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On the night final month when Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania, Spencer Cox was at house within the Utah governor’s mansion. Pacing the second-floor residence, he scrolled for updates on his cellphone, watching and rewatching the identical footage, finding out photographs of the previous president’s bloody face.
“I used to be sort of captivated,” Cox advised me. “However there was this sick-feeling pit in my abdomen.”
Cox had grown steadily extra anxious lately in regards to the prospect of a whole democratic breakdown in America. He’d immersed himself within the literature of polarization and political violence. He couldn’t escape his concern that the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear had been millimeters away from beginning a civil warfare.
As he sat within the pews of a Latter-day Saint ward the subsequent morning, an concept got here to him: He ought to write Trump a letter. This was not an apparent intuition. Cox was one of many few office-holding Republicans left in America who hadn’t gotten on board with the previous president. He didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 or in 2020, and had publicly pleaded together with his occasion to appoint anybody else in 2024. However Cox was relieved that Trump—no less than up to now—had not responded to the assassination try with escalatory rhetoric or threats. He felt he ought to encourage no matter intuition was behind that restraint.
After church, he climbed into the again of an SUV headed towards his rural hometown of Fairview and took out his iPad to kind.
“Your life was spared. Now, due to that miracle, you’ve got the chance to do one thing that no different individual on earth can do proper now: unify and save our nation,” Cox wrote. “By emphasizing unity quite than hate, you’ll win this election by an historic margin and grow to be one in every of our nation’s most transformational leaders.”
The letter was, Cox advised me, “admittedly somewhat over-the-top.” However he hoped Trump may be receptive to such flowery appeals. He requested Don Peay, a Trump ally from Utah, to hand-deliver it to the candidate, who was in Milwaukee for the Republican Nationwide Conference. Cox says he didn’t count on it to grow to be public, however in fact it leaked, and the day after Trump formally accepted his occasion’s nomination, with a speech that included references to “loopy Nancy Pelosi” and unlawful immigrants coming from “insane asylums,” Cox discovered himself fielding questions in regards to the letter at a press convention. Requested if he would lastly forged his first vote for Trump in 2024, Cox stated he would.
“Republican Politician Buckles to Social gathering Stress, Endorses Trump” will not be a brand new story. It has performed out lots of of occasions previously eight years. However Cox is an uncommon case. He didn’t endorse Trump throughout his personal latest Republican major, when he was heading off challenges from a number of MAGA rivals and had far more to realize politically. And his abrupt reversal has shredded his repute as a principled Republican. Brian King, Cox’s Democratic rival this fall, condemned him for “going the place the wind blows him.” Stuart Reid, an anti-Trump Republican and former state senator, wrote in an open letter, “You will have misplaced your credibility and relinquished your honor.”
Amongst those that know Cox, the information was handled virtually as a thriller to be solved. “I’m shocked at what number of ‘WTF’ texts I’ve obtained on this one,” a longtime Republican strategist in Utah advised me shortly after the announcement.
I met Cox on a Sunday afternoon in July, two days after his endorsement—and hours after President Joe Biden introduced that he was dropping out of the race—within the governor’s mansion, a 120-year-old French châteauesque construction in downtown Salt Lake Metropolis. We’d been speaking on and off all yr, and never as soon as in our conversations had he given any indication that he would assist Trump. Simply a few weeks earlier, he’d advised CNN that he wouldn’t vote for both major-party candidate.
All through our 90-minute interview, Cox rejected the “MAGA” label, known as Trump and his working mate, J. D. Vance, “antithetical” to his model of Republicanism, and at varied factors appeared even to quibble with the concept he’d endorsed Trump in any respect. “I stated I’m going to vote for him,” Cox advised me. “I didn’t say I assist all the things he does. I’m not even telling you that it is advisable vote for him.”
However Cox was surprisingly clear in regards to the calculation he was making. He advised me that the By no means Trump motion had completely failed, and stated he’d come to comprehend that he couldn’t have any affect on the trendy GOP “if I’m not on the group”—that’s, Trump’s group. “It’s completely a litmus check. I don’t assume it needs to be. I want it wasn’t that means. However it’s.”
