Mike Lee’s Journey From Trump Critic to Trump Supporter

MILWAUKEE—Eight years ago today, Sen. Mike Lee was so despondent about the Republican Party’s nomination of Donald Trump that he wondered aloud whether the party would survive. 

“I don’t know,” he said, pausing as he searched for an answer. “I don’t know. In the past, for my entire life, the Republican Party has been known as the natural refuge of the conservative. If we find ourselves with a candidate who doesn’t maintain that status, I don’t know what happens. I don’t know how to live in that world. I don’t know how the Republican Party maintains its vitality. I don’t think it does.”

The GOP, he worried, could be like Van Halen without David Lee Roth—a band with superficial similarities to the real thing but so fundamentally different that it wasn’t worth preserving. “If you studied the music, if you read the sheet music, it’d be like, ‘Yes, that makes sense,’” Lee said. “But you listen to it—it’s not Van Halen. Maybe Trump is Sammy Hagar? I don’t know. When the salt loses its savor, it’s not good for much. And, so, if conservatives no longer have a home in the Republican Party—I hope that day never comes. If it does, something else will emerge as the home of conservatives.”

Lee made those comments during a long conversation we had at a restaurant outside of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Two days earlier, he’d led a last-ditch attempt to block Trump’s nomination by freeing GOP delegates to vote their conscience. Among elected Republicans, Lee was without question one of the most outspoken opponents of Donald Trump in the country. He would later call on Trump to give up the nomination after the release of the Access Hollywood tape and, in November, he voted for Evan McMullin, a fellow Utahn who ran as an independent. 

A lot has changed.

Mike Lee is now one of Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, even in a thoroughly Trumpified Republican Party. When he endorsed Trump in 2020, Lee compared the president to Captain Moroni, a “revered Book of Mormon military commander who inspired soldiers to fight for their religion, freedom, and family.” Earlier this year, he endorsed Trump “wholeheartedly”—days before the first primary votes were cast.

I agreed with Lee’s assessment of Trump in 2016, and I believe the events of the intervening eight years have vindicated the concerns he outlined in Cleveland eight years ago. So we caught up on Wednesday—this time in Milwaukee—and spent 30 minutes inside the security perimeter at the Baird Center discussing how and why we ended up in such different places. After a question about the news of the day—a briefing he was set to receive yesterday afternoon on the security failures that led to the attempted assassination of former President Trump—we touched upon the size of government, debt and deficits, the rule of law, Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and January 6 and its aftermath. Our conversation can be found below, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Steve Hayes: It’s eight years tomorrow from our conversation in 2016. A lot has happened between now and then. Before we get to that, let me ask you about the news of the day and what’s happening. You guys are getting a briefing this afternoon on the assassination attempt, what do you expect to hear? Are you satisfied with the answers that we’ve gotten, to the extent that we’ve gotten any answers from the federal government?

Mike Lee: The short answer is no, I’m not satisfied with the answers we’ve gotten so far. The information we’ve gotten so far doesn’t really tell us anything about why on Earth you would allow an elevated platform, 148 yards away from the place where the former president was speaking, to just go unsupervised—especially when you had people in the building. According to one source, there were sharpshooters in that building. They just didn’t go up on the roof. 

Hayes: It was their holding area, from what I understand. 

Lee: They had multiple eyewitness accounts of people saying, “Okay, this guy climbed up on the roof, and he’s got a rifle.” It would have been the easiest thing in the world to radio that in and say, “Hey, maybe don’t bring the president out yet.” Or if he was up there, “Take him off the stage. We’ve got to deal with this.”

Hayes: Do you have any sense of what you’re likely to hear in this briefing? 

Lee: Yes, I can almost script it out already, because things like this tend to go as follows: “We’ve devoted all available personnel to evaluate and ascertain where the failures occurred and we’re going to figure this out.” It’s going to be more or less an information-free zone.

Hayes: When you just look at what happened, I would argue that you don’t need a lot of data points, because you saw what transpired, and by definition, that means there was inadequate security. And yet, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle says she’s not considering resigning. Should she be?

Lee: My instinct says, yes, she should. But it’s possible that there are things that I don’t know. 

Hayes: I’m a “wait for the facts” guy. I like to go slower. I don’t like to jump to conclusions, but what happened, happened.

Lee:  Indeed. What happened, happened. I’ve also heard from multiple reliable sources, people close to the Trump campaign, that the Trump campaign, and on several occasions through the head of the president’s Secret Service detail had, over the last two years, requested more resources than they’ve had, saying we’ve got some vulnerabilities. And those were denied.

