Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is a snake in the grass

MAGAs usually rely on volume and attention. Their Lizard King would shoot himself in the foot to generate ratings — and frequently does, metaphorically. Jordan, Roy, Greene, Gosar, Gaetz, and Boebert will say anything to get cameras pointed in their direction, confident that the more hateful and untrue they are, the better the ratings.

But slithering along, under the radar, are the besuited quiet ones, who pledge their allegiance sub rosa to the malevolent miasma at the core of conservatism’s mephitic philosophy. They swear fealty, on obeisant bended knee, to the oleaginous overlord of the mindless mob that is the corpse flower of the right.

Utah's senior Senator, Mike Lee, is a doctrinaire conservative who has largely escaped the MAGA stain. He is a Shakespearean villain in a Dickensian novel —  the love child of Iago and Uriah Heep — all greasy accommodation and cynical rectitude on the surface. But underneath lives a hand-wringing accommodator, waiting for his victim to walk away before shoving the shiv in his back.

But he has been discovered — his duplicity uncovered. He has proved that, unlike MAGA’s loyal luminaries, he wavers between election denial and election acceptance while trying to keep in the whiner-in-chief’s good graces.

In the waning weeks of 2020, as a relieved nation enjoyed sanity’s victory over the forces of darkness in the presidential contest, he begged the couch hugging, Chief-of-Staff, Mark Meadows, to give him talking points to promote the big lie —

Text from Lee to Meadows. “Please give me something to work with. I just need to know what I should be saying.”

— while encouraging Meadows to pursue all remedies to what he perceived was a sham Biden win.

Lee is a lawyer, a former clerk for Justice Alito, and the son of Reagan Solicitor General Rex Lee. He is careful to give himself deniability in case happenstance or dedicated journalism should expose his machinations. In a message he hoped Meadows would give to Trump, he wrote,

“We the undersigned offer our unequivocal support for you to exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy at your disposal to restore Americans faith in our elections.”  

Pretty words. Lee promises to stick to the rules. But then he recommends Sidney ‘Kraken’ Powell to take the lead in the cynical, evidence-free campaign to ‘prove’ a fraud that she will not even claim exists under oath. When Powell proves a bust, he next promotes John Eastman and his “alternate electors” path to election theft.

"If a very small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative slates of delegates, there could be a path."

Then as the clock ticks towards January 6th, 2021. he sees the writing on the wall and votes to validate the Electoral College count. Now a CNN article surfacing his communications with Meadows has dashed any hope he had that his embrace of electoral malfeasance would remain a secret.

He refused to explain himself to CNN’s Gary Tuchman. But in a later interview with the Deseret News, he tried to excuse his behavior as run-of-the-mill. And claimed that Meadows could read between Lee’s lines  

“He knows that when I [Lee] said things like ‘Tell me what we ought to be saying,’ what I was just trying to figure out was ‘What is your message?’ He knows me well enough to know that that doesn’t mean I will do your bidding, whatever it is.”

“Conversations I had with him at the time on the phone and in person, he knew that. He knew I was not there to do his bidding.”

The Lady doth protest too much, methinks. But Meadows is not talking, so we do not know what he thought about Lee’s advice on how to thumb the scale.

Although Lee, by January 4th, 2021, had determined that Trump was the loser, he still wanted the putative leader of the rabid right to love him and offer Lee his political aegis. After Trump, during a MAGA rally, had picked on Lee’s supposed apostasy for backing away from Trump's election denial, Lee texted Meadows about how much time he had invested in the pursuit of election fixing.

"I've been spending 14 hours a day for the last week trying to unravel this for him."

If there is one thing a peevish suck-up hates most, it is when the man who owns the ass he is kissing turns around and kicks him in the balls.

Everything was going swimmingly for Lee in his reelection until Evan McMullin, a Mormon who won 21% of the Utah vote in the 2026 presidential campaign as an independent, announced he would challenge Lee in his attempt to retain his Senate seat. The other shoe dropped when the Democrats decided not to run a candidate. Now Lee is in a race far tighter than he would have imagined.

Lee is so desperate he has begged a rare non-MAGA Republican, the State’s junior Senator, Mitt Romney, to endorse his campaign. Mitt did not. Instead, he declared that he likes both men. If you translate Romney's political language into English, Mitt is saying that while he cannot call Lee a snake in the grass because he is a member of the same political party — nevertheless, he is a snake in the grass.