On the night final month when Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania, Spencer Cox was at dwelling 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 pictures of the previous president’s bloody face.
“I used to be type of captivated,” Cox instructed me. “However there was this sick-feeling pit in my abdomen.”
Cox had grown steadily extra anxious lately concerning 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 conflict.
As he sat within the pews of a Latter-day Saint ward the subsequent morning, an thought 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 along 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 sort.
“Your life was spared. Now, due to that miracle, you’ve 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 relatively than hate, you’ll win this election by an historic margin and grow to be one in all our nation’s most transformational leaders.”
The letter was, Cox instructed me, “admittedly slightly 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 concerning the letter at a press convention. Requested if he would lastly solid his first vote for Trump in 2024, Cox mentioned he would.
“Republican Politician Buckles to Celebration Stress, Endorses Trump” will not be a brand new story. It has performed out tons of of instances prior to now eight years. However Cox is an uncommon case. He didn’t endorse Trump throughout his personal current Republican main, when he was keeping off challenges from a number of MAGA rivals and had way 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 have got misplaced your credibility and relinquished your honor.”
Amongst those that know Cox, the information was handled nearly as a thriller to be solved. “I’m shocked at what number of ‘WTF’ texts I’ve acquired on this one,” a longtime Republican strategist in Utah instructed 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 12 months, and never as soon as in our conversations had he given any indication that he would help Trump. Simply a few weeks earlier, he’d instructed CNN that he wouldn’t vote for both major-party candidate.
All through our 90-minute interview, Cox rejected the “MAGA” label, referred to as Trump and his operating mate, J. D. Vance, “antithetical” to his model of Republicanism, and at numerous factors appeared even to quibble with the concept he’d endorsed Trump in any respect. “I mentioned I’m going to vote for him,” Cox instructed me. “I didn’t say I help all the things he does. I’m not even telling you that it’s good to vote for him.”
However Cox was surprisingly clear concerning the calculation he was making. He instructed me that the By no means Trump motion had completely failed, and mentioned he’d come to appreciate that he couldn’t have any affect on the fashionable GOP “if I’m not on the staff”—that’s, Trump’s staff. “It’s completely a litmus take a look at. I don’t suppose it ought to be. I want it wasn’t that means. However it’s.”
Cox instructed me he’s on a mission that’s extra vital than sustaining his anti-Trump credentials. That is maybe probably the most mysterious a part of his new posture. The trigger for which he’s keen to ally with an insult-flinging felon? The therapeutic of America’s political tradition.
When I first sat down with Cox, in January, I assumed it will 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 crimson 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 probably the most reliably Republican non secular group in America—have 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 have been seeping into the groundwater. Cox had seen it too. “It’s what retains me up at evening,” he instructed me.
Cox had spent the Trump period preaching the gospel of depolarization—and arguing that his dwelling 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 related, how that ethos got here to outline his state. He proudly championed what he referred to as the “the Utah mannequin,” a consensus-minded method to coverage making that had yielded attention-grabbing compromises on culture-war points, together with immigration, LGBTQ rights, and non secular freedom. He made nationwide headlines when he vetoed a invoice aimed toward banning transgender women from youth sports activities, noting that the regulation would have utilized to only 4 high-school athletes. “When unsure,” 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 right mascot for the model of Utah he was pitching—nearly a strolling stereotype of Boy Scout earnestness.
In 2023, he grew to become chair of the Nationwide Governors Affiliation and launched an initiative he referred to as “Disagree Higher.” The concept had originated within the fevered last 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 operating for governor on the time, filmed a sequence of advertisements along with his Democratic opponent, Chris Peterson, through which they good-naturedly teased one another and appealed to decency and democracy. Critics referred to as the advertisements 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 advertisements 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 Submit, warmly acquired 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 popular 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 truth, he appeared nearly delighted by it. Utahns had all the time taken satisfaction of their peculiarity, and the governor was no exception. “We’re bizarre,” he boasted at his State of the State handle in January. “The nice type of bizarre. The type of bizarre the remainder of the nation is determined for proper now.”
However a number of months later, when Cox started campaigning in earnest for his reelection, it was exhausting to disregard simply how peculiar his state’s politics had grow to be—that’s to say, imply and indignant and fueled by division.
Cox’s main was brutal. His chief opponent, Phil Lyman, was a state consultant finest recognized for having acquired a presidential pardon from Trump. (Lyman was arrested in 2014 for main an ATV protest journey on public lands in a Utah canyon.) In taking over Cox, Lyman promoted outlandish rumors that the governor was interfering along 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 folks 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 instructed 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 towards 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 incorrect. Survey knowledge steered that American Mormons have been turning into much less Republican total within the Trump period, however those that remained within the occasion have been turning into Trumpier. “I don’t suppose {that a} governor, or any type of authorities, coming in and saying … ‘Let’s put some cute little advertisements collectively that we’re all gonna get alongside!’ goes to make a distinction,” one lady mentioned 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 type of been a breach within the stronghold,” he instructed me.
