Since the first U.S. Congress met in 1789, senators have used the filibuster — most famously depicted by Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” — a tactic in which a lawmaker can block a vote on a bill provided he or she talks and talks and talks and doesn’t stop.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee has taken a similar approach with his account on X (formerly Twitter) by using his @BasedMikeLee account not to block legislation but, his supporters say, to disrupt the stodgy traditions of the Senate by sharing a dizzying deluge of policy positions and concerns not on the Senate floor, but on social media.
Lee covers topics ranging from demanding restaurants return to cooking with beef fat and urging a revival of less-efficient light bulbs — victims, he believes, of federal government overreach — to accusing the White House of “#ElderAbuseat1600″ for hiding President Joe Biden’s alleged dementia.
He promotes right-wing conspiracy theories like the assertions that federal agents helped orchestrate the Jan. 6 insurrection and that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself. He cozies up to President-elect Donald Trump and billionaire X owner Elon Musk. He ridicules his fellow senators for their age, and amplifies deceptive images and bogus right-wing memes.
And he does it at an astonishing rate.
In 2024 alone, Lee posted to X a total of 13,142 times, according to a Salt Lake Tribune analysis of his account. That’s nearly 1,100 posts a month, 36 posts a day, or one post roughly every 40 minutes — all year long.
His posts come fast and furious at all hours, day or night, although he is most active between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., Utah time, or 9 p.m. to midnight in Washington. (X no longer includes where an account holder is located in the post information.)
And his posting grew to a genuinely frenetic pace in the last half of the year, where he made 9,396 posts on X over the course of six months — meaning the senator was posting once every 28 minutes, assuming no interruptions to eat, sleep, rest his thumbs or attend to his duties as a senator.
In mid-November, after the election was decided, Lee posted 737 times in a week and 208 times on Nov. 18 alone, a barrage that began in the early morning, ended 17 hours later and averaged a dizzying pace of a post every five minutes during that span.
By comparison, Gov. Spencer Cox, who also runs his own personal account, posted 474 times in all of 2024. State Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, another prodigious presence on X, posted 3,363 times in 2024. Posts from Democratic state Sen. Nate Blouin are even more copious. The Millcreek senator posted on X 8,295 times in 2024 — still nearly 5,000 fewer than Lee.
In fact, Cox, Weiler and Blouin combined created 1,000 fewer posts in 2024 than Lee did.
Lee refused to be interviewed or comment on this story. His supporters say the posting is a way for the senator to go around traditional media, connect with supporters, share where he stands on issues and to potentially build a following that would amplify his own influence in the body.
Critics counter that it shows he is more interested in being a social media influencer than getting things done for Utahns.
The beginnings of @Based
Lee launched his then-Twitter account under the @BasedMikeLee handle on July 24, 2022, a decision he later said was “one part experiment and two parts dare.” He credited four players in conservative media circles with coaxing him online.
One of those men was Benny Johnson, a right-wing media influencer linked to a company that, prosecutors alleged last fall, was paid $10 million by Russian agents to produce content promoting the Kremlin’s interests, including creating divisions among American voters and undermining U.S. support for Ukraine.
The other three Lee credits with his X evolution are Alex Lorusso and Danny De Urbina — both of whom work on Johnson’s podcast, “The Benny Show” — and Tyler Bowyer, who is one of 18 people charged with a string of felonies last year for his role in allegedly orchestrating a slate of fraudulent Arizona electors in 2021 in an attempt to flip the state and the election to Trump. All four of the men have worked at Turning Point USA, a stridently pro-Trump political organization.
Johnson was not accused of knowingly working for the Russians and publicly denied any awareness of the payments. He posted at the time that, if it is true, he was a victim. Bowyer has pleaded not guilty to the fake elector charges.
When the indictment referencing Russia’s alleged efforts to use Johnson to influence the election was unsealed last September, Lee dismissed it, posting on X: “I’ll go with ‘Tricks That Only Work Once’ for 1,000, Alex.”