Cox advised me he’s on a mission that’s extra essential than sustaining his anti-Trump credentials. That is maybe essentially the most mysterious a part of his new posture. The trigger for which he’s prepared to ally with an insult-flinging felon? The therapeutic of America’s political tradition.
When I first sat down with Cox, in January, I believed it could be for a narrative about an embattled governor struggling to stem the unfold of Trumpism in his personal yard.
Utah had developed a repute within the Trump years for being a pink state uniquely proof against this model of politics. Trump positioned a distant third within the state’s 2016 Republican primaries, and carried the state within the common election with a meager 45 p.c plurality of the vote. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—as soon as essentially the most reliably Republican spiritual group in America—had been fleeing the newly MAGA-fied GOP. Solely half supported Trump in 2016, 20 factors decrease than the share that supported a typical Republican presidential nominee.
For years, journalists and students supplied theories to clarify Trump’s underperformance in Utah: that his vulgarity and checkered private life offended Mormon sensibilities; that his message of rigged methods and white grievance didn’t resonate in a state with low revenue inequality and excessive upward mobility; that his xenophobic rhetoric clashed with Utahns’ relative openness to immigrants.
I’d written many of those tales myself, and nonetheless noticed proof that the phenomenon was actual. However I’d additionally seen one thing altering in Utah—not a wholesale mutation, essentially, however indicators that Trumpism’s most poisonous parts had been seeping into the groundwater. Cox had seen it too. “It’s what retains me up at evening,” he advised me.
Cox had spent the Trump period preaching the gospel of depolarization—and arguing that his house state supplied an antidote to our nationwide politics. In speeches and interviews, he appreciated to speak about Utah’s old school communitarianism, how the Mormon pioneers who settled the state constructed properties in village facilities and planted crops on the outskirts of city in order that farmers might assist each other and keep linked, how that ethos got here to outline his state. He proudly championed what he known as the “the Utah mannequin,” a consensus-minded method to coverage making that had yielded fascinating compromises on culture-war points, together with immigration, LGBTQ rights, and spiritual freedom. He made nationwide headlines when he vetoed a invoice aimed toward banning transgender ladies from youth sports activities, noting that the regulation would have utilized to only 4 high-school athletes. “When doubtful,” he defined on the time, “I all the time attempt to err on the aspect of kindness, mercy, and compassion.” Lean and sprightly, with rosy cheeks and a talking cadence that makes him sound like he’s perpetually smiling, Cox was the proper mascot for the model of Utah he was pitching—virtually a strolling stereotype of Boy Scout earnestness.
In 2023, he grew to become chair of the Nationwide Governors Affiliation and launched an initiative he known as “Disagree Higher.” The thought had originated within the fevered closing weeks of the 2020 election, when Trump was already spreading stolen-election lies and indicating that he wouldn’t settle for defeat. Cox, who was working for governor on the time, filmed a collection of adverts together with his Democratic opponent, Chris Peterson, by which they good-naturedly teased one another and appealed to decency and democracy. Critics known as the adverts cloying and tacky, however they appeared to perform the inconceivable: Researchers at Stanford reported that individuals who watched them exhibited marked drops in partisan acrimony. By means of Disagree Higher, Cox recruited bipartisan pairs of politicians to star in related adverts throughout the nation.
Cox was quickly welcomed in elite quarters as that rarest of Trump-era creatures: the palatable Republican, respectfully profiled in Time and The Washington Put up, warmly obtained in such venues as The Atlantic Pageant (the place I interviewed him onstage final fall). On the similar time, he surfaced as a villain within the right-wing media. Tucker Carlson took a particular curiosity in Cox, deriding him as “creepy” for politely answering a high-school scholar’s query about his most well-liked pronouns, and accusing him of “auditioning for the title of ‘America’s Guiltiest White Man.’” (When, in a podcast interview final month, Carlson mused that Utah’s governor should “get off on debasing himself,” I texted Cox the clip. “He appears to be projecting once more,” he responded.)
Cox was not shocked by the MAGA resistance. In actual fact, he appeared virtually delighted by it. Utahns had all the time taken pleasure of their peculiarity, and the governor was no exception. “We’re bizarre,” he boasted at his State of the State handle in January. “The great sort of bizarre. The sort of bizarre the remainder of the nation is determined for proper now.”
