Romney’s comments were made in an interview with political journalist John Dickerson at The Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

Early in his remarks, he looked back on his own failed attempt to win the White House. “I was talking about policy when it would have been more effective to talk about why I favor that policy—to get wages up,” he said. He also argued that the Republican primary process poses a challenge to GOP nominees: They spend a year talking to partisan Republicans, who are older and whiter than the country as a whole, about issues they care about most, while their Democratic rivals spend the primary process speaking on college campuses and to gatherings of minority groups.

Republicans need those votes in the general election, he explained, but by the time they start to pursue them it’s too late––and to win in future cycles, he theorized, GOP candidates must go before those groups and make their pitches earlier.

Romney also declared that the current system of campaign finance regulation is a mess––it would be better to allow unlimited donations to candidates and their campaigns, he argued, than to have a system where unlimited donations are allowed, but only to SuperPacs, which are not run by the candidates or their campaigns, who could at least be held accountable for whatever messages that they put out.

This year, he said, “it’s unfortunate that both on the left and right, Bernie Sanders has run a campaign that said all your problems, middle class Americans are because of those big banks and Wall Street… and on the right our nominee is saying, it’s these people here, it’s Mexicans coming across the border… it’s them and it’s Muslims… I’m afraid the things Mr. Trump has said has been unfortunate branding for our party...”

Would Romney feel better about Trump if he stuck to scripted remarks going forward?

“No,” Romney said.

Near the end of the interview John Dickerson pressed Romney: Who is more qualified to be president, he asked, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? Romney said that he wasn’t going to make news, and wanted to focus on campaigning for candidates he supports. Even so, earlier in the interview, he made a point of quoting writer and satirist P.J. O’Rourke: “Hillary Clinton is wrong on every issue,” Romney approvingly repeated, “but she’s wrong within the normal parameters.”