When it became apparent on Election Night in 2012 that President Barack Obama had won reëlection, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, sat on a couch in the hotel suite where he had been awaiting the returns and began writing a concession speech. His wife, Ann, was next to him; other family members and campaign advisers lined the seats nearby. An aide suggested to Romney that he be “pastoral.” He would have time later to continue to press his ideas for the country. Romney’s reaction was one of disbelief. “My time on the stage is over, guys,” he said. “I mean, I’m happy for the time I’ve had there, but my time is over.” Ann Romney was equally emphatic. “We’re done,” she said.

This scene appears toward the end of “Mitt,” a documentary released in 2014, which shadowed the Romney family in the course of his unsuccessful 2008 and 2012 bids for the Presidency. The film’s concluding sequence shows the couple bidding farewell to their Secret Service detail and returning home shortly after the 2012 election. Romney settles into an armchair, his wife across from him. The moment is quiet and reflective—a narrative coda before the credits roll. The story line, however, that Romney’s second failed attempt for the Presidency marked his final exit from public life, proved to be inaccurate. In November, 2018, after the retirement of Senator Orrin Hatch, Romney was elected to the U.S. Senate in Utah. He was seventy-one years old. This week, Romney returns, once again, to the national political stage, as one of the leading protagonists in the third Presidential-impeachment trial in American history.

The uneven trajectory of Romney’s political career makes this a moment of genuine suspense, both for him and for American democracy. The animating rationale for Romney’s political career largely has been his image as a private-sector turnaround artist, based on his business career in management consulting and private equity, which made him fabulously wealthy. Romney’s ardent supporters also tout his character and integrity, qualities shaped by the Mormon faith, which occupies the center of his life. Yet questions about what he truly stands for have long hampered Romney’s efforts to attain higher office. In “Mitt,” one of the more human moments comes during the 2008 campaign, when Romney ruefully acknowledges the public’s perception of him. “When this is over, I will have built a brand name,” he tells his family. “People will know me. They’ll know what I stand for.” The camera zooms in. “The flippin’ Mormon,” he said, his face broadening into a doleful grin.

In the 2008 Republican Presidential-primary contest, Romney had sought to recast his image from the moderate, coalition-building governor of Massachusetts to an uncompromising fiscal and social conservative. In 2012, he managed to win the nomination, campaigning with a focus on the economy and the argument that he would put it on better footing than President Obama could. In both of these bids for President, Romney often seemed to be paralyzed by caution, applying a management-consulting approach to his campaign, calculating where the data points best aligned and calibrating his candidacy accordingly. “He’s not a very notional leader,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a longtime aide, said, in a 2007 interview with the Des Moines Register. “He is more interested in data, and what the data mean.” Fehrnstrom was describing Romney’s management style, but that sentiment also helps to explain the difficulty Romney has had in conveying conviction to voters.

Romney considered running for President yet again, in 2016, but ultimately demurred. Instead, during the primary season, he delivered an extraordinary speech denouncing Donald Trump, who had become the Republican front-runner, as “a phony, a fraud” who was “playing the members of the American public for suckers.” In January of last year, just before Romney was sworn into the Senate, he published an op-ed assailing Trump in the Washington Post. The piece asserted that “a presidency shapes the public character of the nation,” and that a President should “demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect.” In this regard, Romney wrote, the President’s “shortfall has been glaring.” Romney promised to “speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.”

The most abiding—and instructive—political influence on Romney over the years has been that of his late father, George Romney, a Republican former governor of Michigan who was known for his candor and principled stance on civil rights. George Romney made his fortune as an automobile executive before he got into politics. In 1968, he made his own ill-fated attempt for the Presidency. Before Mitt Romney’s first debate with President Obama, he had scrawled “Dad” on a notepad at the podium, for inspiration. In the book “The Real Romney,” from 2012, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, reporters from the Boston Globe, recount a campaign-trail encounter in New Hampshire in which a young girl asked Romney what he would tell her classmates to make them want to be politicians. At first, Romney jokes, “The answer is: nothing. Don’t do it. Run as far as you can.”

But when he turns serious, he invokes the advice he says his father offered years ago: “He said, ‘Don’t get into politics as your profession. . . . Get into the world of the real economy. And if someday you’re able to make a contribution, do it.’ ” This is the essence of Romney’s pitch, and it has been ever since his days as a dealmaker in the 1980s and 1990s. He’s made his money—a mountain of it, in fact—and believes, as his father did, that he now owes a debt to the country that made a place for him.

In taking on Trump, Romney seems finally to have found the clarion voice that so often eluded him while he was running for President. In April of last year, after the release of the Mueller report, Romney issued a statement in which he said he was “sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President.” In October, he called the President’s appeals to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden “wrong and appalling.” He was also harshly critical of the President for his abrupt pullout of American troops from northern Syria, at the expense of Kurdish allies. “What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a bloodstain in the annals of American history,” he said, in a speech on the Senate floor. Most recently, with the Senate impeachment trial approaching, Romney expressed support for hearing testimony from witnesses and suggested that he was interested, in particular, in summoning John Bolton, the former national-security adviser who reportedly described the White House’s attempt to secure politically expedient investigations from Ukraine as a “drug deal.” (Romney, and also Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, Susan Collins, of Maine, and Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, are widely seen as representing the decisive votes on the question of whether witnesses will be permitted in the trial proceedings.)