solve the problems they’d been elected to solve: “If Donald Trump says, ‘Hey, kill that immigration deal,’ [they’re] gonna kill the immigration deal.”
Romney told me he’d been invited to deliver a commencement speech, and he planned to illustrate the cynical nature of politics today by talking about his childhood fascination with professional wrestling. As a kid, he’d been enthralled by the theatrical rivalry between “Dick the Bruiser,” a muscle-bound former NFL player, and “Haystacks Calhoun,” a 600-pound farm boy from Texas. The two men riled up crowds by thumping their chests and talking trash about each other. “I was intrigued,” Romney told me, “until my brother, six years older, said it’s all fake. And it suddenly became less interesting.” Congress, he’d come to discover, was more or less the same. “Most of what’s going on in these buildings is just fake”—less policy making than performative animosity and posturing.
I thought it sounded a little bleak for a commencement address, but Romney wasn’t soliciting feedback. Before I could say anything, he was venting about the lack of seriousness in legislative debates over the federal debt and climate change, and the plague of partisan “messaging bills” that are written to score points instead of make law. Finally, when he’d tired himself out, he slumped back in his chair. “We’ve got some real challenges,” Romney said, “and we just don’t deal with them.”
“So that’s—anyway, that’s a long answer,” he said with a sigh.
I joked that it seemed like he had a lot to get off his chest. He didn’t laugh.
It was not lost on me that the publication of my book, Romney: A Reckoning, was a more fraught experience for Romney than it was for me. As a biographer, I’d looked at his stories about the dissolution of the GOP under Trump as a valuable contribution to the historical record. But Romney had paid a price for his candor.
To the extent that there had been any doubt before, the book sealed his status as a villain in MAGA world. Conservative publications ran takedowns with headlines such as “Mitt Romney, We Hardly Knew Ye.” Sean Hannity, a onetime cheerleader for Romney’s presidential campaign, denounced him as a “small, angry, and very bitter man.” Trump himself weighed in with a characteristically rambling post on Truth Social in which he seemed to confuse the biography for a memoir. “Mitt Romney, a total loser that only a mother could love,” the review began, “just wrote a book which is, much like him, horrible, boring, and totally predictable.”
Romney was mostly amused by Trump’s reaction (“Hahaha!” he texted me at the time. “He’s such a whack job!”), but the book’s chilly reception among Republicans on Capitol Hill must have been upsetting. Some of his colleagues made known their disapproval in private. Others, including Senator J. D. Vance, lashed out in the press. “If he has a problem with me,” Vance told a reporter, “I kind of wish he just acted like a man and spoke to me directly, not whining to a reporter about it.” Romney wasn’t exactly surprised by the attacks from people he’d criticized in such withering fashion. (“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” he had told me.) Still, the hostility was unpleasant enough that, after The Atlantic published an excerpt from the book, he opted to skip the GOP caucus lunch.
The Trump-era GOP’s perception of Romney as a devious traitor put him in a precarious position. The 2024 presidential election had, by that point in the spring, played out exactly as he’d predicted. Trump had easily defeated a large and feckless field of Republican challengers to clinch the party’s nomination, despite facing 88 criminal charges. And Joe Biden looked to be on a glide path to renomination, despite having some of the worst approval ratings of any modern first-term president. In the months that followed, the race would become more volatile—a disastrous debate performance by Biden; a party-wide panic and push to replace him on the ticket; the nomination of Kamala Harris; the assassination attempts on Trump. But that spring, polls showed Trump clinging to a persistent lead, and Romney was convinced that a second Trump term was imminent.
Romney had made this prediction before, telling anyone who would listen in the run-up to the 2020 election that he thought Trump was going to get a second term. He’d even bet one of his sons his prized 1985 BMW that Biden would lose. But back then, he’d told me, it was a kind of psychological game he played with himself—predicting the outcome he most dreaded as a form of “inoculation.”
This time felt different. Trump had repeatedly pledged to use the Justice Department and the FBI to go after his political enemies if reelected. “I am your retribution,” he enjoyed telling his crowds. Romney knew that he was likely to appear on any enemies list kept by the former president, and he’d privately mused to friends that it might be time for him and his wife, Ann, to consider moving abroad. (A spokesperson for the senator told me he was not serious about this.)
But when I asked Romney, in the spring, what a Trump reelection would mean for him and his family, he was careful at first. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. If Trump tried to sic the Justice Department on him, Romney told me, “the good news is I haven’t had an affair with anybody; I don’t have any classified documents; I can’t imagine something I’ve done that would justify an investigation, let alone an indictment.”
What about his sons? I asked. Might they be targeted?
“I mean, hopefully they’ve all crossed their t’s and dotted their i’s,” Romney replied, straining to sound casual. “But it’s hard for me to imagine that President Trump would take the time to go out and see if [he] can find something on members of my family.”
“You might need to expand your imagination,” I suggested.
Romney grew irritated. “Yeah, but I’ve got 25 grandkids!” he said, throwing up his hands. “How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids? I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law—it’s like, we’re a big group.” This was clearly a problem to which he’d given serious thought, and realized there was no solution. In the weeks after January 6, he’d spent thousands of dollars a day to protect his family from red-capped vigilantes. But how do you hide a family of 40 from a president hell-bent on revenge?
Recognizing that I’d hit a nerve, I said it was possible, of course, that Trump’s “retribution” rhetoric was all bluster. But Romney didn’t seem comforted.
“I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word,” he told me, his voice suddenly subdued. “So I would take him at his word.”
