Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, is set to remain in office for another year, but he’s already transitioning into his new job: selling books.
According to rumor, Romney even told one journalist that he’d received an offer to serve as vice president… to television star Oprah Winfrey.
The journalist, McKay Coppins, is set to release his book Romney: A Reckoning later this month. A party privy to the manuscript summarized the book for an Axios reporter.
Axios reported Monday, “Coppins writes that Romney told him Winfrey, a Democrat, made a pitch to run together ‘to save the country,’ according to a source familiar with the manuscript.”
Winfrey wanted them to run against then-President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
According to Axios, Romney told Coppins that he’d rejected Winfrey’s offer… due to fear of inadvertently helping Trump’s chance for re-election.
Winfrey has a long record of endorsing Democratic lawmakers. She even endorsed Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., over her longtime colleague Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Republican. At one point, Oprah even entered the conversation as a possible candidate for 2020’s presidential election.
Even some “Never Trump” Republicans were encouraging Winfrey to run for president. The pundit Bill Kristol tweeted in 2018, “Oprah: Sounder on economics than Bernie Sanders, understands Middle America better than Elizabeth Warren, less touchy-feely than Joe Biden, more pleasant than Andrew Cuomo, more charismatic than John Hickenlooper. #ImWithHer.”
However, Winfrey issued a very early denial about any plan to run for president. In fact, sources close to Winfrey told Axios that she was never seriously considering a run at all.
Romney himself ran for president twice but never won. He lost a general election in 2012, and he failed to win the primary elections in 2008. He was elected to the Senate in 2018, but he’s declined to run for re-election.
The Horn editorial team