The media played its own part in the fight against Romney. For example, when he described his efforts to recruit women for his cabinet, which involved his staff compiling lists of qualified women, mainstream outlets ran countless headlines panning Romney’s use of the phrase “binders full of women” and amplifying social media posts mocking the comment.

However, Romney’s more recent critiques of his own party, particularly Donald Trump, have endeared him to Democrats and the press. The shift was most striking when the Utah senator voted to convict Trump during impeachment proceedings in 2020, which led to widespread praise from the other side of the aisle.

“I sat silently across the chamber, listening to my friend give one of the most important speeches I have ever had the good fortune to hear in person,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy wrote. “At a time when many wonder what honor is left in public life, there is Mitt Romney.”

The Utah senator’s reputational recovery mirrors that of John McCain. As the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, McCain was portrayed as an “anti-abortion Creationist who surrounds himself with religious extremists”. But towards the end of his life, and especially after his death, McCain became a model Republican in the eyes of liberals and the media, with particular attention paid to his vote to save the Affordable Care Act. Then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in 2017: “He’s just a wonderful man. I treasure his friendship and just the fact of knowing him.” After his death, the Washington Post portrayed him as a courageous “maverick”.

The evolution of the GOP from Ronald Reagan to Trump was a key driver of these changes. Trump’s rise has given way to more caustic criticism from the Left, including claims that he poses an existential threat to democracy — a point Harris and Biden have made explicitly and repeatedly. This ratcheting up of the rhetoric provides some insight into the process that rehabilitates Republicans of decades past. As Sorkin argued in his recent NYT piece, Romney may reject elective abortion, but at least he’s not a threat to democracy.

As a result of Trump’s rise, many other GOP figures have undergone a rehabilitation. George W. Bush, for example, was once considered a war criminal by large sections of Left, a charge that was central to an effort to impeach him. But he’s since been rehabilitated, with a majority of Democrats approving of him in 2017, while both media elites and Democrats have portrayed him as a unifying figure in contrast to his Republican successor. This pivot likely has as much to do with distaste for Trump as it does with the Left embracing a more interventionist foreign policy platform.

Even Reagan has received positive attention in the press as a foil against more recent Republicans such as Trump. While Romney is presently a symbol for the Left of an older, better GOP, this wasn’t the case back in 2012, when Politico, joined by several other outlets, declared: “Romney is nothing like Reagan.” Whether Trump will ever prompt the same re-evaluation is less likely.

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is UnHerd’s US correspondent.

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