Romney
A Reckoning
-
- 14,99 $
Description de l’éditeur
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! In this illuminating and “scoop-rich biography…the tell-all tales rush forth” (Los Angeles Times) offering a “penetrating analysis of the ongoing Republican civil war through the eyes of one of its last embattled centrists” (Publishers Weekly).
Few figures in American politics have seen more and said less than Mitt Romney. An outspoken dissident in Donald Trump’s GOP, he has made headlines in recent years for standing alone against the forces he believes are poisoning the party he once led. Romney was the first senator in history to vote to remove from office a president of his own party. When that president’s supporters went on to storm the US Capitol, Romney delivered a thundering speech from the Senate floor accusing his fellow Republicans of stoking insurrection. Despite these moments of public courage, Romney has shared very little about what he’s witnessed behind the scenes over his three decades in politics—in GOP cloakrooms and caucus lunches, in his private meetings with Donald Trump and his family, in his dealings with John McCain, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Joe Manchin, and Kyrsten Sinema. Now, Romney provides a window to his most private thoughts.
Based on dozens of interviews with Romney, his family, and his inner circle as well as hundreds of pages of his personal journals and private emails, this in-depth portrait by award-winning journalist McKay Coppins shows a public servant authentically wrestling with the choices he has made over his career. In lively, revelatory detail, the book traces Romney’s early life and rise through the ranks of a fast-transforming Republican Party and exposes how a trail of seemingly small compromises by political leaders has led to a crisis in democracy. “A rare feat in modern-day political reporting” (The New Yorker), Romney: A Reckoning is a redemptive story about a complex politician who summoned his moral courage just as fear and divisiveness were overtaking American life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Utah senator and 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney resists his party's sharp right turn in this probing biography. Atlantic journalist Coppins (The Wilderness) recaps Romney's success running Bain Capital's private equity fund, which was criticized for shuttering heartland factories and laying off workers; his term as a liberalish Republican governor of Massachusetts, where he instituted a universal health insurance system that became a model for Obamacare; his ill-fated 2012 presidential campaign, which floundered because of his image as a "cold-blooded, out-of-touch plutocrat"; his horror at Donald Trump's takeover of the GOP in 2016, which he denounced in a controversial speech; and his current Senate term, during which he bucked his party's rightward drift (he joined a Black Lives Matter protest march in 2020), cast the lone Republican vote to convict in Trump's first impeachment trial, and rejected Trump's 2020 election denialism—all at considerable cost to his political fortunes. (After the election, Coppins notes, Romney found himself on an airliner full of Trump supporters chanting "Traitor!") In Coppins's telling, Romney is a decent, dutiful man, eager to apply technocratic fixes to government. But he also makes Romney an apt symbol of a GOP establishment focused on staid business conservatism that was baffled and terrified by the erupting populist rage of its base. The result is a penetrating analysis of the ongoing Republican civil war through the eyes of one of its last embattled centrists.