The LDS reporter who got the Romney scoop: He’s ‘friendly’ and ‘relentlessly fair’ but likes ‘making trouble’

Unlike Bob Woodward’s clandestine meetings with chain-smoking Watergate informant Deep Throat in a darkened parking garage, journalist McKay Coppins’ secret interviews were conducted at odd hours in Mitt Romney’s Washington office or town house, where the Utah senator ate frozen salmon on a hamburger bun.

Why did Romney share his personal journals and emails with the 30-something reporter as well as sit for 45 on-the-record, tell-all discussions about the state of the Republicans’ — and the senator’s own — soul?

“I had read a number of his articles, and he was a good and entertaining writer,” Romney tells The Salt Lake Tribune. “And he was not mean-spirited.”

Plus, like Romney, Coppins is a Latter-day Saint.

It “made sense to have someone who was a member of my faith,” Romney says. “Someone outside might be confused by my motivations.”

Coppins was “easy to talk to,” the senator adds. “He’s so friendly and disarming you can kind of forget he’s not necessarily your friend.”

He “probably should have taken more thought,” Romney quips, “about giving him my journals.”

The soon-to-be-retired politician is hardly the only one who describes Coppins’ combination of winning affability and hard-hitting reporting — both of which shine through in his new political biography, “Romney: A Reckoning.”

“McKay is someone you want to spend time with. He’s a genuinely friendly and pleasant person,” says The Atlantic’s editorial director, Denise Wills, “but he can be tough when he needs to be.”

He is “relentlessly fair,” Wills says. “His commitment is to the truth, which is the guiding principle in the [Romney] book.”

There is at least one person, of course, who doesn’t find McKay’s personality or work — and that of Romney, in fact — to be appealing: Donald Trump.

From boyhood to BYU and beyond

Young McKay grew up as a wordsmith in greater Boston, devouring newspapers and imagining a career as a novelist.

At 15, he got a gig writing a weekly humor column for the Holliston Tab, poking fun at the town’s foibles.

He discovered a columnist named Peter Chianca, who wrote features for Massachusetts papers and was funny and honest and real, but it was in a journalism class at Brigham Young University, owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where Coppins awoke to his future.

“We read a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in The Oregonian about a kid with facial deformities going through dramatic surgery,” he recalls. “A light clicked on and I thought, ‘This is what I want to do’ — tell deeply textured stories but they don’t have to be fiction.”

As the 2009 editor of BYU’s campus newspaper, The Daily Universe, he was responsible for a series of stories investigating how student government used its funds. Someone had leaked to the paper a semester’s worth of expenditures.

“We published them and, as you can imagine, that did not go over well at BYU,” he recalls, with a smile. “We ruffled a lot of feathers by publishing leaked documents. But I was idealistic and stubborn about journalism and speaking the truth to power.”

Coppins insisted that the paper run the stories on the front page and “a lot of people got mad, including some administrators,” he says. “There was talk of an Honor Code investigation of me because the document was stolen. Luckily, I don’t think that Honor Code investigation happened.’

Joel Campbell, a BYU communications professor, knew Coppins “was destined for great things in journalism” the day that investigative front-page story — including information about the students’ expenditures on things like travel and dry cleaning — hit the press.

During Campbell’s 20-year BYU career, Coppins’ student reporting “still remains some of the most exceptional and gusty I have seen,” he says. “McKay brought us the closest I can remember to the university shutting down the student newspaper, but it didn’t happen because the reporting was solid.”

Kaye Nelson, who was a faculty adviser to the student paper, harks back to Coppins as a student.

“We wished we could have cloned him,” Nelson says. “He was mature beyond his years, a seemingly seasoned reporter in a basic print journalism class. If that sounds like gushing, it was warranted.”

The paper hired Coppins as a desk editor, who eventually moved up to the editor’s chair, she says. “He was a great leader with students and worked well with the professional staff. He was organized, pleasant and thorough. He expected quality and got it from students who were his peers, and they respected him.”

It doesn’t surprise Nelson that Coppins has blossomed into a nationally recognized writer.

“He is a natural-born journalist with a keen eye for a good story,” she says, “and he is tenacious in tracking down relevant details that draw readers in.”

Taking his bite out of the Big Apple

In 2010, Coppins was offered a choice of two BYU-arranged internships in New York — one with Newsweek and the other with the Daily News.

His professors thought he should go to the News because, they said, he was a “hard-news guy.”

