The Radical Conversion of Mike Lee
30 min read
When it was finally his turn to speak during the televised roll call at this summer’s Republican National Convention, Senator Mike Lee wore the canny smile of a man who was selling something bigger than his home state of Utah. “It’s a place where we love freedom, we love the Constitution,” Lee said, “and we despise tyranny.”
Watching Lee from some 20 feet away as he spoke, I felt a twinge of déjà vu. Hadn’t I heard him deliver these same patriotic bromides at a Republican convention before? Yes, I had. It was 2016, in Cleveland. Lee had gone there with a radical agenda: to sabotage Donald Trump’s nomination for president. First, he maneuvered his way onto the convention’s rule-making committee. 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. I was there, watching the drama up close, talking with Lee and other ringleaders in a cramped corridor just outside the committee room as they schemed and argued and tried every trick imaginable to outsmart the party enforcers who’d been tasked with putting down their rebellion.
In public remarks and private discussions leading up to Trump’s coronation, Lee invoked nothing less than the survival of American democracy. “I’d like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution,” Lee said on Newsmax TV. “That he’s not going to be an autocrat, that he’s not going to be an authoritarian.”
Cleveland was the climax of Lee’s year-long effort to stop Trump. During the primaries, he had implored activist leaders to rally their organizations behind his best friend, Senator Ted Cruz, who had emerged as Trump’s chief rival. 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. When the Cleveland plot fell apart, it marked Lee’s third failure. He still refused to endorse the party’s new standard-bearer. Then, that fall, Lee spotted one final opportunity. 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. “If anyone spoke to my wife, or my daughter, or my mother, or any of my five sisters the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person,” Lee said in a Facebook Live video. “I certainly don’t think I’d feel comfortable hiring that person to be the leader of the free world.”
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.
What began as a reluctant, transactional alliance—advising on judicial picks, working with Trump on criminal-justice reform—soon became personal. Lee grew to relish dining at the White House and flying on Air Force One. He told friends that Trump was funny, charming, kindhearted. Before anyone could make sense of it, Lee emerged as one of Trump’s staunchest defenders. He steered the Senate Republicans’ strategy to acquit the president following his first impeachment. 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.
Listening to Lee as he addressed the 2024 convention in Milwaukee, I was baffled by the impossible symmetry of it all. Here was the senator speaking about freedom and tyranny—not as a rebuke of the man who he’d feared was an authoritarian, but as an endorsement of him. “Utah, the 45th state admitted to the union,” Lee declared from the convention floor, “today proudly casts all of its 40 delegate votes for President Donald J. Trump!”
To hear Lee’s friends, allies, and former staffers tell it—and they did, by the dozens, though many requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from the senator—Lee is all but unrecognizable. Once a good-natured Latter-day Saint whose idea of edgy was doing corny impersonations of his fellow senators, he now regularly engages in crude conspiracy theories. Once a politician who seemed to be fashioning himself as a modern Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the right, Lee is now a very online MAGA influencer. It’s as if Ned Flanders became a 4chan troll.
Lee will be a top candidate for attorney general if Trump wins in November, according to people close to the former president. This might prove to be the most treacherous position in Washington in 2025: the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, serving at the pleasure of a lawless president who has vowed to wield the justice system against his political opponents as “retribution” for his own criminal prosecutions. Trump has openly toyed with terminating the Constitution. He has also floated subversive ideas—military tribunals for his critics, religious litmus tests for immigrants—that, during his first term, would have been opposed by a remnant of principled Republicans. Today it’s unclear whether any such remnant exists. In our many hours of conversation this spring and summer, Lee did not sound to me like a man interested in holding the line.
The day after his floor speech in Milwaukee, Lee sat down across from me at a small table inside the convention’s security perimeter. 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. I asked him whether he’d changed over the past eight years.
“All of us change as times change,” he said, shrugging.
As our conversation went on, however, the senator’s tone shifted. He began to insist that, in fact, he hadn’t changed; that what the world was seeing and hearing from him was no Trump-induced abnormality but rather the realest, rawest version of himself. “Those who know me,” Lee said, “know that privately, this is who I am.”
Everyone I talked with wanted to know the same thing: What happened to Mike Lee? Of all the possible answers to that question, this one—that nothing has changed about the man—is the least satisfying. It may also be the most revealing.
