Tim Alberta: “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.”
“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.”
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