Hayes: I saw [U.S. Rep] Mike Waltz make a similar claim. Do you know if they have written back? Presumably, they wrote letters to the Secret Service Because the Secret Service obviously is strenuously denying that and say that they had gotten all of the resources they need. They devoted extra resources based on the threat, the threat environment, and categorically denies that that’s the case.

Lee: What I don’t know is how requests like that are typically made, whether they’re made in a phone call, face-to-face, memo, email, I don’t know.

Hayes: I mean, presumably, if [the Trump campaign] did this repeatedly, they would have record of it. Well, thanks for that. Let me go back to Cleveland. So we sat down, your wife was there. It was in a restaurant, as I recall, and it came at a moment when I think it’s fair to describe you as very frustrated, maybe even despondent about the situation the Republican Party was in. 

Lee: Yeah.

Hayes: You were not a Donald Trump fan. 

Lee:  Yeah.

Hayes: I was not a Donald Trump fan. You had been active in the rules, on the floor, trying to prevent Trump’s ascent, trying to prevent him from becoming the nominee. And when we talked—we talked for a long time—you were very concerned about the Republican Party, and what he would do to shape the Republican Party. Fast forward to now, you’ve endorsed him. I would say you’re an enthusiastic supporter of the president. I would love to just have you take me from where we were eight years ago to where we are now, and why you’ve gone through the changes you’ve gone through.

Lee: Sure. Shorter answer is, I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe he would govern as a conservative. I didn’t like how the primary had gone, and I had three very close friends who had run against him. I didn’t like the way he had interacted with them. I didn’t know the guy, but that’s what I knew about him, was how he had treated them. I also knew that he hadn’t been involved in government and politics recently. I wasn’t sure that he aligned with Republican policies.

Hayes: There were a lot of reasons to believe he wouldn’t align with Republican policies at the time.

Lee: While he and I don’t agree—there are a number of areas in which we take different policy positions—he aligned a lot more with Republican ideals than I expected. In some areas, I was particularly surprised how well things went.

Hayes: Which areas would you specify?

Lee: War, let’s go with war powers first. I’m something of an oddity in that I’m a Republican who really doesn’t like war. I wouldn’t call myself a pacifist. I’m sometimes described as a constitutional realist when it comes to warfare. I want to make sure that we go through the proper constitutional steps before doing it, and want to make sure we go into it with our eyes wide open, lest we end up blindly deferring to the military-industrial complex and to these broad aspirational ideals of how we’re going to make the world safe for democracy. For whatever reason, I had it in my head that this would be one of those areas where he’d end up being an authoritarian, he’d end up—for his own glorification—getting us involved in all sorts of foreign conflicts. It turned out not to be that way. In fact, he ended up being the least warlike president in my lifetime, in our lifetime. It’s not because they didn’t try. They tried to get him involved in conflicts in North Korea, Syria, all kinds of places, and he didn’t do it. I was pleasantly surprised by that.

His judicial nominees were really good. He campaigned as a pro-life president. For some reason, I didn’t believe him, colored by experiences in the primary.

Hayes: And the things he had said over more than a decade. He called himself “very pro-choice.”

Lee: Exactly. That’s another issue that’s important to me. It’s a combination of the appointment of textualist, originalist judges and justices and also what we’ve seen with what his contributions to the Supreme Court have brought about in the last few years. From overturning Roe v. Wade, which I’ve always thought was very wrong, because it was wrong, to the overturning, more recently, of the Chevron doctrine. The list goes on and on of the fruits that his judicial nominees have produced in the federal judiciary. 

His overall governing philosophy is also consistent with a belief that the federal administrative state has gone too far, and we’ve got to rein it in. He had kind of a one in, two out policy. He simplified federal regulations, he got rid of more than he put in. The regulations promulgated under his administration reduced the overall footprint of federal regulations, rather than expanding them. The tax reform package that we passed under his presidency, while not perfect, did a lot of good for the economy.

We enacted the most aggressive, most significant criminal justice reform package, not just in a decade, but in many decades, in the last half century or so, all under his leadership. Because he led from the standpoint of strength and American exceptionalism, he got us out of the Paris Climate Accords, out of the JCPOA.

I think those have all been good things. So even though there are plenty of areas where I disagree with him, I think he’s done a lot of good work. 

Hayes: Would you describe him as a small government conservative? Because I wouldn’t.

Lee: He’s sui generis.

Hayes: Fair.

Lee: He defies easy description. But let’s put it this way: Rather than describing him, I’d like to try to describe the things that he’s done. At the end of his four years, you can say that the net footprint of the federal government, as far as its intrusiveness into the lives of the American people, was lower than it was when he started. 

Hayes: Do you think so? 

Lee: I do. 