Rex Edwin Lee was a giant of the conservative legal movement. Raised in small-town Arizona, Lee graduated as valedictorian from Brigham Young University and finished first in his class at the University of Chicago Law School. At 36, he was recruited to become the founding dean of BYU’s law school, a position he held until a newly elected president, Ronald Reagan, came calling. Serving as solicitor general during Reagan’s first term, Lee argued before the Supreme Court with “an astonishing rate of success,” according to the New York Times’ obituary, winning a great majority of his cases and earning renown, according to former Justice David Souter, as “the best solicitor general this nation has ever had.”
But Lee’s real legacy is independence as much as intellect. Not long after Reagan appointed him, the Times noted, “White House political aides soon discovered that he was not automatically their man.” Lee was reliably conservative on a host of matters—busing, abortion, prayer in schools—yet he sometimes set aside his own views, and those of the administration he represented, for what he described as “the broad interests of the nation.” The resulting conflicts with Reagan’s Republican Party, and criticism from far-right conservatives, wore Lee down. Resigning his post in June 1985, Lee remarked of the political pressure he faced: “I’m the solicitor general, not the pamphleteer general.”
Lee had seven children. His two sons followed him into the legal profession. The elder, Thomas, would emulate his father’s career arc: graduating with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School, arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court, and accepting an appointment to the Utah Supreme Court. Six and a half years behind him was Rex’s other son, Michael.
The younger Lee moved at age 10 with his family to the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C., and spent his formative years there. His in-home Mormon mentor was a congressman named Harry Reid; his friends and classmates were the children of politicians. Lee still remembers the first time he was allowed to skip school and watch his father litigate before the high court, he told me. The sight of those ancient lawgivers, carved into marble, adorning the courtroom walls. The booming baritone of the marshal. The nine justices emerging from behind a grand red-velvet curtain. The senator doesn’t recall the details of the case his dad was arguing. But he knew that he’d stepped into a realm of the powerful and profound—and, before long, he found himself wanting to be a part of it.
Like his father and brother, Lee attended BYU for his undergraduate degree. Unlike them, he stayed there for his legal studies. There was no shame in this; Rex, who had since returned to BYU, this time as the university’s president, had helped build the law school into one of America’s top-tier programs. Even so, it was apparent that Mike wasn’t a legal prodigy like Thomas. While the older Lee was clerking for the U.S. Supreme Court, the younger brother failed, in his first attempt, to qualify for the BYU Law Review. Classmates described this as a humiliating setback: The Law Review was effectively a prerequisite for earning prestigious clerkships down the line, and Lee was suddenly forced to consider the limitations of his own career.
“I remember having conversations with him. He was disappointed he didn’t get onto Law Review, trying to figure out, ‘Well, where do I go from here?’ ” Elizabeth Clark, Lee’s classmate, said. “He anticipated, you know, having a career more like his father or brother.”
In 1996, during Mike’s second year of law school, his father died of cancer. He was just 61 years old. Rex was eulogized by his eldest son, as well as by two Supreme Court justices—the Reagan appointee Sandra Day O’Connor and Byron White, a retired Kennedy appointee—who celebrated the solicitor general for something far more enduring than his obvious legal genius. “He was,” White said, “the epitome of integrity.”
Mike Lee did eventually qualify for the Law Review and was on staff during his final year in law school, with Clark as editor in chief. By that point, however, his priorities were shifting. Classmates recalled that he seemed more interested in arguing for Republican policies than debating constitutional minutiae. “He started to come across as really partisan—frankly, in a way that stood out, because it was the opposite of his father’s reputation,” Richard Blake, who worked alongside Lee on the Law Review, told me. Clark added: “Mike was trying to sort of form his own identity and way forward. And I think political life was definitely part of that.”
What Lee lacked in achievement—he did not graduate with honors—he made up for with raw ambition. In the decade after he finished law school, he checked the boxes of elite American jurisprudence: prosecuting for a U.S. Attorney’s Office, working in private practice, and clerking for two federal judges, including Justice Samuel Alito. What changed the course of Lee’s career was a stint as general counsel to Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. A wealthy moderate from the state’s most powerful Republican political family, Huntsman took a liking to Lee. Before long, the young lawyer was making a name for himself among Utah’s ruling class of Republicans.
