Mike Lee: Trump’s autogolpe was great in the beginning, but maybe it went a tiny bit too far

Mike Lee is one of the quieter fascists in the Republican conference, but he’s also one of the most fascist:

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.

“I’m worried about the Powell press conference,” Mr. Lee wrote in another text message to Mr. Meadows. “The potential defamation liability for the president is significant here.”

In other words, what seemed to turn him mildly against the election theft scheme is that it looked like the people running it were too incompetent to pull it off. Which shouldn’t be surprising, since he’s long been a proponent of the theory that “we’re a republic, not a democracy,” i.e. that Republicans are morally entitled to govern even if voters prefer Democrats.