Following the recent firing of Pam Bondi from Attorney General, rumors have circulated that President Donald Trump plans on nominating Utah Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) to the position. According to the Bulwark, Americans should be concerned about the “ravings” and “falsehoods” of an increasingly erratic Lee, who has fallen under the spell of Trump’s election fraud lies.
As the Bulwark notes, there was a time not long ago when Lee had a more realistic appraisal of election security. In 2022, for example, he wrote at length about the fact that his state’s reasonable election laws and competent officials resulted in elections the public could trust.
But lately, Lee has changed his tune, adopting more and more of Trump’s dubious positions.
He’s begun posting with great frequency about the dangers of non-citizen voting, even though his own home state recently completed an audit of registered voters, finding only a single non-citizen in the voter rolls, who had never even attempted to vote at that. He has become an avid proponent of the suggestion that showing proof of citizenship at the polls is essential for security, even though Utah didn’t require it for any of the three Utah elections he oversaw and declared trustworthy. He argues that mail-in ballots can’t be trusted, even though Utah votes entirely by mail. And he asserts skepticism toward states that don’t finish counting ballots within two days of an election, yet Utah itself doesn’t meet this deadline.
These are not idle concerns, but border on obsession. As the Bulwark pointed out, in the few short weeks since March 16th, “Lee has posted or reposted content about elections and election-related legislation on his personal X account at least 300 times, including 31 times on March 20 alone.”
Lee’s posting pace has climbed as Trump has become increasingly frantic to pass the SAVE America Act, a voter ID and security package the president and his allies say is vital to combat election fraud and retain Republican majorities in Congress. Opponents, however, argue that the bill will disenfranchise tens of millions of voters and that it amounts to little more than an attempt by the GOP to rig the election.
While the Bulwark notes that it seems unlikely that the SAVE Act will pass, as Politico has reported, even some of Lee’s fellow Republicans view his forceful public enthusiasm for the bill as “a self-serving attempt” to curry favor with Trump. And while for now his power is limited, if the president puts him “in charge of 9,200 attorneys at the Department of Justice, the election lies of ‘@BasedMikeLee’ start to look a lot scarier.”