One of those Republicans was Enid Mickelsen, a former congresswoman who would soon become chair of the state party. Mickelsen had the highest regard for Rex Lee—she had taken his constitutional-law class at BYU and “idolized him like everyone else did,” she told me—and had heard great things about his son. But before long, Mickelsen began to develop misgivings about Mike Lee. She remembers thinking: “Something’s off with this guy.”
In 2009, around the time Barack Obama’s presidency sent the GOP spiraling into paranoia and mass folly, Lee began holding pop-up “Constitution seminars” across Utah. Meeting with small groups of activists, he would warn them about the dangerous consolidation of power in the executive branch and the creep of an imperial presidency. There was not yet a visible movement of Gadsden flags and tricorn hats. Yet Lee was every bit the Tea Party prototype, declaring war on a corrupt Republican establishment while raising hysterical alarms about Obama and the Democratic Party. Lee never embraced the “birther” lie—he was too smart for that—but he found ways to wink and nod at the fringe of the new right. Most notable, as he parlayed the popularity of those seminars into a long-shot bid for the U.S. Senate in 2010, Lee promised that, if elected, he would work to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.
“That’s when the hair on the back of my neck stood up,” Mickelsen told me. “He was telling people what they wanted to hear, not what was true.”
Lee had the perfect foil in Senator Bob Bennett, an institutionalist and a close ally of the GOP leader Mitch McConnell. Bennett had spent decades cutting deals and keeping Washington working. Now he was the target of a populist uprising led by the unlikeliest of agitators: the Beltway-raised progeny of Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general. When GOP delegates voted in the May 2010 nominating convention, Bennett placed third. Lee and the top vote-getter, the businessman Tim Bridgewater, advanced to a runoff.
By that point, the Tea Party wave had begun to crash over the Republican Party—Rand Paul in Kentucky, Marco Rubio in Florida. Suddenly, in the six weeks between the Utah convention and the runoff election, the Senate Conservatives Fund poured money into Lee’s campaign, while FreedomWorks exported a ground game to Utah on his behalf. These organizations were promising to remind a wayward GOP of its foundational small-government ethos. With their help, Lee won the runoff by two points—fewer than 5,000 votes—and, having secured the GOP nomination in safely red Utah, was on his way to Washington.
Lee was now indebted to leaders of a conservative movement who viewed him as their proxy in a brewing war with the Republican establishment. Several of Lee’s contemporaries back then told me that, had the new senator been accepted by McConnell and his allies, he would have fallen in line and become a team player. But he wasn’t—and he most certainly didn’t.
“Had he not gotten caught up in Tea Party movement when he first got elected, he might have had a very different career. He might have been much more of a mainstream Republican,” Spencer Stokes, Lee’s first Senate chief of staff, told me. “But Mike craves respect. Those groups on the right gave it to him. And because there were no accolades from the mainstream, he stayed where the accolades were.” (Lee’s response to this: “I stayed where the truth was.”)
He was certainly convincing. Several of Lee’s colleagues from that era told me they believed that, perhaps more than any other conservative in Congress, Utah’s new senator was the real deal. 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. Which, they said, is what makes his career arc so baffling.
“If someone told me back then that Mike Lee would sell his soul to Donald Trump, I would have never believed it,” Joe Walsh, the former representative from Illinois who came to D.C. alongside Lee in the Tea Party class of 2010, told me. “I still can’t believe it.”
Lee did not enjoy his first two years in Congress, several of his friends told me. Republicans were in the minority, and he was adrift—not effective enough to be a real problem for the GOP leadership, but not relevant enough, like Rubio and Paul, to garner much attention of his own. Lee passed no meaningful legislation, made few real friends, and built no obviously distinct profile. And then along came Ted Cruz.
Lee first met Cruz in November 2010 at a Federalist Society event in D.C. Lee told the former solicitor general of Texas that he’d seen him argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and was impressed; Cruz told Lee he planned to run for Senate in 2012 and wanted an endorsement. Lee had never given an endorsement before. When Lee decided to back him—“You’re probably the closest thing to my ideological twin that I’m gonna find,” he told Cruz—he envisioned a new dynamic duo in the Senate, a pair of separated-at-birth freedom fighters who would storm McConnell’s castle and revolutionize the GOP.
