Utah Should Have Known Better

We returned a plunderer and a villain to our planet’s most powerful position

Illustration by Beck Seamons

We write this to grieve and to remember.

We grieve because Donald Trump, a malicious man whose campaign was founded upon a thirst for vengeance and fueled by a violent lie, won 59.3% of Utah’s vote in last Tuesday’s presidential election. Some of Trump’s voters, we know, were turned off by his crudeness, his cruelty, and his lawlessness, but in their eagerness for lower taxes and fewer regulations they supported him all the same.

That strikes us as a catastrophic miscalculation. No political gain is worth an all-out assault on the beating heart of American democracy. Nothing—not another conservative Supreme Court justice, not a deregulated crypto industry, not a nationwide abortion ban—is worth the graft, mismanagement, and instability that a second Trump term will likely bring. We have returned a plunderer and a villain to our planet’s most powerful position, and our nation and our world will be less safe because of it. The state of Utah, led by governor Spencer Cox, has sold itself for a mess of pottage.

Which brings us to remembrance. Trump and his allies lie about matters large and small every single day, and will continue to do so, so it is worth recalling some instances from Trump’s recent past to counteract the revisionary power of his incessant dishonesty.

In 2020, Donald Trump shamelessly and falsely insisted that the presidential election had been stolen from him, and when his nefarious scheme to seat a set of alternate electors failed, he sent a murderous mob to the Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Utah Senator Mike Lee was an ally in these efforts.

As president, Donald Trump presided over a shocking and inhumane effort to separate immigrant parents from their children, treating the most vulnerable population on the planet as pawns in his crazed game of zero-tolerance border enforcement.

For decades now, Donald Trump has spoken of women in demeaning, possessive, and objectifying terms. He has also been credibly accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women. The sheer number of accusations, not to mention the boorish behavior of the man against whom they are levied, is such that it is preposterously unlikely that Trump is anything other than a serial sexual predator.

Trump rose to political prominence by popularizing the racist lie that Barack Obama was not an American citizen. He forged a path to the White House via a “recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built.” The inclinations that fueled this noxious advocacy found another outlet in 2017, when Trump responded to a deadly rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville by saying that some participants were “very fine people.” This of a group that yelled “Jews will not replace us” as they staged a torchlit march whose ghastly, flickering lighting evoked the cross burnings of the Ku Klux Klan.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, more than a few pundits have trotted out a truism from 2016, namely that we cannot write off Trump’s supporters as racists and misogynists. Instead, the case goes, we must read their alarming political behavior as a justifiable response to years of economic and cultural humiliation. We eliminated heartland jobs and ridiculed heartland values, so the heartland bit back.

There is something to this line of thinking. No, we cannot write off the seventy-four million Americans who voted for Donald Trump as incurable bigots, both because that would be an incomplete analysis and because it would be an ineffective way of building an anti-Trump coalition.

Further, it is true that the gospel of neoliberalism, paradigmatic from Reagan through George W. Bush, crippled unions, closed domestic factories, called globalization a net positive, and then ignored the newly unemployed. It is no surprise that those who bore the brunt of this shift felt betrayed. 

But this explanation falls short in Utah, particularly along the Wasatch Front. Nearly sixty-nine percent of voters in Utah County voted for Donald Trump. Utah County is not home to hollowed-out Rust Belt towns. On the contrary, it is prosperous and well-educated, home to BYU, UVU, Silicon Slopes, and the forthcoming Utah City. Residents of Utah County have every reason to be satisfied with the present and optimistic about the future, and yet they voted in large numbers for a man who says that the country is broken and in need of a strongman to repair it. What are we to make of that?

Here’s one explanation: Utahns have proven, to quote Brigham Young, that “they cannot stand wealth.” In their prosperous complacency, they selected the candidate who would minimize their tax burden. They ignored the weightier matters of probity, competence, and commitment to liberal democracy, and thereby welcomed a wolf into the hen house.

Further reading:

The Last Man in America to Change his Mind About Trump

Why Mike Lee Folded 

The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Family-Separation Policy 

The First White President

How Republican Billionaires Learned to Love Donald Trump Again 

America Did This to Itself

Trump Won. Now What? 

Trump Voters Got What They Wanted