After the murders of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, posted on his X account: “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” and “Nightmare on Waltz Street?”
How did he go from posting goofy tweets like ““We consume more Jello on a per capita basis than any state in the Union,” to “Marxism is a deadly mental illness.” How did Sen. Lee go from anti-Trump to full blown Trumper?
The man
A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a two-time graduate of Brigham Young University, a former prosecutor, a clerk for Judge Samuel Alito, Lee is a member of a prominent Utah family. His father, Rex E. Lee was the U.S. solicitor general and his brother, Thomas Rex Lee, is a justice on the Utah Supreme Court.
This is a man who wrote: “Frustration is not a platform. Anger is not an agenda. And outrage, as a habit, is not even conservative.” Instead of “outrage, resentment, and intolerance,” the party should project a message — and more than a message, a principle — of “optimism,” he said. “American conservatism, at its core, is about gratitude, and cooperation, and trust, and above all hope.”
A Tea Party man
Lee’s Tea Party politics were a perfect fit for a conversion to Trumpism. Since Trumpism was the result of a turn by the Republican Party away from good-faith participation in the democratic process, the door was opened to a politics of polarization. The Tea Party and its leaders engaged in conspiracy theories, attempts to restrict voting, stoking fears of minorities and immigrants.
Lee opposed Donald Trump before he became a Trumper. Before his conversion, Lee said of Trump, “I’d like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution, that he’s not going to be an autocrat, that he’s not going to be an authoritarian.”
In his Before Trump life, Lee argued, “Government is the official use of coercive force — nothing more and nothing less. The Constitution protects us by limiting the use of government force.”
He attempted to stop Trump from winning the Republican nomination for president in 2016. But he already was part of an authoritarian movement that was degrading truth, decency, national unity, racial progress, his own party and U.S. democracy.
In an easy leap, Lee morphed from critic to convert.
Social media persona
Lee is a permanent fixture on X. As the most prolific social media influencer in the U.S. Senate, Lee communicates on X not through reason but through hyperbole, untruthful claims and threats against others. Social media is a breeding ground for divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that senators rarely use in public.
There’s a looseness about Lee’s social media persona that seems unrelated to his status as senator. “I’m 53 and I love dank memes,” he boasted in one post. “Dank” usually means “moist and damp,” but as a slang word it can refer to memes that are extremely weird.
His personal X account @basedmikelee is digital slang for a person unwired from decorum, good manners, a person who “tells it like it is.” Lee’s nocturnal tweets are “feeding time” for the “red meat” carnivores of MAGA.
“Over the 90-day span, Lee averaged more than 103 posts a day.”
The sheer volume of Lee’s tweets makes one wonder if he is a full-time, professional influencer. During the first three months of 2025, he created 9,310 posts on X, formerly Twitter, on pace to crush his eye-popping mark of 13,142 posts created in all of 2024. Over the 90-day span, Lee averaged more than 103 posts a day, working out to once every 15 minutes without stopping.
@basedMikeLee uses saltier language than anything his Mormon brothers would approve. For example, he used the vulgar sexual phrase “raw dogging” to describe Mormons’ approach to life; spread a baseless rumor that President Joe Biden was having a medical emergency aboard Air Force One; posted a debunked video that purported to show a “badass” Trump golfing one day after he was shot; and suggested multiple times that Biden might in fact be incapacitated or even deceased, suggesting that a “proof-of-life” video be provided by the White House to satisfy his and his followers’ concerns.
Who is the real Mike Lee? Has his social media persona taken over his real personhood? For example, during the long campaign to pass the Victims Compensation Fund that benefits 9/11 first responders, Jon Stewart and a team of first responders met with Lee.
Later Stewart recalled: “We met a lot of people in Washington. That was the only meeting where we all walked out and looked at each other and went, ‘What …. is wrong with that guy?’”
Full blown Trump messages
Lee now routinely posts tweets on X repeating Trump’s talking points (the MAGA term for “Trump’s lies”).
Joining the Republican choir, Lee insisted Trump’s trial in Manhattan was a sham and blamed it on the Biden administration. Lee claimed the Trump trial showed the Biden White House had made “a mockery of the rule of law and fundamentally altered our politics in un-American ways.”
His embrace of Trump’s web of conspiracy theories included working behind the scenes to overthrow the 2020 election. His public declarations of Biden’s victory were contradicted by more than 100 texts Lee sent after the election. He worked tirelessly to find a way to overturn the election. Lee sent Mark Meadows a text on Nov. 20, 2020: “Please give me something to work with. I just need to know what I should be saying” and two days later reiterating, “Please tell me what I should be saying.”
He tried to convince fellow Latter Day Saints that Trump should be thought of as Captain Moroni. “To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” Lee told rallygoers in Arizona. He also stated that the president “seeks not the praise of the world” and wants only “the well-being and peace of the American people.”
The Book of Mormon tells the story of the selfless character of Captain Moroni. Lee’s comments are problematic considering the lack of integrity in Trump. Lee sounds here like evangelicals stretching biblical truth beyond recognition to make Trump like King Cyrus, David or Solomon. He sounds like Trump’s apostle, Robert Jeffress, promoting Trump as God’s vessel for the salvation of America.
More messages of disgust
Other Lee posts demonstrate the same carelessness and recklessness: Insistence that federal agents (FBI) were the instigators of the January 6 insurrection. He offered a picture of what he claimed was a guy holding a badge. It turned out it was not a badge.
He has posted questions about whether Michael Epstein was killed rather than dying by suicide. He posted a conspiracy theory on Feb. 7, “How much do you suppose USAID paid the guy who killed Jeffrey Epstein?”
He reposted a fake news release claiming President Jimmy Carter had died a year before Carter actually died.
Lee reposted a photo of Biden standing next to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and said, “I prefer presidents who stand with Americans.”
On Feb. 19, he reposted a fake video that purported to be Ukrainian soldiers burning Trump in effigy and posted, “Not another dime for Ukraine.”
Lee posted that Burning Man flooding is “God’s judgment” for sexual promiscuity.
The medium
There is simply too much scholarly and empirical evidence of the devastating impact of social media to ignore the role of X in Lee’s persona. I have devised a metaphor for social media: Social media is the Jurassic Park of communication.
Lee is one of the most dangerous predators in the social media Jurassic Park. If Trump is T Rex, Lee is the leader of the velociraptors.
Social media is a worldwide phenomenon created by Mark Zuckerberg and others centered on the attempt to create a wide-open digital communication system. No one saw how quickly social media would become a jungle of predators.
The sheer power of emotionalism drips from nearly every post. The emotions most likely to be shared and retweeted are the angry, repulsive, misleading and insulting ones. Social media is an emotional nightmare for the innocent people attempting to navigate the communicative terrain. The Jurassic Park of social media is filled with millions of innocent, naïve and harmless creatures sharing recipes, what they did at work, offering dating advice, and attempting to produce satire. And then there are the predators — the social media monsters.
The man? His message? His medium? Who is the real Mike Lee? He represents a political manipulator unrestrained by democratic norms. He offers a blueprint for the unraveling of democratic norms, values and principles.
I suggest we accept Lee and his thousands of tweets as the real person. He is repulsive, dangerous and the meanest, “baddest” velociraptor in the Jurassic Park of social media.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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