However a couple of months later, when Cox started campaigning in earnest for his reelection, it was onerous to disregard simply how odd his state’s politics had grow to be—that’s to say, imply and indignant and fueled by division.
Cox’s major was brutal. His chief opponent, Phil Lyman, was a state consultant finest identified for having obtained a presidential pardon from Trump. (Lyman was arrested in 2014 for main an ATV protest experience on public lands in a Utah canyon.) In taking over Cox, Lyman promoted outlandish rumors that the governor was interfering together with his supporters’ Wi-Fi connections, and accused him of getting unlawful immigrants from Colorado to vote for him. Lyman drew cheers on the marketing campaign path by attacking Disagree Higher as “a leftist, Marxist tactic to get individuals to drop their opinions.” When Lyman in the end misplaced the first, he refused to concede and sued to have the outcomes of the election overturned. (The lawsuit was dismissed.)
“It was the whole playbook,” Cox advised me. “The lies, the vitriol, the denial of the legitimacy of the election.” 4 years earlier, he had narrowly received a hard-fought however well mannered contest in opposition to Jon Huntsman Jr., the centrist former governor and presidential candidate. Now Cox felt like he was contending with a brand new species of Republican.
He wasn’t mistaken. Survey information urged that American Mormons had been changing into much less Republican total within the Trump period, however those that remained within the occasion had been changing into Trumpier. “I don’t assume {that a} governor, or any sort of authorities, coming in and saying … ‘Let’s put some cute little adverts collectively that we’re all gonna get alongside!’ goes to make a distinction,” one girl stated in a June focus group of Utah Republicans organized by the political advisor Sarah Longwell. “He’s simply one other RINO.” For each Mitt Romney, it appeared, there have been now two Mike Lees, scrambling to memory-hole their former opposition to Trump and reinvent themselves as MAGA adherents.
When Cox addressed the state Republican conference in Might, he was loudly booed by Trumpists. Lastly, in a match of exasperation, he spat, “Perhaps you simply hate that I don’t hate sufficient.” The race appeared to rattle his religion in Utah exceptionalism. “It solely bolstered my concern that there’s sort of been a breach within the stronghold,” he advised me.
The evening of the first ended up being a superb one for Cox. Not solely did he win comfortably, however a comparatively average congressman, John Curtis, earned the Republican nomination to fill Romney’s Senate seat. However once I texted Cox that June night to ask how he was feeling, he advised me he was simply relieved it was over. “It was tough,” he wrote.
So how did a governor who’s constructed his model on standing in opposition to hatred and extremism in politics discuss himself into supporting Trump? This was the query I wished a solution to once I met with him on the governor’s mansion in late July.
We sat throughout from one another in his examine, adorned with work of desert landscapes and a bullhorn hat rack that initially belonged to Theodore Roosevelt. Cox, sporting a slim-cut swimsuit and socks with cartoon footage of Abraham Lincoln, leaned ahead as he defined how supporting Trump was a means of training what he preached.
“Once we speak about disagreeing higher and the work of depolarization, there’s this bizarre factor that occurs to individuals,” Cox advised me. “You begin to criticize the people who find themselves polarizing us … after which they grow to be your enemies.” When you’re not cautious, he stated, you threat changing into a mirror picture of the factor you’re working to defeat.
“That ‘Love your enemies’ stuff—it sucks. I hate it. I want Jesus had by no means stated that,” Cox advised me. But when he was critical about injecting decency and compassion again into politics, he defined, he wanted to discover a technique to work together with his political enemies. And inside his personal occasion, no less than, he might consider few figures who certified as enemies greater than Trump. “To me, that is sort of the final word check.”
Certainly, I advised him, there was a technique to present Christian like to Trump and his supporters with out endorsing the person for president. I pointed to the lengthy record of issues Trump has performed and stated that Cox has discovered abhorrent, and Cox insisted he nonetheless discovered all the identical issues abhorrent. He additionally made clear that he’s not amongst these claiming that Trump discovered God after his near-death expertise: “I’m not an fool. The man’s 78. He’s most likely not altering.”
