The Last Man in America to Change His Mind About Trump

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

71% : Trump will be in Utah later this month for a fundraiser, and Cox hopes they can find time to talk.
59% : As he sat in the pews of a Latter-day Saint ward the next morning, an idea came to him: He should write Trump a letter.
56% : I noted that many Republicans before him had attempted this strategy -- ingratiating themselves to Trump so that they could steer his presidency.
55% : "Surely, I told him, there was a way to show Christian love to Trump and his supporters without endorsing the man for president.
48% : We'd been talking on and off all year, and not once in our conversations had he given any indication that he would support Trump.
48% : Trump placed a distant third in the state's 2016 Republican primaries, and carried the state in the general election with a meager 45 percent plurality of the vote.
48% : Only half supported Trump in 2016, 20 points lower than the share that supported a typical Republican presidential nominee.
46% : His chief opponent, Phil Lyman, was a state representative best known for having received a presidential pardon from Trump.
44% : But he hoped Trump might be receptive to such flowery appeals.
41% : Asked if he would finally cast his first vote for Trump in 2024, Cox said he would.
37% : He did not endorse Trump during his own recent Republican primary, when he was fending off challenges from multiple MAGA rivals and had much more to gain politically.
37% : And within his own party, at least, he could think of few figures who qualified as enemies more than Trump.
37% : In 2020, he'd initially said he would vote for Trump, before changing his mind.
35% : He didn't vote for Trump in 2016 or in 2020, and had publicly pleaded with his party to nominate anyone else in 2024.
35% : Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland and a friend of Cox's, laughed when I asked about the idea that endorsing Trump could be an "act of depolarization," as Cox had described it to me.
35% : You know, if you shoot someone on Fifth Avenue..."Read: The new Trump is always the old TrumpIn the weeks after our interview, Trump seemed determined to prove that his brief flirtation with magnanimity and restraint was over.
34% : So how did a governor who's built his brand on standing against hatred and extremism in politics talk himself into supporting Trump?
33% : He conceded that his party's nominee had largely reverted to old habits -- "playing the hits," Cox called it -- but said he stood by what he'd written in that letter to Trump and planned to vote for him.
32% : From Cox's perch in late July, with Trump leading every major poll and the Democratic Party in chaos, the prospect of a Reagan-style landslide looked within reach.
32% : She has made little secret of her distaste for Trump; earlier this year she endorsed Nikki Haley for president (while her husband remained officially neutral in the GOP primary).
29% : I pointed to the long list of things Trump has done and said that Cox has found abhorrent, and Cox insisted he still found all the same things abhorrent.
26% : For every Mitt Romney, it seemed, there were now two Mike Lees, scrambling to memory-hole their former opposition to Trump and reinvent themselves as MAGA adherents.
25% : He also made clear that he's not among those claiming that Trump found God after his near-death experience: "I'm not an idiot.
25% : When I asked if there was anything Trump could do to lose his vote, Cox shrugged.
25% : But as our conversation continued, Cox seemed eager to change the subject from Trump himself to Trump's supporters.
22% : Throughout our 90-minute interview, Cox rejected the "MAGA" label, called Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, "antithetical" to his brand of Republicanism, and at various points seemed even to quibble with the idea that he'd endorsed Trump at all.
21% : But Cox was relieved that Trump -- at least so far -- had not responded to the assassination attempt with escalatory rhetoric or threats.
20% : Cox, wearing a slim-cut suit and socks with cartoon pictures of Abraham Lincoln, leaned forward as he explained how supporting Trump was a way of practicing what he preached.
18% : The idea had originated in the fevered final weeks of the 2020 election, when Trump was already spreading stolen-election lies and indicating that he wouldn't accept defeat.
8% : Cox says he didn't expect it to become public, but of course it leaked, and the day after Trump formally accepted his party's nomination, with a speech that included references to "crazy Nancy Pelosi" and illegal immigrants coming from "insane asylums," Cox found himself fielding questions about the letter at a press conference.

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