Aaron Sorkin Takes Back Calling for Democrats to Nominate Mitt Romney

Aaron Sorkin is taking back his suggestion that the Democratic party nominate Mitt Romney as its 2024 presidential candidate, expressed in a New York Times op-ed that was published online Sunday.

After Sorkin’s piece dropped, President Joe Biden announced that he was ending his 2024 re-election bid and would be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.

Later, Sorkin’s West Wing actor Josh Malina posted what looked like a screenshot of a message from the writer.

“I need to borrow your Twitter account again,” Sorkin’s note began before he offered a suggested tweet: “I take it all back. Harris for America!”

A rep for Sorkin confirmed the accuracy of his note and the Times piece was updated with a note about Biden dropping out of the 2024 race.

In his op-ed Sorkin, the Oscar-winning scribe of The Social Network who also penned the 1995 political film The American President, pointed out the similarities between West Wing’s fictitious President Bartlet and the real-life political landscape this year, including an attempted shooting of a character and a president contending with a serious illness.

Like Biden, Sorkin wrote, Bartlet also faced the question of whether or not to run for re-election. The screenwriter noted that his character triumphantly decided to run, and says in a third season opener, “I’m going to win.”

But, Sorkin noted, “because I needed the West Wing audience to find President Bartlet’s intransigence heroic, I didn’t really dramatize any downward pull that his illness was having on his re-election chances. And much more important, I didn’t dramatize any danger posed by Bartlet’s opponent winning.”

Sorkin added that “if, as a result of Bartlet revealing his illness, polling showed him losing to his likely opponent” — and if that opponent was “a dump truck of ignorance and bad intentions” who “had been a dangerous imbecile with an observable psychiatric disorder who related to his supporters on a fourth-grade level and treated the law as something for suckers and poor people” and “was a hero to white supremacists” — Bartlet would have dropped out of the race.

“The problem in the real world is that there isn’t a Democrat who is polling significantly better than Mr. Biden,” Sorkin continued. “And quitting, as heroic as it may be in this case, doesn’t really put a lump in our throats.”

His solution? “The Democratic Party should pick a Republican,” he wrote. “At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.”

Sorkin argued that the pick “would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice.”

He added that the choice “would be putting our money where our mouth is: a clear and powerful demonstration that this election isn’t about what our elections are usually about it, but about stopping a deranged man from taking power.”

To conclude, he emphasized: “But mostly, [the move to elect Romney] would be the end of Donald Trump in presidential politics.”

3:24 p.m. This story has been updated with Sorkin taking back his Romney idea and endorsing Harris.

This story was originally published on July 21 at 9:25 a.m.