Upset over Ukraine
(Tyler Hicks | The New York Times) Ukrainian soldiers in the 28th Mechanized Brigade at a frontline position near Toretsk, Ukraine, on Oct. 9, 2024.
Lee has not been tied to the Russian influence operation. But his posts, like Johnson’s, tilt overwhelmingly against the United States backing of Ukraine. He has posted about Russia or Ukraine (or their respective leaders) more than 500 times since 2023, ridiculing people who post their support for Ukraine’s resistance or the Ukrainian flag, repeatedly opposing U.S. military aid to the country, and pushing for an end to the war.
“Who else is tired of this crap?” Lee wrote in a post at the end of 2024 that was “liked” nearly 18,000 times. “No more money to Ukraine!”
Last July, Lee blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on President Joe Biden’s push to add Ukraine to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.
When pro-Ukrainian social media trolls — known as North Atlantic Fella Organization, or “NAFO fellas” — crashed one of Lee’s Twitter polls designed to show opposition to more funding for Ukraine, Lee fired off an article about NAFO from a decidedly pro-Kremlin site known as The Grayzone, that referred to the Russian invasion as “NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.”
He was chastised by commenters as “not a serious person” and former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, accused Lee of promoting Russian propaganda.
Fake Feds and killing Carter
Amid the turmoil and hot takes, Lee’s following has steadily grown. In September 2022 — a few months after joining Twitter and during his run for reelection in which he used his account to threaten his opponent with a defamation suit and told him to “lawyer up” — Lee had 18,700 followers. A year later, 119,800 accounts followed his posts.
His following has now surpassed 453,000 users and his posts have received more than 3 billion views. Despite his affinity for social media and his devotion to Trump — whom Lee has mentioned in roughly 700 posts — the @BasedMikeLee account on Trump’s Truth Social platform has only 42 followers and three posts.
Lee’s most “liked” post on X came after Trump was shot during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Lee’s post — “Gets shot Gets up the next day Goes golfing” with a video of Trump taken from a window getting into a golf cart — got 185,590 likes.
It wasn’t the only time he got sideways with the truth.
In August 2023, the senator amplified a post from Alex Jones’ Infowars that said the government was planning to reinstate COVID-19 lockdowns. “Over my lifeless body,” Lee proclaimed. The Infowars story was false.
Later that November, the senator posted he was eager to ask FBI Director Christopher Wray about an image of someone at the Capitol insurrection that — according to a conspiracy theory that circulated widely in right-wing media — showed the person holding a badge.
In response to Lee’s post, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, who served with Kinzinger on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection, posted, “Hey @BasedMikeLee — heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”
The man in the image Lee promoted was holding a vape, not a badge, and had already been convicted and sentenced for his role in storming the Capitol, where he stole a photograph from then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and a wallet from the jacket of a House staffer. At his sentencing, he said he was an “idiot” who was swept up in the moment.
Last July, Lee extended his condolences to the family of former President Jimmy Carter and reposted a fake news release — that included sexual references to former first lady Nancy Reagan and referred to Rosalynn Carter, the now-late president’s wife, as the “original Brat.”
Lee later deleted the post.
On July 5 of that year, he reposted a false rumor that Biden was having a medical emergency aboard Air Force One, which he did not delete.
Last October, he posted an image of a girl in a life raft clutching a puppy after Hurricane Helene. The image was fake but widely circulated among right-wing accounts in an attempt to show that the Biden administration had allegedly abandoned hurricane victims. Lee deleted the image.
The benefits of being @Based
Maggie Macdonald, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky and a faculty research affiliate with New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics, said the senator’s prolific posting is shocking.
“I don’t know of many politicians that tweet this frequently,” she said.
She said that politicians can use social media to raise their profile, possibly go viral and generate fundraising or other benefits. But they also risk making missteps, going viral for the wrong reasons and damaging their brand.
In Lee’s case, his fundraising has increased significantly since he grew his presence on X. In 2017-2018 — the two years after his 2016 reelection — he raised less than $700,000. In the two years since he created his personal Twitter account and won reelection, he has raised more than $2.4 million.
