Republican politicians are worried that Mitt Romney’s new book will reveal their true feelings and private conversations about Trump

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Sen. Mitt Romney’s disdain for former President Donald Trump’s brand of politics is no surprise.

So when the Utah Republican and 2012 GOP presidential nominee announced on Wednesday that he wouldn’t seek a second term in the Senate, he said that the former president was “unwilling to lead on important matters.”

And in “Romney: A Reckoning,” an upcoming book to be released in October, he’ll go into detail about how some of his GOP colleagues truly feel about Trump, a development which has them concerned, according to The New York Times.

The book, written by The Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins, is based in part from hours of interviews with Romney. Coppins was afforded access to the senator’s emails, along with his personal diary, according to The Times.

“For two years, I met with Mitt Romney in his DC townhome as he grappled with what his party — and his country —were becoming,” Coppins wrote on X on Wednesday. “The stories he told me from inside the Senate were extraordinary and damning.”

Multiple books written during the Trump era were built on the two-faced nature of many GOP lawmakers who would publicly praise Trump but privately trash him.

The Romney biography threatens to attribute the comments in a way few of those books had. So far, the one major exception might be the tapes of now-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California criticizing Trump in the wake of the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol. The leaked audio sparked a brief firestorm. 

The book will be released shortly before the start of voting for the 2024 GOP presidential primaries and caucuses, which could anoint Trump as the nominee once again or crown a new candidate as the party’s standard-bearer.

Romney in July urged Republicans to turn the page from Trump in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, arguing that the party needed a nominee with “character,” while also asking that donors not encourage a slew of candidates to remain in the race too late — which could give the former president an easy avenue to win the nomination next year.

A former GOP presidential nominee, Romney has rarely been shy about discussing Trump.

Romney called Trump a “con man” during a blistering 2016 speech. Just before joining the Senate, the senator wrote a Washington Post op-ed that charged the then-president for failing “to ris[e] to the mantle of the office.” Romney was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump on an impeachment charge related to improperly pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. He also voted to convict Trump for inciting the Capitol riot.