Things didn’t quite work out that way. Lee and Cruz did indeed become inseparable in 2013 as the Republican Party clashed with the Obama administration on spending, a government shutdown, and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Yet while Lee logged countless hours thinking through policy proposals and parliamentary tactics that Republicans might try, it was Cruz who became the front man. The new senator from Texas was less interested in incremental wins than in dramatic standoffs that would prove his never-say-die mettle to the GOP base. Several former Lee staffers described to me his intermittent fury with Cruz for taking legitimate legislative plans and turning them into kamikaze missions ahead of a presidential run in 2016.
Still, Lee could feel the tide shifting in his and Cruz’s direction. Since the 2010 midterm elections, Tea Party conservatives had continued to barrage the GOP establishment. Now, with the 2016 presidential cycle drawing near, Lee sensed an opening to seize control of the party—and Cruz appeared best positioned to lead the charge. It didn’t matter, at this point, that Lee was the Robin to Cruz’s Batman; Robin would be in line for a Cabinet post at minimum, or, more likely, either a Supreme Court seat or the role of attorney general.
Of course, Donald Trump had other ideas. 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. The scorched-earth campaign that ensued—questioning Cruz’s citizenship, calling his wife ugly, suggesting that his father had played a part in John F. Kennedy’s assassination—was just as unsettling to Lee as Trump’s philosophical incoherence was. The Republican front-runner had no apparent reverence for the nation’s founding documents; he had, in one meeting with congressional conservatives, promised to protect Article XII of the Constitution—despite the Constitution having only seven articles. If anything, he could come across as a liberal, swearing off entitlement cuts and defending Planned Parenthood during the campaign.
I observed to Lee how, at that point, he seemed bewildered. He nodded.
“Bewildered,” he said, “and frightened.”
This was a disorienting time for Tea Party conservatives. The long-tread-upon GOP base had finally risen up against the domineering party elite, demanding transparency and a return to small-government piety—only to then flock to a thrice-married philanderer for whom lies were a second language and conviction came only in the form of self-glorification.
“This is not how I would’ve predicted things,” Lee told me. “Or wanted things.”
The closest he ever came to making sense of it, Lee said, was in conversation one day with a trusted member of his staff. The way the staffer saw it, American politics had turned into a raucous bar fight at a Wild West saloon. “Donald Trump walks up to the bar, and he’s got a beer bottle in his hand, and he breaks the beer bottle in half over the counter and brandishes it,” Lee said, recalling the metaphor. “Immediately, a bunch of people in the room get behind him. Because he’s being assertive. And odds are lower, as they perceive it, that they’ll be hurt if they get behind him.”
Lee didn’t care about getting hurt—at least, not back then. He began taking meetings with fellow conservatives in Washington—elected officials, think tankers, movement leaders—in hopes of preventing Trump’s nomination. The best idea anyone could come up with was an effort to free the convention delegates in Cleveland. This would set a dangerous precedent, effectively disenfranchising the millions of voters who’d chosen him as their party’s nominee. But to Lee, Trump represented enough of a menace to justify such drastic measures.
In the weeks before the convention, both the senator and his wife procured spots on the rules committee that would finalize the bylaws governing the event. The leadership of the Republican National Committee had hand-selected a group of experienced party officials to manage the rule-making process. And the chair of that committee, as luck would have it, was Enid Mickelsen—hardly a Trump enthusiast, yet an enforcer of party norms all the same.
The uprising was a flop. After he failed to fix the rules against Trump in committee, Lee resorted to histrionics. When it came time for the whole convention to vote on the rules, Lee stood at the fore of Utah’s delegation shouting “No!”—a scene captured by media outlets worldwide. The senator then began telling Utah’s delegates that they would still have the chance to oppose Trump’s nomination on the convention floor, because Cruz had carried the state’s primary contest. But this wasn’t true. Cruz was no longer technically a candidate for president, so pursuant to the proceedings of a convention, no state could cast its delegate votes in his favor. Lee knew that—but charged ahead anyway, dramatizing his show of defiance. “He lied to those Utah delegates. He manipulated them,” Mickelsen said. “All so he could get them riled up for this demonstration on the floor to prove how anti-Trump he was.”