If a homicide occurred, the tabloid would send him “where the body is and you’ll get to talk to neighbors,” Coppins says, “and there was a part of me that was interested in that — like getting thrown into the deep end by a big New York City newspaper would be cool.”

But his dream had always been magazine writing. He chose Newsweek.

So Coppins and his new bride, Annie, landed in a dorm room in Morningside Heights near Harlem that was “insanely hot with no air conditioning.”

Two weeks into the internship, however, the editors gathered the staff into a room and announced the Graham family was putting Newsweek up for sale.

“A lot of veteran staffers started to jump ship,” creating, Coppins acknowledges, more opportunities for interns. “It gave me a chance to prove myself, so my six weeks turned into three months. Then they offered me a job as a reporter.”

It was “extremely, extremely lucky,” being there at the right place and right time.

He sent an email to all the writers, saying he was willing to take any assignment, no matter how large or small.

Columnist Jonathan Alter asked Coppins if he understood HTML (a computer language), and, if so, could he update Alter’s website.

Coppins didn’t know, but he agreed — and then learned how to do it.

Another reporter asked him to get some “color” on a Wall Street trader who was being investigated by going to some of the bars where folks would know the man.

The Latter-day Saint journalist had never even tasted alcohol, due to the church’s Word of Wisdom prohibition on it, so he googled “Wall Street bars” and what people would be drinking.

He went from bar to bar, taking notes and sending them to the reporter, who praised the intern for his details.

“I remember thinking ‘I love this.’ This was definitely what I wanted.”

Annie Coppins, who had known McKay since childhood, even read his high school columns, believed in her future husband and his writing talent.

“When he talked to my parents about marrying me, my parents asked him if journalism didn’t work out, what his backup plan was,” Annie says. “McKay answered that it would either be business school or law school. As you know, journalism isn’t always the easiest career path, but he’s worked hard and is incredibly talented and has made a great career for himself.”

She adds with a chuckle that her folks have “recently decided maybe writing will work out for him after all.”

A risky career move

During his 18 months at Newsweek, Coppins contributed to the magazine’s coverage of the early stages of Romney’s historic 2012 presidential quest, including a famous cover with Mitt’s head on a dancing missionary with the words, “The Mormon Moment.”

Then came an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Coppins had been sending some of his stories to Ben Smith, a Politico writer with an influential blog, hoping that Smith would link to them.

Smith soon was recruited to become editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, a startup online magazine and asked the ambitious writer to meet with him.

The BuzzFeed pitch, according to Coppins, went like this: “Look, you’re 23 years old. You’re not going to get to be the lead presidential campaign reporter in Newsweek for a couple cycles. If you come join me, I’ll put you on the trail right away, I’ll cover all your expenses. You can travel as extensively as you want. And you can be the lead reporter on the Romney campaign.”

It was a career risk, leaving a venerable magazine with a huge national audience to go to this “cat meme website” that was just venturing into news.

Still, Coppins found it appealing — and Annie was on board.

“We decided together we were going to take big risks with his career … going to an online startup, and turning down some offers that we knew weren’t right for us,” she says now. “I’ve always known he would be successful.”

Coppins isn’t sorry he leaped.

Smith taught him everything he needed to be a first-rate political journalist — how to cultivate sources, how to ignore certain talking points, how to engage with politicians, and how to get scoops.

The editor even asked a lot of questions about Coppins’ Mormonism (which, the reporter says, were probably inappropriate), but Smith liked the idea of having a staffer on the beat who understood Romney’s religion.

It turns out, however, that the campaign handlers liked Coppins’ faith less.

On the Romney barnstorming beat

As a reporter covering Romney’s 2012 presidential push, Coppins could see that the candidate’s discomfort talking about religion was not because he was ashamed of his faith. It was because consultants had convinced him that his Mormonism was a “liability.” And it was best to change the subject.

“That was really a shame because I think it was one of reasons he came across as artificial or inauthentic,” Coppins says, “because he couldn’t share this part of him that was most central to who he was. Take away the Mormonism and then you also take away his business career to a certain extent, and you’re left with this kind of shell.”

That also meant the aides didn’t let Coppins talk to Romney.

“I was on the trail, on the plane but because I was writing a lot of stories about him and his faith and how it intersected with politics and how it shaped him,” he says, “his campaign kept me at arm’s length.”

The reporter sympathized with Romney’s uneasiness because the White House hopeful got a lot of questions that the media wouldn’t ask of other politicians. The press often portrayed his church, Coppins says, as “this exotic, alien thing.”

