‘Please Tell Me What I Should Be Saying’: Mike Lee Perfectly Sums Up Trump-Era Republican Ethos in Text to Mark Meadows

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The Republican Party has found its 2024 party platform, even if inadvertently.

In the weeks following the 2020 presidential election, then-President Donald Trump and a cadre of cranks such as Mike Lindell and Sidney Powell falsely claimed the election had been stolen. It was a desperate, half-baked attempt to keep him in office.

Given Trump’s grip over the Republican Party, most GOP lawmakers felt they had little choice and went along with this nonsense. Indeed, to this day many elected Republicans refuse to acknowledge Joe Biden won the presidency legitimately.

One of these self-neutered sycophants is Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who, in newly-released text messages obtained by CNN, wanted to overturn the 2020 election.

“We need something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning,” Lee texted to then-White House Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows. The senator was apparently holding out hope that GOP-controlled legislatures in states Biden won would somehow thwart the certification of his victory in those states. “Even if they can’t convene, it might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a statement indicating how they would vote.”

At one point, Lee, who once fashioned himself as libertarian-leaning, independent-ish Republican, begged Meadows for talking points to buttress the patently ludicrous claim the election had been rigged.

“Please tell me what I should be saying,” Lee texted Meadows on Nov. 20, 2020. “I’ve been spending 14 hours a day for the last week trying to unravel this for him.”

Please tell me what I should be saying.

This is the same Mike Lee who in 2016 railed against Trump during an interview with Newsmax, slamming him for suggesting Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. “He said that without any scintilla, without a scintilla of evidence,” Lee explained, who is seemingly concerned about lies that don’t pertain to elections.

The Republican Party famously did not adopt a party platform in 2020, instead choosing to recycle the planks in its 2016 version. Additionally, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said his party will not advance a legislative agenda ahead of the 2022 midterms.

But it’s doubtful the GOP won’t advance a platform in 2024. The good news for Republicans, however, is that Lee’s eight-word text to Meadows sums up their current political philosophy better than a hundred party conventions ever could.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.