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. But everyone who was there and who watched his wrangling knew better. Numerous Utah Republicans who spent time with Lee in Cleveland told me he was devastated by the failure to stop Trump’s nomination. One of them was Todd Weiler, a state senator who’d tutored Lee as a teaching assistant in law school. 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.
“Was he wrong?” Weiler asked.
After the convention fiasco, Lee went dark for a while. He mused to friends about leaving the GOP; about registering as an independent, or perhaps as a Libertarian. Then came the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016. Lee immediately called a meeting with his top staffers. They agreed that it was best for him to keep quiet and let the situation play out. 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.
I had long wondered, given Lee’s foresight in diagnosing the dangers of Trumpism, whether he harbored any regret about allying himself with the man. 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.
“I was a jerk,” the senator said. “I was a jerk to him.”
It was a remarkable moment. After all of Trump’s cruel, ad hominem venom throughout that 2016 campaign, I said to Lee, you’re the jerk?
“Fair enough,” the senator said. “But his decisions don’t have to determine mine.”
In the weeks after Election Day 2016, Trump Tower was the world capital of kissing and making up. Republicans who’d spent part of the past year and a half denouncing Trump were now coming to terms with reality: They needed him. This was a tactic of self-preservation, but even more so, it was an opportunity. The incoming president had no perceptible governing agenda. In that vacuum, everyone realized, ordinary lawmakers were about to become extraordinarily powerful. 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.
To hear Lee tell it, he made the trip for a different reason.
“At the request of some mutual friends, I went to Trump Tower after he was elected,” he recalled. The purpose of this summit, Lee said, was to “clear the air.” He described a conversation in which he tried politely to defuse tensions as Trump harped on the senator’s past criticisms. Finally, Lee told me, he ran out of patience.
“I just said, ‘Look, let me be frank. I just got reelected. You just got elected. So, for the next four years, we’re gonna have some interaction. So let me just be very clear about where we stand,’ ” Lee recalled. “ ‘Insofar as you undermine constitutionally limited government … I will be a thorn in your side, a pain in your neck. I will be your worst nightmare. You will wish I was never born.’ ”
Lee was hissing every syllable now, leaning toward me, reenacting this moment of machismo. “ ‘And insofar as you fight to protect those things, I’ll be your friend and your ally, and we can work effectively together,’ ” Lee concluded, offering a practiced scowl that suggested he’d told this story before. “ ‘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. His first year in office, Trump traveled to Utah and Lee rode along on Air Force One. “I got to know him as a person. I realized that there’s a lot more to him than people realize,” Lee told me. “He has deep empathy for Americans. You find him to be a genuinely likable person.”
By this point, Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, and onetime skeptics like Lee were racing ahead, eager to squeeze as many policy and political wins out of this unforeseen presidency as possible. 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. (He wanted the border wall, but opposed the funding contrivances Trump pushed for.)
The true test, though, was always going to be what Lee would do when Trump began abusing power. The first impeachment trial was one harbinger. Some Republicans concluded that, although Trump’s actions—withholding aid from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while pressuring him to investigate Joe Biden—were inappropriate, they did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. Lee went further. He met with White House attorneys to plot Trump’s defense. He bragged on Fox News that he was going to “embarrass the heck out of the Democratic Party.” He said, in a floor speech before voting to acquit, that the Zelensky phone call was “exactly the sort of thing the American people elected President Trump to do.”
This rationale for Trump’s behavior—that he’d been handed a mandate by pissed-off voters to change the way Washington operates, etiquette and standards be damned—worked for many politicians in many places. Utah was not always one of them. Trump had won the state with just 46 percent of the vote in 2016. And although one wing of the Republican base there became Trumpier during the president’s first two years in office, the other wing became that much more moderate. The result, in 2018, was Utah electing as its newest U.S. senator a man known for being perhaps Trump’s biggest antagonist in the Republican Party: Mitt Romney.
