Confronted with Donald Trump’s abuse, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said: “Ha, ha, ha. He’s such a whack job.”
Romney’s view of the former president and current Republican presidential frontrunner was communicated to McKay Coppins, author of a new biography, Romney: A Reckoning, written in co-operation with its subject.
Romney once flirted with joining Trump’s cabinet but has since emerged as a chief antagonist, voting to convict at both Trump’s impeachment trials.
Earlier this week, responding to reporting about Coppins’ work, Trump called Romney “a total loser that only a mother could love”, erroneously said the senator “just wrote a book”, and said it was, “much like him, boring, horrible, and totally predictable”.
Trump also claimed to have forced “this left-leaning Rino [Republican in name only] out of politics”, a reference to Romney’s announced retirement next year.
On Thursday, Coppins spoke to Brian Stelter, the former CNN anchor now host of Inside the Hive, a Vanity Fair podcast.
Coppins said: “I sent [Trump’s] statement to Mitt and … I’ll just pull up the text. He wrote back, ‘Ha, ha, ha. He’s such a whack job.’ So Mitt kind of enjoyed Trump’s response.”
Coppins also discussed how he came to write Romney’s biography – in part because, as he writes in his book, Romney decided not to write a traditional memoir.
Coppins said: “When I first approached him, it was just a couple months after January 6. I remember our first meeting was in his Senate hideaway, which is this little cramped windowless room that the senators get near the chamber in the Capitol building. And there was still barbed wire fence around the building because the riots had just happened.”
On 6 January 2021, Trump sent supporters to the Capitol to block certification of Joe Biden’s election win. They failed but nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. Thousands have been arrested and hundreds convicted, some for seditious conspiracy.
Coppins said Romney’s “initial decision to cooperate with this book was just born of … extreme frustration and disappointment with the leaders of his party and fear for the country. I think he thought of this book as a warning.”
Trump faces 91 criminal charges, for state and federal election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments. He also faces civil threats including a fraud trial regarding his business and a defamation trial arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.
Nonetheless, he leads by huge margins in national and key state polling regarding the Republican presidential nomination.
Coppins told Stelter that Romney was now “looking back at the moments in his pursuit of the presidency that he sort of flirted with the more extreme elements of his party.
“I think he realises now that the mistake he made, and the mistake that a lot of the Republican establishment made, was thinking that they could basically harness the energy of the far right without succumbing to it.”
In 2012, Romney accepted Trump’s endorsement.
“He wishes he didn’t do it,” Coppins said. “And I think that that’s emblematic of a lot of these these small ethical compromises that he and a lot of his party leaders made, not realising the kind of Pandora’s box they were opening.”