Romney is the first to admit that retirement has never been his strong suit. The last time he attempted it, after losing the 2012 presidential election, the boredom nearly drove him crazy. Writing in his journal at the time, he struggled to even use the term retirement. “Terrifying word,” he wrote, “but worse reality.” Among those who know him best, the consensus is that he’ll need a post-Senate project—but what will it be?
Romney told me he’s received invitations from multiple universities to teach, and was considering a campus lecture tour. He also remained fixated on finding ways to pull American politics back toward the center. He wanted to collect data on how reforming the primary system to allow ranked-choice voting and greater participation from independents might yield less extreme candidates. And he was eager to see more coordination among the various centrist nonprofits and third parties—No Labels, Forward, Unite America—that are devoted to depolarization.
He conceded that there were hurdles impeding such efforts. Romney himself had been recruited by No Labels to run as an independent. Like everyone else approached by the group, Romney had turned them down. “The reality that anyone who looked at it had to confront was that you can’t win, right?” he told me. “And if you can’t win, you’re a spoiler, and you’re not quite sure who you’re going to spoil.” Sure, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed content at the time to play the 2024 spoiler, but Romney didn’t exactly consider the anti-vaccine former Democrat a role model. The senator mentioned a recent New York Times article revealing that doctors had discovered a dead parasite in Kennedy’s brain in 2010. “I’m sorry, but there are certain people I will not vote for for president,” Romney told me. “People who’ve had a worm eat part of their brain should probably not be given the nuclear code.” (Kennedy dropped out over the summer and, perhaps confirming the wisdom of Romney’s litmus test, endorsed Trump.)
There was, of course, one other possibility for Romney’s final act: a position in the next Biden administration. The two men have become unlikely friends in recent years. And according to one person close to the Biden campaign, senior Democrats in the president’s orbit had discussed appointing Romney to a high-profile diplomatic post in a second term, before Biden dropped out of the race. The conversations were hypothetical—ambassadorships aren’t typically doled out six months before an election—but such an offer would presumably be conditioned on an endorsement. And Romney wasn’t sure he could oblige.
“Biden’s policies drive me crazy,” he told me. “And one of the reasons I think there are people like me who shrink at the idea of endorsing Biden is, does that mean I endorse his border policies? Or do I endorse giving trillions of dollars to college students to pay their debt?” He knew Trump’s authoritarianism and commitment to undermining America’s electoral system made him more dangerous than Biden. “The fact that if you want to be in the good graces of MAGA world you’ve got to say the election was stolen is extraordinary to me—but that is the test,” Romney said. Still, throwing his support behind a president whose policies he’d spent decades fighting against was a difficult thing to do. He told me he wasn’t ruling it out.
In September, after Harris’s ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket, I asked Romney if he wanted to talk again, hoping to understand how the news might change his expectations for the election. He declined, but there are signs that his impression of the vice president, like that of many Americans, might be evolving. On the few occasions when he mentioned her in our interviews over the years, it was usually to describe the Democrats’ political bind. Romney had internalized the Washington consensus that, although Biden was clearly weak, Harris had no chance of beating Trump. But after her debate performance earlier this month, Romney seemed impressed. “Most people didn’t know her terribly well other than a few clips that were not flattering that you might see on the internet,” he told reporters. “And people saw, actually, she’s an intelligent, capable person.”
As our conversation in the spring wound down, I decided to ask Romney a question I’d somehow neglected to bring up in our dozens of interviews before: What—if anything—gave him hope about the future?
This question had come up repeatedly on my book tour. Invariably, after listening to me recount the sordid tales of cynicism, hypocrisy, and unbridled malice that Romney had witnessed inside Congress, someone in the audience would politely raise their hand and ask for a happy ending—and I’d draw a blank.
When I put it to Romney in his office, he told me about a book he’d recently read, The Age of Acrimony. The book chronicled America from 1865 to 1915, a period in which the country was exploding with political energy, much of it destructive. Torch-carrying mobs held massive rallies that turned into riots. Political assassinations were widespread. Many people were predicting a second civil war. Then, in relatively short order, “the air went out of the balloon,” Romney told me. Presidential-election turnout rates plunged from 80 percent in 1896 (when many people were bribed for their vote) to less than 50 percent two decades later. Romney invited the author, a historian at the Smithsonian, to his office. He wanted to know what had changed. How had a nation addicted to partisan tribalism and political violence managed to break the cycle? The author told him that members of the generation that had come of age during this “age of acrimony” simply decided they didn’t want to live that way anymore.
Romney thought about the young Americans who’d entered political consciousness during the Trump era. They’d watched their parents and grandparents fight endlessly with one another about politics on Facebook and fall down conspiracy-theory rabbit holes. They’d seen the caliber of politicians who rose to the top in this climate, and the havoc they’d wrought on democratic institutions. And he hoped that perhaps they were ready to try something different.
When Romney announced his retirement last year, he framed the decision as a move to make room for “a new generation of leaders.” At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to this notion. It seemed like a savvy bit of rhetoric aimed as much at dinging the two geriatric presidential contenders at the time as it was at explaining his own thinking.
But listening to him talk that day in his office, I was struck by just how much trust he was placing in younger Americans to fix Washington, if only because he’d lost confidence in the supposed adults running the town now.
“I have hope in the rising generation,” Romney told me—hope “that they’re watching what’s going on, and they’re going to say, Enough.”
This essay was adapted from the new afterword for the paperback edition of Romney: A Reckoning.
theatlantic.com