The Governor Who Endorsed Trump to Heal American Politics

On the evening last month when Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania, Spencer Cox was at home in the Utah governor’s mansion. Pacing the second-floor residence, he scrolled for updates on his phone, watching and rewatching the same footage, studying photos of the former president’s bloody face.

“I was kind of captivated,” Cox told me. “But there was this sick-feeling pit in my stomach.”

Cox had grown steadily more anxious in recent years about the prospect of a complete democratic breakdown in America. He’d immersed himself in the literature of polarization and political violence. He couldn’t escape his fear that the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear had been millimeters away from starting a civil war.

As he sat in the pews of a Latter-day Saint ward the next morning, an idea came to him: He should write Trump a letter. This was not an obvious instinct. Cox was one of the few office-holding Republicans left in America who hadn’t gotten on board with the former president. He didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 or in 2020, and had publicly pleaded with his party to nominate anyone else in 2024. But Cox was relieved that Trump—at least so far—had not responded to the assassination attempt with escalatory rhetoric or threats. He felt he should encourage whatever instinct was behind that restraint.

[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]

After church, he climbed into the back of an SUV headed toward his rural hometown of Fairview and took out his iPad to type.

“Your life was spared. Now, because of that miracle, you have the opportunity to do something that no other person on earth can do right now: unify and save our country,” Cox wrote. “By emphasizing unity rather than hate, you will win this election by an historic margin and become one of our nation’s most transformational leaders.”

The letter was, Cox told me, “admittedly a little over-the-top.” But he hoped Trump might be receptive to such flowery appeals. He asked Don Peay, a Trump ally from Utah, to hand-deliver it to the candidate, who was in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention. Cox says he didn’t expect it to become public, but of course it leaked, and the day after Trump formally accepted his party’s nomination, with a speech that included references to “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and illegal immigrants coming from “insane asylums,” Cox found himself fielding questions about the letter at a press conference. Asked if he would finally cast his first vote for Trump in 2024, Cox said he would.

“Republican Politician Buckles to Party Pressure, Endorses Trump” is not a new story. It has played out hundreds of times in the past eight years. But Cox is an unusual case. He did not endorse Trump during his own recent Republican primary, when he was fending off challenges from multiple MAGA rivals and had much more to gain politically. And his abrupt reversal has shredded his reputation as a principled Republican. Brian King, Cox’s Democratic rival this fall, condemned him for “going where the wind blows him.” Stuart Reid, an anti-Trump Republican and former state senator, wrote in an open letter, “You have lost your credibility and relinquished your honor.”

Among those who know Cox, the news was treated almost as a mystery to be solved. “I’m shocked at how many ‘WTF’ texts I’ve received on this one,” a longtime Republican strategist in Utah told me shortly after the announcement.

I met Cox on a Sunday afternoon in July, two days after his endorsement—and hours after President Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the race—in the governor’s mansion, a 120-year-old French châteauesque structure in downtown Salt Lake City. We’d been talking on and off all year, and not once in our conversations had he given any indication that he would support Trump. Just a couple of weeks earlier, he’d told CNN that he wouldn’t vote for either major-party candidate.

Throughout our 90-minute interview, Cox rejected the “MAGA” label, called Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, “antithetical” to his brand of Republicanism, and at various points seemed even to quibble with the idea that he’d endorsed Trump at all. “I said I’m going to vote for him,” Cox told me. “I didn’t say I support everything he does. I’m not even telling you that you need to vote for him.”

But Cox was surprisingly transparent about the calculation he was making. He told me that the Never Trump movement had utterly failed, and said he’d come to realize that he couldn’t have any influence on the modern GOP “if I’m not on the team”—that is, Trump’s team. “It’s absolutely a litmus test. I don’t think it should be. I wish it wasn’t that way. But it is.”

Cox told me he’s on a mission that’s more important than maintaining his anti-Trump credentials. This is perhaps the most mysterious part of his new posture. The cause for which he’s willing to ally with an insult-flinging felon? The healing of America’s political culture.

When I first sat down with Cox, in January, I thought it would be for a story about an embattled governor struggling to stem the spread of Trumpism in his own backyard.

Utah had developed a reputation in the Trump years for being a red state uniquely resistant to this brand of politics. Trump placed a distant third in the state’s 2016 Republican primaries, and carried the state in the general election with a meager 45 percent plurality of the vote. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—once the most reliably Republican religious group in America—were fleeing the newly MAGA-fied GOP. Only half supported Trump in 2016, 20 points lower than the share that supported a typical Republican presidential nominee.

For years, journalists and scholars offered theories to explain Trump’s underperformance in Utah: that his vulgarity and checkered personal life offended Mormon sensibilities; that his message of rigged systems and white grievance didn’t resonate in a state with low income inequality and high upward mobility; that his xenophobic rhetoric clashed with Utahns’ relative openness to immigrants.

I’d written many of these stories myself, and still saw evidence that the phenomenon was real. But I’d also noticed something changing in Utah—not a wholesale mutation, necessarily, but signs that Trumpism’s most toxic elements were seeping into the groundwater. Cox had noticed it too. “It’s what keeps me up at night,” he told me.

