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Why Mitt Romney once said, ‘I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than JD Vance’
“How can you go over a line so stark as that — and for what?”
In the short time since former President Donald Trump officially tapped him as a running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance has continued to dominate the news cycle.
The headlines run the gamut: The “Hillbilly Elegy” author could be the first U.S. vice president to sport facial hair since 1933, according to Slate. As ProPublica reported, he’s also lent credibility to Infowars founder Alex Jones, who infamously claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.
More on JD Vance:
And, as many social media users were quick to point out, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney once quipped, “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance.”
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Romney’s scathing words come from McKay Coppins’s biography “Romney: A Reckoning,” an excerpt of which ran in The Atlantic last September. The former Massachusetts governor purportedly shared his thoughts on Vance during one of several interviews with Coppins.
Years earlier, Romney had read “Hillbilly Elegy” and was so impressed that he hosted Vance at his annual Park City summit in 2018, according to Coppins. At the time, Vance was a vocal Trump critic who once called the former president “America’s Hitler” and “cultural heroin.” But in the lead-up to his 2022 Senate run, Vance made himself over in MAGA’s image.
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“How can you go over a line so stark as that — and for what?” Romney mused, according to Coppins. “It’s not like you’re going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator. It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?”
Romney added: “How do you sit next to him at lunch?”
Read the excerpt from “Romney: A Reckoning”:
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