Oprah Winfrey denied Monday that she asked Mitt Romney to join her on a unity presidential ticket for the 2020 election. Instead, the mogul said, she merely reached out to encourage the former GOP presidential candidate to run as an independent in that contest.
Romney reportedly told author McKay Coppins that Winfrey had approached him in late 2019 about running together on a unity ticket in 2020. The assertion was among the many details Coppins included in the upcoming book “Romney: A Reckoning.”
But in a statement provided to the TheWrap, Winfrey’s representatives said, “In November 2019, Ms. Winfrey called Sen. Romney to encourage him to run on an Independent ticket. She was not calling to be part of the ticket and was never considering running herself.”
Romney, who spoke out against Donald Trump in 2016 but nevertheless accepted his endorsement when he ran for the Senate in Utah two years later, lost the 2012 presidential election by more than 5 million votes.
Notably, during that election cycle, Romney helped spread the “birther” conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama faked his birth certificate and wasn’t eligible to be elected president. That falsehood was most famously championed by former President Trump.
According to “Romney: A Reckoning,” Romney said Winfrey, who was a prominent Obama supporter, pitched the ticket as a way to “to save the country” from a Trump reelection.