Cox had spent the Trump era preaching the gospel of depolarization—and arguing that his home state offered an antidote to our national politics. In speeches and interviews, he liked to talk about Utah’s old-fashioned communitarianism, how the Mormon pioneers who settled the state built homes in village centers and planted crops on the outskirts of town so that farmers could help one another and stay connected, how that ethos came to define his state. He proudly championed what he called the “the Utah model,” a consensus-minded approach to policy making that had yielded interesting compromises on culture-war issues, including immigration, LGBTQ rights, and religious freedom. He made national headlines when he vetoed a bill aimed at banning transgender girls from youth sports, noting that the law would have applied to just four high-school athletes. “When in doubt,” he explained at the time, “I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion.” Lean and sprightly, with rosy cheeks and a speaking cadence that makes him sound like he’s perpetually smiling, Cox was the perfect mascot for the version of Utah he was pitching—almost a walking stereotype of Boy Scout earnestness.

In 2023, he became chair of the National Governors Association and launched an initiative he called “Disagree Better.” The idea had originated in the fevered final weeks of the 2020 election, when Trump was already spreading stolen-election lies and indicating that he wouldn’t accept defeat. Cox, who was running for governor at the time, filmed a series of ads with his Democratic opponent, Chris Peterson, in which they good-naturedly teased each other and appealed to decency and democracy. Critics called the ads cloying and cheesy, but they seemed to accomplish the impossible: Researchers at Stanford reported that people who watched them exhibited marked drops in partisan acrimony. Through Disagree Better, Cox recruited bipartisan pairs of politicians to star in similar ads across the country.

[Watch: Spencer Cox at The Atlantic Festival]

Cox was soon welcomed in elite quarters as that rarest of Trump-era creatures: the palatable Republican, respectfully profiled in Time and The Washington Post, warmly received in such venues as The Atlantic Festival (where I interviewed him onstage last fall). At the same time, he surfaced as a villain in the right-wing media. Tucker Carlson took a special interest in Cox, deriding him as “creepy” for politely answering a high-school student’s question about his preferred pronouns, and accusing him of “auditioning for the title of ‘America’s Guiltiest White Guy.’” (When, in a podcast interview last month, Carlson mused that Utah’s governor must “get off on debasing himself,” I texted Cox the clip. “He seems to be projecting again,” he responded.)

Cox was not surprised by the MAGA resistance. In fact, he seemed almost delighted by it. Utahns had always taken pride in their peculiarity, and the governor was no exception. “We’re weird,” he boasted at his State of the State address in January. “The good kind of weird. The kind of weird the rest of the nation is desperate for right now.”

But a few months later, when Cox began campaigning in earnest for his reelection, it was hard to ignore just how ordinary his state’s politics had become—that is to say, mean and angry and fueled by division.

Cox’s primary was brutal. His chief opponent, Phil Lyman, was a state representative best known for having received a presidential pardon from Trump. (Lyman was arrested in 2014 for leading an ATV protest ride on public lands in a Utah canyon.) In taking on Cox, Lyman promoted outlandish rumors that the governor was interfering with his supporters’ Wi-Fi connections, and accused him of getting illegal immigrants from Colorado to vote for him. Lyman drew cheers on the campaign trail by attacking Disagree Better as “a leftist, Marxist tactic to get people to drop their opinions.” When Lyman ultimately lost the primary, he refused to concede and sued to have the results of the election overturned. (The lawsuit was dismissed.)

“It was the complete playbook,” Cox told me. “The lies, the vitriol, the denial of the legitimacy of the election.” Four years earlier, he had narrowly won a hard-fought but polite contest against Jon Huntsman Jr., the centrist former governor and presidential candidate. Now Cox felt like he was contending with a new species of Republican.

He wasn’t wrong. Survey data suggested that American Mormons were becoming less Republican overall in the Trump era, but those who remained in the party were becoming Trumpier. “I don’t think that a governor, or any kind of government, coming in and saying … ‘Let’s put some cute little ads together that we’re all gonna get along!’ is going to make a difference,” one woman said in a June focus group of Utah Republicans organized by the political consultant Sarah Longwell. “He’s just another RINO.” For every Mitt Romney, it seemed, there were now two Mike Lees, scrambling to memory-hole their former opposition to Trump and reinvent themselves as MAGA adherents.

[From the November 2023 issue: What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate]

When Cox addressed the state Republican convention in May, he was loudly booed by Trumpists. Finally, in a fit of exasperation, he spat, “Maybe you just hate that I don’t hate enough.” The race seemed to rattle his faith in Utah exceptionalism. “It only reinforced my concern that there’s kind of been a breach in the stronghold,” he told me.

The night of the primary ended up being a good one for Cox. Not only did he win comfortably, but a relatively moderate congressman, John Curtis, earned the Republican nomination to fill Romney’s Senate seat. But when I texted Cox that June evening to ask how he was feeling, he told me he was just relieved it was over. “It was rough,” he wrote.

So how did a governor who’s built his brand on standing against hatred and extremism in politics talk himself into supporting Trump? This was the question I wanted an answer to when I met with him at the governor’s mansion in late July.