Hayes: I mean, his spending was out of control—and it was out of control before COVID. He doesn’t care. He’s against entitlement reform. We’re going to have a debt crisis unless we address entitlements. He’s against entitlement reform, and he stripped it from the Republican platform.

Lee: Stripped which part?

Hayes: Entitlements. There’s no entitlements. There’s a lot of other things you could say about the Republican platform, but I’m an entitlement reform guy. I’m a debt and deficit guy, and the changes have been disastrous.

Lee: I don’t know if it’s fair to impute all of that to him, but you’re talking about the part that said no changes to retirement age or anything like that. 

Hayes: Right. 

Lee: Yeah, I don’t agree with that. But on the whole, he did things, he moved the government in a more conservative direction. It’s easier, I think, to make that case than to describe his own governing philosophy, which is more difficult to capture.

Hayes: I would say that’s a great euphemism. So on the policy side, he’s closer to what you wanted than you imagined he would be when we talked in Cleveland. The other big concern you had was character. I certainly have my own strong views on that, but I will not lead the witness. Do you still have those concerns about character?

Lee: It was easy for me when I didn’t know him to dismiss him as just someone I didn’t like. When you don’t know someone, it’s easier to just say, “Eh, I can’t stand the guy.” When I got to know him, I realized there’s good in him. He has genuine compassion for people, for what they go through. That is one of the things I admired about him, about his non-interventionist approach to foreign policy and military intervention, things like that. It’s nothing short of heartbreaking when I have to call families of fallen soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

Hayes: Even as you get to know him, he still says and does things that are ridiculous—

Lee:  Yep. 

Hayes: —and that are false. He says things that are false all the time. So does Joe Biden. Joe Biden says we had 9 percent inflation when he came in. But Trump does this routinely, and it still bothers me a lot, but it sounds like it bothers you less. Does getting to know him solve that character issue?

Lee: It’s not about solving it, it’s about what’s going to move the country in a better direction. Endorsing him in 2020, no-brainer. We faced a binary choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That was an easy judgment call. And in 2024, we face the fine same binary choice: Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It’s an easy choice for me. 

Hayes: It’s an even more fraught binary choice, because Joe Biden is what Joe Biden is today, which is not what Joe Biden was. I mean, he’s been an incredibly progressive president for four years, but he also is very clearly in serious cognitive decline.

Hayes: When I listen to you talk about things like that—the rule of law—and then I contrast what I think I know of you and the way that Trump talks about weaponizing the federal government, going after his political enemies—which he says in virtually every rally speech. How do you respond to that?

Lee: When he talks about retaliatory weaponization?

Hayes: Yeah, retribution. I would argue it’s a central theme or the central theme of his campaign, and it scares the crap out of me. 

Lee: Yeah look, I think it’s dangerous to do that. Now, one of the things that had freaked me out a little bit in 2016, I didn’t like the “lock her up” chants. I was quite relieved when that didn’t materialize. He didn’t lock her up. One could argue that we’re in a different position now, I don’t know for sure. One could argue that if he doesn’t do this now, we will have set the wrong precedent, but on the other hand, maybe not. Maybe we could put the genie back in the bottle and say we’re above that. I’m hoping that his better angels will convene around that idea.

Hayes: Am I wrong to be as concerned as I am? It really scares me. I listen to his rally speeches, and he says some things about Joe Biden and about the prosecution, particularly in New York, that I agree with. I think that was political. But I hear him talk about retribution, and he’s very straightforward about it. He says, “If they’re doing it to me, I’m doing it to them.” That is almost a textbook argument against the rule of law.

Lee: Which is why it’s so damaging to start using lawfare to begin with, is that it becomes a nuclear reaction. My last book I wrote a couple years ago, called Saving Nine, was about court packing. I make the point that court packing is wrong, that we should never do it. But that I guarantee, if and when, Democrats ultimately deploy that weapon, it will not be the end, because at that point, Republicans will end up having to do the same thing the next time Republicans take control of the three levers. 

There’s an analogous use of lawfare. Once it’s fully out there, it’s feathers in the wind that you can’t bring back in. I still hope that maybe, just maybe, we can—especially if his victory is resounding enough. I would hope that we could conclude, as a party, as a country, that maybe, just maybe, one of the reasons he’s winning is because people have seen that this is wrong, what they’re doing to him. That creates a genuine marker of distinction between us and the other party.

Hayes: Is that true of all of the prosecutions?

Lee: They’re all a little bit different, but yeah. I think all four of the prosecutions have different flavors, but they all have one thing in common. I think everyone agrees that they would not have been brought against him had he not been running against the 46th president of the United States.