The evening of the first ended up being a great 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 after I texted Cox that June night to ask how he was feeling, he instructed 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 towards hatred and extremism in politics speak himself into supporting Trump? This was the query I wished a solution to after I met with him on the governor’s mansion in late July.
We sat throughout from one another in his research, 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 practising what he preached.
“Once we speak about disagreeing higher and the work of depolarization, there’s this bizarre factor that occurs to folks,” Cox instructed me. “You begin to criticize the people who find themselves polarizing us … after which they grow to be your enemies.” In the event you’re not cautious, he mentioned, you threat turning 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 mentioned that,” Cox instructed me. But when he was critical about injecting decency and compassion again into politics, he defined, he wanted to discover a solution to work along 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 type of the final word take a look at.”
Certainly, I instructed him, there was a solution to present Christian like to Trump and his supporters with out endorsing the person for president. I pointed to the lengthy checklist of issues Trump has completed and mentioned 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 fastened, the previous president may modulate his habits in response to optimistic reinforcement relatively than scolding. From Cox’s perch in late July, with Trump main each main ballot and the Democratic Celebration in chaos, the prospect of a Reagan-style landslide seemed inside attain. Cox mentioned he wished to be a great affect on the subsequent president. “Even when it’s the smallest, tiniest attainable affect over the subsequent 4 years to maneuver issues in a greater course, it’s price taking, even at nice private threat or hurt,” he mentioned.
I famous that many Republicans earlier than him had tried this technique—ingratiating themselves to Trump in order that they may steer his presidency. The outcomes had typically ranged from ineffective to catastrophic. Cox insisted this was completely different. “All these folks wished one thing—they wished to be nearer to energy, they wished a Cupboard place,” he instructed 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 might run Cox’s pondering by a handful of his associates and allies. Even these keen to grant his sincerity appeared both confused or doubtful. Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland and a good friend of Cox’s, laughed after I requested about the concept endorsing Trump may very well be an “act of depolarization,” as Cox had described it to me. “I might deeply disagree with that reasoning,” Moore instructed me. “Governor Cox is a good man … so I hope he would have 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 instructed me. “I hope Donald Trump reads it and heeds it, however I don’t suppose that both Spencer or I are holding our breath.”
At one level, I requested Cox what his spouse, Abby, manufactured from his resolution to vote for the previous president. She has made little secret of her distaste for Trump; earlier this 12 months she endorsed Nikki Haley for president (whereas her husband remained formally impartial within the GOP main). Cox spoke rigorously. “We now have a really shut relationship,” he instructed me. “This wasn’t her favourite thought—to place it mildly. And nonetheless isn’t.”
I questioned how lengthy Cox would stick with this plan. In 2020, he’d initially mentioned he would vote for Trump, earlier than altering his thoughts. After I requested if there was something Trump might do to lose his vote, Cox shrugged. “I imply, there may be. You recognize, in the event 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. Dealing with 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 concerning the crowds at Harris’s rallies, and gave a rambling, lie-laden press convention at Mar-a-Lago. He referred to as his opponent “nasty” and repeatedly questioned her racial id. At a rally in North Carolina, he assured his followers that the capturing hadn’t softened him: “In the event you don’t thoughts, I’m not going to be good!”
So, final week, I referred to as Cox yet another time to seek out out if he’d modified his thoughts. “It appears like a 12 months in the past since we final chatted,” he instructed me, a hint of exasperation in his voice. He conceded that his occasion’s nominee had largely reverted to previous habits—“taking part in the hits,” Cox referred to as it—however mentioned he stood by what he’d written in that letter to Trump and deliberate to vote for him. “He might nonetheless win huge by specializing in points as a substitute of grievance,” Cox mentioned. Trump will likely be in Utah later this month for a fundraiser, and Cox hopes they will discover time to speak.
However as our dialog continued, Cox appeared keen to vary the topic from Trump himself to Trump’s supporters. He mentioned lots of his allies within the combat towards polarization felt betrayed by his resolution (“They’re very indignant at me, and that’s effective,” he mentioned, sounding prefer it wasn’t completely effective), however that he hoped he may now be capable of attain a brand new viewers along with his message: his personal occasion’s base.
Cox instructed me concerning the folks he grew up with in Fairview, and the way a lot they distrusted politicians like him. In speeches, he continuously invokes his rural hometown for instance of how partisan politics can poison a group. “I actually do care about them, however they don’t suppose I care about them,” he instructed me. “In the event you’re a By no means Trumper, you’re the enemy.”
Along with his endorsement, Cox wasn’t their enemy anymore—would they hearken to him now?