We sat across from each other in his study, adorned with paintings of desert landscapes and a bullhorn hat rack that originally belonged to Theodore Roosevelt. Cox, wearing a slim-cut suit and socks with cartoon pictures of Abraham Lincoln, leaned forward as he explained how supporting Trump was a way of practicing what he preached.

“When we talk about disagreeing better and the work of depolarization, there’s this weird thing that happens to people,” Cox told me. “You start to criticize the people who are polarizing us … and then they become your enemies.” If you’re not careful, he said, you risk becoming a mirror image of the thing you’re working to defeat.

“That ‘Love your enemies’ stuff—it sucks. I hate it. I wish Jesus had never said that,” Cox told me. But if he was serious about injecting decency and compassion back into politics, he explained, he needed to find a way to work with his political enemies. And within his own party, at least, he could think of few figures who qualified as enemies more than Trump. “To me, this is kind of the ultimate test.”

Surely, I told him, there was a way to show Christian love to Trump and his supporters without endorsing the man for president. I pointed to the long list of things Trump has done and said that Cox has found abhorrent, and Cox insisted he still found all the same things abhorrent. He also made clear that he’s not among those claiming that Trump found God after his near-death experience: “I’m not an idiot. The guy’s 78. He’s probably not changing.”

But he believed that even if Trump’s core character is fixed, the former president might modulate his behavior in response to positive reinforcement rather than scolding. From Cox’s perch in late July, with Trump leading every major poll and the Democratic Party in chaos, the prospect of a Reagan-style landslide looked within reach. Cox said he wanted to be a good influence on the next president. “Even if it’s the smallest, tiniest possible influence over the next four years to move things in a better direction, it’s worth taking, even at great personal risk or harm,” he said.

I noted that many Republicans before him had attempted this strategy—ingratiating themselves to Trump so that they could steer his presidency. The results had generally ranged from ineffective to catastrophic. Cox insisted this was different. “All those people wanted something—they wanted to be closer to power, they wanted a Cabinet position,” he told me. “I don’t want any of that stuff at all. I’m not trying to get into his orbit.”

Later, I would run Cox’s thinking by a handful of his friends and allies. Even those willing to grant his sincerity seemed either confused or dubious. Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland and a friend of Cox’s, laughed when I asked about the idea that endorsing Trump could be an “act of depolarization,” as Cox had described it to me. “I would deeply disagree with that reasoning,” Moore told me. “Governor Cox is a decent man … so I hope he would look at the evidence and change his perspective.” Jared Polis, the centrist Democratic governor of Colorado, praised Cox for trying to make a difference. “It was a thoughtful letter,” he told me. “I hope Donald Trump reads it and heeds it, but I don’t think that either Spencer or I are holding our breath.”

At one point, I asked Cox what his wife, Abby, made of his decision to vote for the former president. She has made little secret of her distaste for Trump; earlier this year she endorsed Nikki Haley for president (while her husband remained officially neutral in the GOP primary). Cox spoke carefully. “We have a very close relationship,” he told me. “This wasn’t her favorite idea—to put it mildly. And still isn’t.”

I wondered how long Cox would stick to this plan. In 2020, he’d initially said he would vote for Trump, before changing his mind. When I asked if there was anything Trump could do to lose his vote, Cox shrugged. “I mean, there might be. You know, if you shoot someone on Fifth Avenue…”

[Read: The new Trump is always the old Trump]

In the weeks after our interview, Trump seemed determined to prove that his brief flirtation with magnanimity and restraint was over. Facing slipping poll numbers and a spirited new opponent in Vice President Kamala Harris, he returned to familiar patterns of demonization and venting. He posted conspiratorial diatribes on social media about the crowds at Harris’s rallies, and gave a rambling, lie-laden press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He called his opponent “nasty” and repeatedly questioned her racial identity. At a rally in North Carolina, he assured his fans that the shooting hadn’t softened him: “If you don’t mind, I’m not going to be nice!”

So, last week, I called Cox one more time to find out if he’d changed his mind. “It feels like a year ago since we last chatted,” he told me, a trace of exasperation in his voice. He conceded that his party’s nominee had largely reverted to old habits—“playing the hits,” Cox called it—but said he stood by what he’d written in that letter to Trump and planned to vote for him. “He could still win big by focusing on issues instead of grievance,” Cox said. Trump will be in Utah later this month for a fundraiser, and Cox hopes they can find time to talk.

But as our conversation continued, Cox seemed eager to change the subject from Trump himself to Trump’s supporters. He said many of his allies in the fight against polarization felt betrayed by his decision (“They’re very angry at me, and that’s fine,” he said, sounding like it wasn’t totally fine), but that he hoped he might now be able to reach a new audience with his message: his own party’s base.

Cox told me about the people he grew up with in Fairview, and how much they distrusted politicians like him. In speeches, he frequently invokes his rural hometown as an example of how partisan politics can poison a community. “I really do care about them, but they don’t think I care about them,” he told me. “If you’re a Never Trumper, you’re the enemy.”

With his endorsement, Cox wasn’t their enemy anymore—would they listen to him now?