Hayes: Let me follow up and spend just a moment on one of those cases, because it implicates a lot of other things, and that’s the January 6 case. Part of what I’m trying to do here is square why I am where I am, and you are where you are, because we started in the same place. I voted for you in 2016. I think I told you that before. I wrote you in in 2016. 

Lee: Very honored, by the way. 

Hayes: And I’ve watched as you’ve done what you’ve done, and I’ve done what I’ve done, and I have to feel that there’s something more that’s different than the fact that you got to know him and I didn’t. What about the January 6 stuff? My view is it’s very clear that he lost the 2020 election.

Lee: The only election that matters in 2020 is the election that occurred on December 14. He lost that. 

Hayes: I’m sympathetic to some criticism of what happened in Wisconsin, what happened in Pennsylvania, but I think he lost. He didn’t get as many votes as Joe Biden, didn’t get as many electoral votes. But he put the country through hell by claiming that he did, convincing half of rank-and-file Republican voters that he did. And then all of the stuff happened around January 6 and beyond.

Obviously, you did not vote to impeach him. I very much would have. I read your reasoning, I understand it, but I would have come down in a different place. But I worry that having gone through that period with him has left us so bent out of shape, has contributed greatly to a Republican electorate that doesn’t know what’s true and what’s not, or is too willing to believe things that just aren’t true, these crazy conspiracy theories. Does that worry you?

Lee: Look, he has a different take on the election of 2020 than I do.

Hayes: I’m sorry, but it’s more than just a different take. He’s wrong—he’s just wrong. He’s lying about it, no?

Lee: There are all kinds of weird things that happened in 2020. You had a whole bunch of states that had never done universal mail-in balloting that all of a sudden were.

Hayes: Sure.

Lee: Utah had been working out the kinks of mail-in balloting for close to a decade by then, so we sort of knew how to do it. We knew how to do signature verification. I actually don’t like universal mail-in voting. I think there are a lot of risks with it that are excessive, but other states hadn’t dealt with that. There were a lot of bad things that happened. Whether or not those are things that would have affected the outcome of the election, I have no ability to know. I don’t think any of us ever will.

Hayes: Take something more concrete. Take his call to Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, where he says, “Find me these votes.”

Lee: I would not have advised him to do that.

Hayes: I understand we’re not supposed to say “he’s a threat to democracy,” and I understand why people think that that’s excessive. But that, to me, was a threat to democracy, and lying about the results of the election was a threat to democracy. I guess I’m surprised, given all of that, that people are as comfortable as they are being enthusiastically for him, you included.

Lee: I think he was poorly advised on what Congress could do. I think he saw Congress as the ultimate decider of elections. My take on it at the time was, we have no more authority than the queen of England to correct mistakes, fraud, other anomalies, real or perceived. We have no more authority than the queen of England to do that here. Our role is very simple and straightforward. As long as, as was the case, each state has sent us exactly one slate of electors, those figures are due and undisputed. Our job is linear. It’s simple.

Hayes: But he tried to send multiple slates of electors, right? He was involved in that process. He ended up parting ways with his top law enforcement official, who called all this stuff “bulls—t,” his top military official, because they wouldn’t do things to try to let him remain in power after he lost the election. That’s the bottom line. I can understand what you’re saying about the policy agreements you have with him, even if they’re not mine. But the bottom line for me is, how do you look at what happened on January 6 and its aftermath and the post-election period and say, “Yeah, this is a good thing?”

Lee: If you’re looking for a guy to defend every aspect of his approach to the 2020 election and January 6, I’m not your guy. But … it’s a binary choice.

Pretty well close to the moment he announced that he was running for president again, I think we all knew we were going to face a binary choice. That choice, in my mind, is not close. Now, I faced a binary choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016 and I voted for Evan McMullin. It was one of the dumber things I’ve done, in part because I’ve got my own thoughts on Evan McMullin that have become more clear since then.

But the binary choice and the binary choice, even just from the standpoint of defense of the Constitution, of truthfulness, of respect for government power and limitations on them, it’s not close. Joe Biden has been the most anti-constitutional president we’ve had, at least since Woodrow Wilson. He may have outdone Woodrow Wilson. He has deliberately undermined the constitutional structure more than any other president, at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt, if not more. He hasn’t quite outdone FDR, in all areas, because unlike FDR, he never actually unfurled, in earnest, a court-packing plan, but he was getting ready to.

Hayes: But he made an announcement yesterday where—it’s all back. It’s all back on the agenda.

Lee: He’ll do it. 

Aide: And unfortunately, we’re going to have to leave it there. You’re live with Megyn in about five minutes.

Hayes: Thank you so much for taking the time.

Lee: It’s good to talk to you.

Leah Schroeder aided in the transcription for this piece.