Once again, Lee found himself playing second fiddle. And, according to friends, he could not stand it. His annoyance with Romney exerted a sort of magnetic push on Lee, moving the senior senator closer to the MAGA base with the junior senator’s every motion away from it. “Maybe,” Romney told one confidant, according to my colleague McKay Coppins’s book Romney: A Reckoning, “he just can’t stand being in my shadow.” 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. He needed to argue that, actually, Trump had done something right.
Lee began to see, his friends told me, something fundamentally unfair about the way the president was treated. The more he studied the man, the more he came to see him as bold, even valiant, taking on all comers and keeping a sense of humor about it. By the time of the president’s reelection bid in 2020, the senator who’d once tried everything to derail Trump’s nomination was now one of his biggest cheerleaders.
“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. “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the well-being and the peace of the American people.”
It was a stunning remark—comparing Donald Trump to one of the LDS faith’s most heroic figures, who symbolizes humility and selflessness—that angered even some of Trump’s most ardent Mormon supporters. Lee had to quickly walk it back.
This episode, however, was about more than an errant turn of phrase. The senator had begun to view Trump as something greater than a president. 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. Lee was more than smitten; he was spellbound. And it was under that spell that he turned his back on American democracy.
The senator likes to tell a tidy, self-respecting story about his role in Trump’s attempted coup. 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.
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. When no states did so, and the votes were tabulated, and Biden was declared the winner, there was nothing left to do but certify those counts on January 6, 2021. And that’s what Lee did.
But this version of events omits certain key details that call into question both his honesty and his allegiance to the Constitution.
In early November, the day the networks called the election for Biden, Lee sent multiple text messages to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, endorsing the work of the attorney Sidney Powell. Lee called Powell a “straight shooter” and asked that she be brought into the White House to advise the president. 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. This was before Eastman wrote his infamous memo arguing that the vice president had the authority to unilaterally overturn the election results on January 6. 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.”
With the December 14 deadline closing in, Lee told Meadows “there could be a path” to overturning the election if states appointed alternative electors. Meadows replied that he was working on it. But when the states cast their electoral votes in favor of Biden on December 14—and sent no competing electors to Congress—it was over. Legally, constitutionally, and otherwise: Trump was defeated. Lee acknowledged as much to me in our conversations, saying repeatedly that there was no recourse for Trump at that point.
Yet in his texts to Meadows, which were obtained by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection and published by CNN, Lee kept pushing. On December 16, he asked Meadows for the White House to provide “some guidance on what arguments to raise” so senators might object to the certifying of Biden’s victory. As late as January 4, he told Meadows, “I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow.” The senator said that he was “trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend,” adding, “We need something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning. Even if they can’t convene, it might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a statement indicating how they would vote.”
Lee wants credit because, unlike his friends Ted Cruz and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, he ultimately voted to certify all the states’ election results. But what he did prior to that was every bit as much an affront to the Constitution, to the peaceful transition of power, and to the institutions of American democracy.
To this day, the senator denies that he—or even Trump—did anything wrong. “Remember,” Lee told me, “he in fact left office.” The senator paused. “Now, sure, he did some unconventional things beforehand—”
I started to laugh. “Unconventional?”
He shot me a look. “Some unorthodox things,” Lee said. “Things that I would not have advised him to do.”
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.
Lee smirked. “Who actually tried to kill Mike Pence?” he asked. “Who actually tried to kill him?”
I pointed out that people chanting to hang Pence had come within yards of the vice president. That was surely more than unconventional, right?
“Okay. Let’s strike the word unconventional,” Lee replied. “He handled it in a way that I wouldn’t have advised and didn’t advise.”
When I asked Lee whether he had any regrets about the events leading up to January 6, he thought for a moment.
“Well, you know,” Lee said, “had I known that my texts would be leaked to the public selectively, perhaps I would’ve said less in text messages.”
The senator doesn’t seem to regret actively participating in an attempted coup. He regrets being caught.
As we sat in his Washington office this past spring, I asked Lee whether he still worried about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies. He responded by running through the former president’s accomplishments—a reduced regulatory footprint, lower tax rates, the usual—but skirted any reference to January 6.
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.
So, again, I asked: Is he still worried?
“I worry about [that] with every president, with every person we elect to any office,” Lee replied. “That’s why I believe so strongly in federalism and separation of powers.” He said that every recent president has expanded the powers of the executive branch, and he cited Biden’s unilateral actions on forgiving student loans as the most recent example that concerned him.
