Romney: A Reckoning

McKay Coppins is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic. In 2012, he covered Mitt Romney’s second presidential campaign while working as a reporter for Buzzfeed. Like Romney, he is Mormon and attended Brigham Young University, where he served as the editor of the student newspaper. His 2015 book, The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House, received praise, but Romney: A Reckoning was generally reviewed as a more thorough examination of the political landscape. In 2016, Coppins got into a Twitter feud with Donald Trump after critiquing his campaign. He is married with four children. 

Throughout this text, Coppins comments on the unusually close relationship between himself and his subject matter. He approached Romney about writing a biography with the stipulation that he would have full editorial control. In the author’s note, he expands upon his methodology for the text. Between March 2021 and May 2023, he conducted 45 interviews with Romney. Romney shared “hundreds of pages of his personal journals and thousands of emails and text messages from his private correspondence,” establishing the close level of trust Romney feels for Coppins (325). Based on descriptions of the interactions between Romney and Coppins, it is clear that Coppins is viewed as a more trustworthy reporter than most, and it is implied that their shared

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