TBH, I kind of get his point, and respect him for his candor. That said, I think he's also aware that he will more than likely be disappointed by his decision. He probably also knows it's only a matter of time before the party completely rejects him.
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.”
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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.
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“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.”
