Republican Mike Lee has been a United States Senator representing the state of Utah since 2011, but a careful look at Lee’s dozen-plus years in office shows that — in some respects — Utah has had two very different Mike Lees in office during that time, reflective of the two very different Republican parties Lee has found himself in.
As the circa-2016 video of Lee currently being amplified by Republicans Against Trump demonstrates (below), Lee has dramatically changed his tune on the most consequential event his GOP has faced during his tenure: the rise and subsequent dominance of Donald Trump, and the related power of the MAGA movement over Republican lawmakers.
Lee says Trump is unfit to lead and that he wouldn’t want Trump to talk to his wife or daughter or to work for any enterprise where he had a say in the hiring. “If anyone spoke to my wife [like that],” Lee says, it would be trouble.
That Mike Lee no longer exists.
— Blue California Native (@WFPBLifer) October 7, 2024
Lee even asked Trump to quit his run for President, in light of the once-thought-shocking “Access Hollywood” tape that exposed Trump boasting about grabbing women by the privates because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
GOP Senator Mike Lee: “If anyone spoke to my wife, or my daughter…the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person, wouldn’t want to be associated with that person, and I certainly don’t think I’d be comfortable hiring that person to be the leader of the free… pic.twitter.com/qbMfVGsWyC
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 7, 2024
Lee’s dramatic turnabout since then is encapsulated in the opening paragraph of a recent Atlantic article called How Mike Lee Learned to Love Donald Trump. It begins: “In 2016, he tried to stop Trump from becoming president. By 2020, he was trying to help Trump overturn the election. Now he could become Trump’s attorney general…”
Lee led a major Never-Trumper contingent all the way into the Republican National Convention in 2016 — back when Lee professed he would have kept Trump away from his wife and daughter — when the Senator’s most specific objection to Trump was a fear that as President, Trump would not “uphold the Constitution.”
The twice-impeached Trump, defeated in 2020, fulfilled Lee’s fears about Constitutional relegation — leaving Washington under protest, accused of inciting a mob to attack the Capitol to help him hold on to power.
But Trump also, somehow, allayed Lee’s concerns of 2016 — fears he expressed at the convention that Trump would be an “autocrat” and “authoritarian.” Either these were allayed or, as Lee’s critics say, those things just became less important.
The facts are that since Lee said that he found Trump to be loutish, sexist, and a poor choice to lead the “free world,” the Utah Senator has expressed absolute fealty to Trump, an about-face critics call a simple case of principles being sacrificed on the altar of power.
(NOTE: Lee’s fellow Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who has blasted the former President’s conduct and rejected the opportunity to fall in line, is serving out his term after announcing he won’t run again in the changed GOP landscape. Yet even Romney, who finds Trump unqualified, hasn’t endorsed his opponent — despite being, unlike Lee, is no longer subject to the need for votes.)