Coppins became known on the bus as “the Mormon Wikipedia,” enlightening his counterparts about scripture and history, he says. “I would have to give them a capsule answer in 30 seconds.”

The writer’s first in-depth conversation with Romney didn’t happen until 2019, when the senator arrived in Washington to take his place representing Utah in the U.S. Senate.

When he actually got to talk to the politician, Coppins says in a recent “Mormon Land” podcast, he quickly realized that Romney “has a kind of puckish sense of humor. He can be irreverent. He is well attuned to the absurdities of political life and more willing than many political leaders to kind of dish about his experiences.”

Their shared faith was sometimes a help in his work, Coppins says now, and sometimes a hindrance.

In the long run, though, being the answer man and providing context for other reporters gave the Latter-day Saint journalist a career — and possibly a bestselling book.

‘He tweeted about my wife’

One thing this 70-something senator and millennial journalist definitely had in common was the “complex relationship American Mormon conservatives have with Donald Trump.”

For the reporter, it began two years before Trump announced his run for the White House.

Due to a storm in New Hampshire, Coppins ended up on Trump’s plane and spent 36 hours with the man in his Florida mansion, Mar-a-Lago. He wrote about it for BuzzFeed, dismissing Trump’s “career” as a “long con that the blustery billionaire has perpetrated on the country for 25 years by repeatedly pretending to consider various runs for office.”

At the time, it was “a kind of surreal, bizarre run-in with a loudmouth celebrity,” Coppins recalls. “And as the years have passed, that experience has taken on more meaning and also kind of become more foreboding, in some ways, because you realized what was to come: public harassment campaigns against individuals.”

The piece questioned Trump’s political plans and aspirations, and the future president was not pleased.

He responded to the story “by throwing a theatrical tantrum, complete with Twitter insults, blacklist threats, and a ‘Breitbart News’ hit piece,” Coppins wrote in a 2020 story for The Atlantic.

Reporters must have a thick skin and be ready to be attacked — like Trump calling Coppins “true garbage” and a “scumbag” and planting “fake stories” about the journalist — but when the candidate tweeted about his wife, Coppins says, it really “got under my skin.”

Trump saw a picture of Annie on Coppins’ phone when he was interviewing the tycoon and said, “That’s a good-looking woman.”

When Coppins cited that in his piece about Trump, the candidate insisted “he was being sarcastic when he complimented my wife.”

To Coppins, that illustrated what kind of man Trump was, and “he’s shown it again and again and again in the 10 years since then.”

After Trump’s 2016 victory, Coppins’ first assignment for his current employer, The Atlantic, was to cover the Republican nominee’s initial news conference [at New York’s Trump Tower] as president-elect.

“I’ll admit that was a dirty trick to play on a new writer,” says Yoni Appelbaum, who was his first editor at The Atlantic.

But Coppins showed “what he’s consistently displayed since,” Appelbaum says, “a good eye, great writing and a knack for capturing the larger stakes of any event.”

Still, Coppins recognized that “the further [Trump’s] havoc-wreaking campaign got, the more opportunities came my way — and I was hardly alone.”

Faith versus journalism

As a teen, Coppins noticed two sides in himself. One was the “upstanding Mormon youth who wanted to be nice and didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.” The other “liked making trouble.”

Young McKay wasn’t a rebellious teen but enjoyed writing articles for his student paper that generated controversy. Coppins wondered if these traits would be in tension or whether he could have both.

“Your faith, like journalism,” his dad told him, “is about pursuing truth.”

That clicked. He could be an “active practicing member of my religious community,” Coppins concluded, “and a reporter who is at times hard charging.”

Whether an investigative piece on Alden Global Capital (a hedge fund that has gobbled up many newspapers), a cover story on the Trump kids, a profile of Mike Pence or a personal essay about his faith, Coppins says, “the best journalism is about getting to the truth.”

And it is the truth that he believes Romney was also after as he shared late-night leftovers with a friendly and yet fearless reporter.

Author in Utah

McKay Coppins will be in Utah to discuss his new book, “Romney: A Reckoning.”

• Nov. 2, 6 p.m., First Baptist Church of Salt Lake City. (At publication, this event was shown as sold out.)

• Nov. 3, 11 a.m., BYU’s Varsity Theater.

• Listen to The Tribune’s latest “Mormon Land” podcast with Coppins.

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.