I conceded that the expansion of presidential authority in the post-9/11 era was cause for concern. But is there really a comparison between using executive power for loan forgiveness and using executive power to overturn election results and stay in office?
Lee glared at me. “Did he stay in office?” he asked.
This, it seemed, was the best argument that Mike Lee—self-celebrated constitutionalist, sounder of alarms about an “imperial presidency”—could muster. Because Trump had failed in his attempt to subvert the election, it was no big deal.
“You know, both his brother and his father—as the solicitor general and as a judge—they felt bound by precedent. That was their north star,” Blake, Lee’s old law-school classmate, told me. “Mike’s a politician. I’m not sure he feels bound by anything like that.”
In the summer of 2022, Lee launched a new Twitter account: @BasedMikeLee. Allies noticed that the senator’s personal style had begun to evolve rather dramatically, between shaving his head, befriending MAGA figures such as Benny Johnson and Donald Trump Jr., and using saltier language than anything his peers thought was in his vocabulary. But it was the embrace of based—Millennial slang for being one’s unapologetic true self, regardless of what others might think—that signaled a transformation to the broader world. Two of Lee’s friends told me they worried he was having a midlife crisis.
To give a sense of the senator’s new online persona: During one stretch this summer, he used the vulgar sexual phrase raw dogging to describe Mormons’ approach to life; amplified a baseless far-right rumor that Biden was having a medical emergency aboard Air Force One; earned nearly 10 million views by posting a debunked video that purported to show a “badass” Trump golfing one day after he was shot; and insinuated more than once that Biden might in fact be incapacitated or even deceased, suggesting that a “proof-of-life” video be provided by the White House to satisfy his and his followers’ concerns.
I was surprised, then, to discover just how different Lee was in person. There were no taunts, no confrontational insults. The guy who posted on X to his hundreds of thousands of followers about false-flag operations against conservatives was mellow and circumspect in our interactions. At one point, speaking in his office, Lee described the current attorney general, Merrick Garland, as a brilliant and decent man who’d found himself in the untenable position of running an ostensibly nonpartisan Justice Department while facing, Lee believes, pressure from a president who “literally tried through multiple angles to imprison” his political rival.
Lee himself could, ironically enough, soon find himself in that very position. When I asked Lee if he would accept Trump’s offer to become attorney general, he asked to discuss the topic off the record. I declined. After thinking for a moment, Lee told me he’d have “a lot of questions” about the job before accepting it. But then he clarified: The questions would primarily be about himself—about his career, whether it was the right fit—and not about the man he’d serve.
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. When I asked Lee about the importance of insulating the attorney general’s office from the self-interested whims of a president, his answer wasn’t reassuring.
“We speak in romanticized terms about depoliticizing this or that arm of the government,” Lee said. “You don’t want a government that operates in a manner that’s detached from the electoral process and from individuals who are elected … If you insulate the Department of Justice—you truly insulate it from political realities altogether—that means they’re subject to no one. And that’s its own kind of problem.”
But what happens when those political realities drive the nation toward catastrophe? Lee knows that the next four years could be crucial for the future of American politics, jurisprudence, and democracy. A former president and his allies have been criminally prosecuted. And Trump has shown every intention of getting revenge.
“I think there are some doors that just shouldn’t be opened,” Lee told me. 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? I put that question to Weiler, the state senator who was Lee’s teaching assistant back in law school.
“Umm. I, I, I—I don’t know,” Weiler answered. “Certainly, he’s evolved into a Trump loyalist.”
The senator himself believes that the prosecutions of Trump were motivated by a desire to appease the Democratic Party’s base. 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.
The first time I visited Lee’s office in Washington, I kept staring beyond him at a bronze statue in a corner of the room. It depicted a man, elegantly dressed and evidently deep in thought, his right hand hovering just below his chin as he looked off in search of answers. It was Rex Lee.
I asked the senator whether he ever wonders what his father would have made of all this.
“All the time,” Lee answered, looking wistful. He closed his eyes. “All the time.”
He didn’t elaborate, and I found myself wondering too.
This article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “The Radical Conversion of Mike Lee.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
