Mitt Romney’s new book Romney: A Reckoning, written by McKay Coppins, shares the politician’s blunt assessments of his fellow Republicans.
Romney recounts an interaction he and former president Donald Trump shared at a New England Patriots game. The two were guests of the owner Robert Kraft.
Coppins writes, “Trump sidled up to Romney’s son Josh and pointed at a leggy brunette across the room. ‘Have you seen my girlfriend, Melania?’ he asked, smirking. ‘When I drop her, the phone is gonna ring off the hook. Every guy in New York wants to go out with her.’”
Romney and Trump have a social history since the mid-1990s.
The Washington Post had previously written, “In the 1990s, Romney began cultivating influential people who might become key supporters of a political campaign. Two months after his failed 1994 campaign for the Senate seat held by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), Romney accepted an invitation to fly on Trump’s plane to Palm Beach to attend the Super Bowl, which was held in Miami in January 1995…The two sat together at the Super Bowl and later went to National Football League games in New Jersey and Massachusetts.”
Romney and Trump were photographed together at the 2004 game in January.
Trump proposed to Melania four months later, and the two were married in Mar-a-Lago, in January 2005.
While Romney wasn’t among the politicians invited to the nuptials, he did visit Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 1995.
Romney later told Coppins that when he first met Trump his impression was that “[Trump] wasn’t really ‘businessman’ at all,” and he agreed to meet with him because he was “not above gawking at famous people.”
The book reports: “Trump [greeted Romney] with a ‘surreal scene’ upon arrival, as the entire Mar-a-Lago staff lined up outside in a white linen uniform, as if posed for a royal reception.”
Romney further said Trump was like a cartoon character and strutted around the estate “like an English lord.”
Romney recalls Trump leading him on a tour of the club where he showed off a drawer full of “gold-colored silverware,” and gloated that the Post family, which sold the club to him in 1985, “didn’t know this was here when they sold me the place” and that the “silverware is worth more than I paid for the house.”
Trump’s team has asserted that Romney’s recollections are false.
A Trump spokesperson told Rolling Stone that Romney is “a loser who is ‘retiring’ because he knows he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving another campaign. He should stop lying and creating fake stories in order to stay relevant. The fact is that he dropped the ball when he ran against Barack Obama and is partially responsible for the mess America is in.”
Romney’s book will be released next Tuesday.
