Spare yourself the indignity of purchasing Buzzfeed alumnus McKay Coppins’ attempted hagiography of outgoing U.S. Senator and failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The cliff notes are as follows: Romney is a loser, a loner, and has been trying to plot a spoiler political party where he and Joe Manchin act as kingmakers for the political left. Ahem. This, from a man who referred to himself as the “turd in the punch bowl,” and whose wife and kids refuse to visit him in Washington. Observe.

After realizing he was one of the few January 6th pearl clutchers in the Republican Party, Romney – who ran out of the Senate chamber before even Vice President Mike Pence was evacuated – schemed about his own presidential campaign wherein he fantasized about debating Donald Trump, per Coppins, published in The Atlantic.

“Romney almost went through with it, this maximally disruptive, personally cathartic primal scream of a presidential campaign. But he abandoned it once he realized that he’d most likely end up siphoning off votes from the Democratic nominee and ensuring a Trump victory,” Coppins writes.

“So, in April, Romney pivoted to a new idea: He privately approached Joe Manchin about building a new political party. They’d talked about the prospect before, but it was always hypothetical. Now Romney wanted to make it real. His goal for the yet-unnamed party (working slogan: “Stop the stupid”) would be to promote the kind of centrist policies he’d worked on with Manchin in the Senate. Manchin was himself thinking of running for president as an independent, and Romney tried to convince him this was the better play. Instead of putting forward its own doomed candidate in 2024, Romney argued, their party should gather a contingent of like-minded donors and pledge support to the candidate who came closest to aligning with its agenda. “We’d say, ‘This party’s going to endorse whichever party’s nominee isn’t stupid,’ ” Romney told me.”

It’s not clear how far Romney and Manchin’s “centrist” – aka globalist – scheme has reached yet, but the picture of Mr. 47% painted by Coppins is scarcely encouraging for his dwindling base of supporters, donors, and fellow travelers.

Instead of some renegade rebelling against a new status quo in his party – MAGA – Romney cuts a pathetic figure who says he loses sleep over Trump. His wife and children won’t visit with him in Washington, D.C., and he appears to sit at home eating gifted salmon steaks on hamburger buns, drowned in ketchup. No, this isn’t satire:

He tried to make [his Capitol Hill townhouse] nice, so that Ann would be comfortable when she visited. A decorator filled the rooms with tasteful furniture and calming abstract art. He planted a garden on the small backyard patio. But his wife rarely came to Washington, and his sons didn’t come either, and gradually the house took on an unkempt bachelor-pad quality. Crumbs littered the kitchen counter; soda and seltzer occupied the otherwise-empty fridge. Old campaign paraphernalia appeared on the mantel, clashing with the decorator’s mid-tone color scheme, and a bar of “Trump’s Small Hand Soap” (a gag gift from one of his sons) was placed in the powder room alongside the monogrammed towels.

It continues:

In the “dining room,” a 98-inch TV went up on the wall and a leather recliner landed in front of it. Romney, who didn’t have many real friends in Washington, ate dinner alone there most nights, watching Ted Lasso or Better Call Saul as he leafed through briefing materials. On the day of my first visit, he showed me his freezer, which was full of salmon fillets that had been given to him by Lisa Murkowski, the senator from Alaska. He didn’t especially like salmon but found that if he put it on a hamburger bun and smothered it in ketchup, it made for a serviceable meal.

This is truly precipitous decline from a man who once took up the mantle of his party’s presidential nomination. Romney is even said to have e-mailed a story about how much his Republican colleagues loathe him to his advisers, referring to himself as “the turd in the punch bowl.”

In the parlance of the bête noire of his debate fantasies: SAD!