The Radical Conversion of Mike Lee

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

83% : He told friends that Trump was funny, charming, kindhearted.
74% : His first year in office, Trump traveled to Utah and Lee rode along on Air Force One.
68% : " 'Insofar as you undermine constitutionally limited government ...
59% : He spoke the language of limited government -- constitutionalism as a check on the executive branch, federalism as a hedge against the abuses of Washington -- in a more grounded and less delusional way than many of his Tea Party allies did.
52% : "Cleveland was the climax of Lee's year-long effort to stop Trump.
52% : Lee will be a top candidate for attorney general if Trump wins in November, according to people close to the former president.
50% : Trump had won the state with just 46 percent of the vote in 2016.
49% : The true test, though, was always going to be what Lee would do when Trump began abusing power.
49% : Lee acknowledged as much to me in our conversations, saying repeatedly that there was no recourse for Trump at that point.
48% : If anything, he could come across as a liberal, swearing off entitlement cuts and defending Planned Parenthood during the campaign.
46% : He was an avatar of masculinity and individuality, a middle finger to the governing class that had shown insurgents like Lee the same disrespect it had shown Trump.
46% : But Eastman had already gone public with bogus, uninformed statements suggesting that Democrats had cheated to defeat Trump -- and Lee called Meadows's attention to the attorney's "really interesting research.
45% : "To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni," Lee said at a rally in Arizona in the fall of 2020, pointing to Trump nearby.
45% : The senator had begun to view Trump as something greater than a president.
43% : What began as a reluctant, transactional alliance -- advising on judicial picks, working with Trump on criminal-justice reform -- soon became personal.
43% : He needed to argue that, actually, Trump had done something right.
37% : " 'Do I make myself clear?' "The obvious questions around this account notwithstanding -- from what I've gathered, never in his life has Lee spoken to anyone this way -- he and Trump did seem to broker a peace.
36% : Then, he led a push by Never Trumpers to unbind the convention's delegates -- that is, to release them from their obligation to vote for Trump as the party's nominee.
36% : The only realistic way to keep Trump in office -- the only constitutional way -- was if certain states submitted alternative slates of electors to be considered by Congress when the Electoral College votes were cast on December 14.
36% : I reminded Lee of Trump's specific comments since leaving office -- about terminating the Constitution, about using his office to seek retribution against political opponents -- and reminded him of his own prescient warnings, back in 2016, about Trump becoming an authoritarian.
35% : "Lee insisted then and now that his real mission in Cleveland was to correct long-standing problems in the party's rule book; that it had nothing to do with resisting Trump.
35% : Republicans who'd spent part of the past year and a half denouncing Trump were now coming to terms with reality: They needed him.
34% : Hours after the Access Hollywood tape was published, he became one of the first Republicans in Congress to call on Trump to quit the race.
34% : Hence the pilgrimage of countless erstwhile critics -- Republicans from every possible rank, including ones who'd called Trump a con artist, a cancer, and worse -- who came bearing the gift of surrender.
34% : (He wanted the border wall, but opposed the funding contrivances Trump pushed for.)
33% : "Now, sure, he did some unconventional things beforehand -- "A mob of protesters tried to kill the vice president inside the U.S. Capitol building, I responded, and Trump did nothing to stop them.
32% : After he failed to fix the rules against Trump in committee, Lee resorted to histrionics.
32% : If Trump does in fact win, and does in fact choose Lee as his attorney general, it's a near certainty that Trump will lean on him -- as he did Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions -- to use the Justice Department for his political purposes.
31% : Because Trump had failed in his attempt to subvert the election, it was no big deal.
30% : When I showed him a photograph -- the senator himself, on the convention floor back in 2016, screaming in opposition to a rules package that effectively ended the campaign to free delegates to vote against Trump -- Lee grimaced.
30% : A few hours later -- to the shock of his aides -- the senator posted a four-minute video online calling for Trump to quit the race.
29% : "The senator himself believes that the prosecutions of Trump were motivated by a desire to appease the Democratic Party's base.
26% : Legally, constitutionally, and otherwise: Trump was defeated.
25% : And Trump has shown every intention of getting revenge.
24% : Then, after Trump lost his reelection bid, Lee conspired with right-wing extremists inside and outside the White House to keep the president in office.
24% : Trump has openly toyed with terminating the Constitution.
23% : If the Republican base demands that Trump deliver on the "retribution" he's been promising -- perhaps against critics such as former Representative Liz Cheney and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley -- then, according to Lee's logic, it might be warranted for the Justice Department to carry out the will of the people.
21% : It goes something like this: Lee began to suspect that the people advising Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and the ideas they were putting into his head, were unhelpful.
19% : In fairness to Lee, he wasn't a rubber stamp for the administration -- he broke with Trump on raising the debt ceiling, reauthorizing surveillance measures, funding a wall at the southern border, and other issues.
17% : After laying waste to the large, talented field of Republican hopefuls in the primaries, Trump wound up in a head-to-head contest against Cruz.
17% : He described a conversation in which he tried politely to defuse tensions as Trump harped on the senator's past criticisms.
16% : With Cruz headed for defeat in the spring of 2016, Lee had tried to broker a meeting between the senator from Texas and their Florida colleague, Marco Rubio, hoping they might form a joint ticket to take down Trump.
16% : But to Lee, Trump represented enough of a menace to justify such drastic measures.
16% : Now that this one is open, he added, "you ought to do everything you can to slam the door."Would Lee actually defy Trump and slam the door?
14% : A couple of weeks later -- after Powell had held a press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters during which she spouted wild allegations and claimed that Trump had "won by a landslide" -- Lee recommended to Meadows a new lawyer: John Eastman.
11% : "And then Trump was hired as the leader of the free world -- triggering an about-face from Lee that rivals even that of J. D. Vance, who once wrote that he feared Trump could be "America's Hitler" before becoming his running mate.
11% : When Romney became the only GOP senator to vote for Trump's conviction, it wasn't enough for Lee to say that Trump had done nothing wrong.
10% : At one point, as Weiler and I compared notes about that mutiny, I mentioned that Lee had been motivated by a belief that Trump represented a threat to American democracy.
6% : Instead, the more we dwelled on Lee's actions during the 2016 campaign -- suggesting that Trump was an aspiring autocrat, attempting to sabotage his nomination, calling for him to quit the race -- the more contrite Lee sounded for having doubted Trump in the first place.

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