It was in his freshman year at Stanford University that a young Mitt Romney took an early step toward establishing a political identity all his own. Students had turned against the Vietnam War, and in May 1966, they staged a sit-in at the office of the university president to protest the draft.

“In Mitt Romney’s mind, this is not how you make change,” Romney biographer Scott Helman told FRONTLINE. “He is the kind of guy who would work within an institution, would follow the rules.”

In keeping with that spirit, Romney took to his own form of protest that spring day. Sporting khakis and a blazer, he joined a counter-demonstration seeking to restore order on the traditionally buttoned-down Stanford campus. His message, spelled out on a picket sign, was “Speak out, don’t sit in.”

“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—­people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics, and made incisive observations about his warped, toddler­like psyche. Romney recalled one senior Republican senator frankly admitting, “He has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.”

This dissonance soon wore on Romney’s patience. Every time he publicly criticized Trump, it seemed, some Republican senator would smarmily sidle up to him in private and express solidarity. “I sure wish I could do what you do,” they’d say, or “Gosh, I wish I had the constituency you have,”