Mitt Romney More Likely to Support Biden Than Trump in 2024: Biographer

Republican Senator Mitt Romney may support President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election over former President Donald Trump, according to Romney's biographer.

Romney, who last month announced his impending retirement from the Senate, has had an adversarial relationship with Trump for most of the former president's political career. Trump last week denounced Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee for president, as "a total loser" who allegedly "begged" to be appointed secretary of state in 2016.

Hostile rhetoric between the men ramped up over the course of Trump's presidency and after, recently reaching a crescendo with the publication of McKay Coppins' biography Romney: A Reckoning—a book that features several moments of harsh Trump criticism from Romney, including his description of the ex-president as "really not smart."

During an interview released in an episode of The Press Box podcast on Tuesday, Coppins speculated that Romney's disdain for the former president could lead to him endorsing Biden "late" in the 2024 election cycle, while making it clear that Romney had not told him that he is planning to do so.

"I mean, there's no way he'll support, endorse [or] vote for Donald Trump," Coppins said. "Will he somehow lend his support to Joe Biden? I don't know the answer to that. Romney is still a conservative. That's the tricky thing about all this. He feels completely alienated from his party."

"He disagrees with Joe Biden on all kinds of stuff," he continued. "But he's also struck up this kind of, weird kind of old guy mutual respect friendship with him ... I would keep an eye out for whether Romney does something like endorse Joe Biden late in the election ... I would not be shocked if he did."

In response to a request for comment on the speculation, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek that Romney is "a certified loser who announced his retirement after everyone learned he was serving himself instead of his constituents."

"He has a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome and should get the proper help he requires," Cheung added.

Newsweek reached out for comment to the office of Romney via email on Tuesday evening.

Romney endorsed no presidential candidate in 2020. The senator has also said that he did not vote for Trump in either of the elections where he was the GOP nominee, while declining to say whether he voted for Biden in the last election.

However, after being nominated as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, Romney did accept an endorsement of his own campaign from Trump.

Coppins, who based his book on extensive interviews with Romney and access to the senator's diaries, said during his podcast interview that Romney accepted the endorsement because he thought of Trump as only a "buffoonish celebrity" at the time.

"He thought of Donald Trump as basically a fun, gossipy, charismatic, buffoonish celebrity," said Coppins. "He didn't think of him as a serious political figure. Trump was on Fox News at that point, kind of floating a lot of crazy conspiracy theories about [former President] Barack Obama."

"Romney said ... 'I just thought that he was a celebrity—you know, a crackpot,'" he continued. "But there are lots of crackpot celebrities that endorse presidential candidates."