A new book claims Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was in 2016 willing to take one for the country in order to thwart Donald Trump’s burgeoning presidential ambitions.
The 2012 Republican presidential nominee was “willing to wage a quixotic and humiliating presidential bid if that’s what it took” to stop Trump, author McKay Coppins wrote in “Romney: A Reckoning,” per excerpts The Guardian shared online Wednesday.
Romney considered attempting to unite GOP opposition against Trump by sharing a ticket with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), even though he’d previously described Cruz in his journal as “scary” and “a demagogue,” according to the Guardian.
“But Romney didn’t think the gambit would actually succeed in taking down Trump,” wrote Coppins. “The problem was that no one else in the party seemed to know what to do about Trump, either.”
Romney, who last month announced he’d not seek reelection in 2024, later contemplated the idea of Cruz as the 2016 nominee and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his running mate. Both Cruz and Rubio ran against Trump in 2016.
But the pair were “just too self-interested,” Coppins wrote.
Trump eventually won the nomination and then defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. Cruz, meanwhile, turned from one of Trump’s biggest critics and victims of his insults to one of his most vocal supporters.
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Elsewhere in the book, Coppins said talk show queen Oprah Winfrey pitched Romney on running as an independent in 2020, with her as his running mate, because she feared the Democratic hopefuls couldn’t defeat Trump.
Winfrey’s representative disputed the claim, however.
“In November 2019, Ms. Winfrey called Senator Romney to encourage him to run on an Independent ticket,” Winfrey’s spokesperson said in a statement to The New York Times. “She was not calling to be part of the ticket and was never considering running herself.”