When it was finally his turn to speak during the televised roll call at this summer's Republican National Convention, Senator Mike Lee wore the canny smile of a man who was selling something bigger than his home state of Utah. "It's a place where we love freedom, we love the Constitution," Lee said, "and we despise tyranny."
Watching Lee from some 20 feet away as he spoke, I felt a twinge of déjà vu. Hadn't I heard him deliver these same patriotic bromides at a Republican convention before? Yes, I had. It was 2016, in Cleveland. Lee had gone there with a radical agenda: to sabotage Donald Trump's nomination for president. First, he maneuvered his way onto the convention's rule-making committee.
Then, he led a push by Never Trumpers to unbind the convention's delegates-that is, to release them from their obligation to vote for Trump as the party's nominee. I was there, watching the drama up close, talking with Lee and other ringleaders in a cramped corridor just outside the committee room as they schemed and argued and tried every trick imaginable to outsmart the party enforcers who'd been tasked with putting down their rebellion.
In public remarks and private discussions leading up to Trump's coronation, Lee invoked nothing less than the survival of American democracy. "I'd like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution," Lee said on Newsmax TV. "That he's not going to be an autocrat, that he's not going to be an authoritarian." Cleveland was the climax of Lee's yearlong effort to stop Trump. During the primaries, he had implored activist leaders to rally their organizations behind his best friend, Senator Ted Cruz, who had emerged as Trump's chief rival. With Cruz headed for defeat in the spring of 2016, Lee had tried to broker a meeting between the senator from Texas and their Florida colleague, Marco Rubio, hoping they might form a joint ticket to take down Trump.
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