However he believed that even when Trump’s core character is mounted, the previous president would possibly modulate his conduct in response to constructive reinforcement quite than scolding. From Cox’s perch in late July, with Trump main each main ballot and the Democratic Social gathering in chaos, the prospect of a Reagan-style landslide seemed inside attain. Cox stated he wished to be a superb affect on the subsequent president. “Even when it’s the smallest, tiniest doable affect over the subsequent 4 years to maneuver issues in a greater route, it’s price taking, even at nice private threat or hurt,” he stated.
I famous that many Republicans earlier than him had tried this technique—ingratiating themselves to Trump in order that they might steer his presidency. The outcomes had usually ranged from ineffective to catastrophic. Cox insisted this was completely different. “All these individuals wished one thing—they wished to be nearer to energy, they wished a Cupboard place,” he advised me. “I don’t need any of that stuff in any respect. I’m not making an attempt to get into his orbit.”
Later, I’d run Cox’s pondering by a handful of his associates and allies. Even these prepared to grant his sincerity appeared both confused or doubtful. Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland and a good friend of Cox’s, laughed once I requested about the concept endorsing Trump may very well be an “act of depolarization,” as Cox had described it to me. “I’d deeply disagree with that reasoning,” Moore advised me. “Governor Cox is an honest man … so I hope he would take a look at the proof and alter his perspective.” Jared Polis, the centrist Democratic governor of Colorado, praised Cox for making an attempt to make a distinction. “It was a considerate letter,” he advised me. “I hope Donald Trump reads it and heeds it, however I don’t assume that both Spencer or I are holding our breath.”
At one level, I requested Cox what his spouse, Abby, product of his determination to vote for the previous president. She has made little secret of her distaste for Trump; earlier this yr she endorsed Nikki Haley for president (whereas her husband remained formally impartial within the GOP major). Cox spoke fastidiously. “We have now a really shut relationship,” he advised me. “This wasn’t her favourite concept—to place it mildly. And nonetheless isn’t.”
I puzzled how lengthy Cox would stick with this plan. In 2020, he’d initially stated he would vote for Trump, earlier than altering his thoughts. Once I requested if there was something Trump might do to lose his vote, Cox shrugged. “I imply, there may be. You understand, should you shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue…”
Within the weeks after our interview, Trump appeared decided to show that his transient flirtation with magnanimity and restraint was over. Going through slipping ballot numbers and a spirited new opponent in Vice President Kamala Harris, he returned to acquainted patterns of demonization and venting. He posted conspiratorial diatribes on social media in regards to the crowds at Harris’s rallies, and gave a rambling, lie-laden press convention at Mar-a-Lago. He known as his opponent “nasty” and repeatedly questioned her racial identification. At a rally in North Carolina, he assured his followers that the capturing hadn’t softened him: “When you don’t thoughts, I’m not going to be good!”
So, final week, I known as Cox another time to seek out out if he’d modified his thoughts. “It looks like a yr in the past since we final chatted,” he advised me, a hint of exasperation in his voice. He conceded that his occasion’s nominee had largely reverted to previous habits—“enjoying the hits,” Cox known as it—however stated he stood by what he’d written in that letter to Trump and deliberate to vote for him. “He might nonetheless win large by specializing in points as an alternative of grievance,” Cox stated. Trump shall be in Utah later this month for a fundraiser, and Cox hopes they’ll discover time to speak.
However as our dialog continued, Cox appeared keen to alter the topic from Trump himself to Trump’s supporters. He stated lots of his allies within the struggle in opposition to polarization felt betrayed by his determination (“They’re very indignant at me, and that’s positive,” he stated, sounding prefer it wasn’t completely positive), however that he hoped he would possibly now be capable to attain a brand new viewers together with his message: his personal occasion’s base.
Cox advised me in regards to the individuals he grew up with in Fairview, and the way a lot they distrusted politicians like him. In speeches, he incessantly invokes his rural hometown for example of how partisan politics can poison a group. “I actually do care about them, however they don’t assume I care about them,” he advised me. “When you’re a By no means Trumper, you’re the enemy.”
Along with his endorsement, Cox wasn’t their enemy anymore—would they take heed to him now?
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