Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for president in 2012 and a United States senator for Utah from 2019 to 2025, best known for breaking with his own party over Donald Trump. Born in Detroit in 1947, he is the son of George Romney, the chairman of American Motors, governor of Michigan and himself a presidential candidate in 1968, whose campaign collapsed after he said he had been brainwashed about Vietnam. He spent thirty months as a Mormon missionary in France, took joint law and business degrees at Harvard, and in 1984 co-founded Bain Capital, a private-equity firm that made him a fortune of some 250 million dollars through leveraged buyouts — a record his opponents used against him in both presidential runs. In 1999 he took over the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, then mired in a bribery scandal and heavy losses, and delivered them in surplus. He was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002, and in 2006 signed a health-care law requiring individual coverage with subsidies and an insurance exchange. It became the model for the Affordable Care Act, which he then spent years campaigning to repeal. He lost the 2008 nomination to John McCain, won it in 2012, and lost to Barack Obama by about four points, damaged by a secretly recorded remark dismissing forty-seven per cent of Americans as dependent on government. His warning that Russia was America's chief geopolitical adversary was mocked at the time and cited approvingly later. Elected to the Senate in 2018, he was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump at his first impeachment trial in February 2020 — the first senator in history to vote to remove a president of his own party. He declined to seek re-election in 2024.
- Lived: 1947 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: governor, senator
