SALT LAKE CITY -- Utah’s Junior Senator has been called the most conservative member of the U.S. Senate, but that doesn’t make him a rubber stamp for his political party.
Senator Mike Lee has serious reservations about his party’s presumptive nominee for President, Donald Trump, and he laid his opinion bare when pressed by a host on NewsMaxTV.com.
The host, Steve Malzberg, asked Lee why he wasn’t “Trumpeting Trump.”
“Hey look Steve, I get it. You want me to endorse Donald Trump,” Lee responded.
From there, Lee launched into a critique of Trump:
“We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend's father of conspiring to kill JFK. We can go through the fact that he's made some statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant. We can get into the fact he's wildly unpopular in my state in part because my state consists of people who are members of a religious minority church. People who were ordered exterminated by the governor of Missouri in 1838, and statements like that make them nervous.”
Lee went on to say he won’t vote for Hillary Clinton, and he hopes Donald Trump assuages his concerns, and then he talked about the nature of those concerns:
“ ...that he's not going to be an autocrat," Lee said. "That he's not going to be an authoritarian. That he's not going to be someone who is going to abuse a document that I have sworn an oath to uphold and protect and defend. I'm sorry sir, but that is not an unreasonable demand.”
The Trump campaign has not responded to Lee’s comments.
