Mr. Lee was chagrined
More treason in Congress.
For weeks in late 2020, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, cheered on President Donald J. Trump’s effort to fight his election defeat, privately offering up “a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him.”
In text messages to Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, Mr. Lee encouraged the Trump campaign to embrace Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer whom the senator described as a “straight shooter,” and said the president should “hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.”
But when Ms. Powell put forth wild claims of foreign rigging of election machines at a widely derided news conference in November, Mr. Lee was chagrined and quietly began to question what Mr. Trump was up to.
Mr. Trump was up to what it was obvious he was up to: trying to steal the election.
[The texts] provide a window into the eagerness of Republicans — even some who ended up voting on Jan. 6 to confirm Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory — to believe Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud and their willingness to go to great lengths, including attempts at exploiting the nation’s election laws, to keep him in power. They also illustrate how rapidly those efforts spiraled out of control, and they show a keen awareness on the part of at least some Republicans involved that the endeavor had become untenable to the point of being dangerous.
They were out of control and dangerous from the beginning. Who and what did they think Trump was? He’d spent five years showing us what a worthless but dangerous criminal monstrosity he is, so what was there to “spiral”?
Five years? If you grew up in the NY/NJ area, you knew he was a dangerous criminal monstrosity for 30 years minimum. But “Real Americans”(TM) can’t believe anything coastal elites say.
The Republicans apparently assumed it was an act. Of course it was an act. People in politics do that sort of thing all the time.
I’m not sure if that’s more damning to their intelligence, or to their characters.