Macdonald said her recent research with one of her colleagues “suggests that there is this rising class of politician who does seek national clout above all else, and so I suspect that he is self-selecting into that strategy.”
“He’s seeking to build a national reputation and to get attention and clout,” Macdonald said. “My expectation is that the things that get him the most engagement are when he says something that’s very partisan, very polarizing, maybe an attack against an opponent or attack against the other party, and then that incentivizes him to do more of that to get more attention, to continue to build his national brand, because it would further his goals.”
In 2022, researchers from the University of Winnipeg and other schools found tweets by U.S. politicians that were less civil garnered more views and likes than civil ones and spurred those politicians to be less civil in order to get more attention.
Using an artificial intelligence model created to score the toxicity of text, they found a 23% increase in toxicity in politicians’ tweets during the 10-year period they studied, attributing the rise to the feedback loop that encourages more toxicity.
The Tribune used the same program — Perspective API — to analyze Lee’s posts (excluding those that were simply replies like a thumbs-up emoji or “Good point” or “Amen”) and his score was lower for the average member of Congress, about 9.6 on a scale from zero to 100 with 100 being the most toxic. The average in the 2022 study was 14.5.
But Lee’s posts have been getting more toxic as his X following has mushroomed, going from a score of 7.1 in 2022 to 8.5 in 2023 and 10.1 in 2024 — a 42% leap over that span.
There are also limitations to the Perspective scores. In posts where Lee is questioning if Biden was senile, for example, he would suggest it was time to use the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office, but the A.I. model gave those a very low toxicity score, usually between 1 and 2, compared to when he accused White House staff of “elder abuse,” which received toxicity scores over 30.
Lee’s critics say his devotion to X only demonstrates that he’s a show pony, not a workhorse.
“Mike Lee has always been a grandstander who is more interested in picking partisan fights and puffing up his own right-wing credentials than getting work done,” said Jeff Merchant, executive director of the left-leaning Alliance for a Better Utah.
Merchant noted that since Lee joined the Senate in 2009, the Utah senator has passed six stand-alone bills, half of which renamed federal buildings.
“The people of Utah probably deserve more from someone who gets paid $174,000 a year to tweet every 28 minutes but can’t get a bill passed,” he said. “If that were any other Utahn in any other job, they’d get fired.”
(Evan Vucci | AP) Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump talks during a roundtable with faith leaders as Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, listens Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024, in Prescott Valley. Ariz.
Lee’s office did not respond to questions about his social media usage, and Lee did not respond to X posts from The Tribune asking about his presence on the platform. Several former staffers and people close to Lee also declined to talk about his social media persona.
But Rob Axson, who worked for Lee and is now the Utah Republican Party chair, said the senator’s presence on the platform gives people an unfiltered view of where he stands.
“Senator Lee — like him or not, agree with him or not on an issue — has demonstrated over the course of the last 2½ terms that he’s never been afraid to say what he believes,” Axson said. “I think that’s a huge positive and benefit. I wish there was more of that in Washington, D.C., from both parties, because I think it allows for honest dialogue and debate and discussions to occur.”
Former Congressman Jason Chaffetz, himself a high-profile X user with more than half a million followers, said that politicians posting on social media are keeping up with changing times.
“You used to be able to send out an email or post something to a website. That doesn’t cut it anymore,” he said. “Town hall meetings are rare, so posting on X or Truth Social is the way to communicate.”
A political strategist close to Lee — who spoke on condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to speak publicly — said the senator’s presence on X is a tool, giving him the clout to mobilize his supporters and influence policy in a way that most of the other 99 senators cannot.
Lee has attempted to wield that clout, both in Utah and the U.S. Capitol. In the latest election, he endorsed Colby Jenkins, who was challenging incumbent Rep. Celeste Maloy in the GOP primary for Utah’s 2nd Congressional District and backed former state Rep. Michael Kennedy’s bid for the open 3rd District seat. Jenkins lost; Kennedy won.
More recently, Lee used his X following to try to rally support for Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s bid to become the next Senate majority leader. It didn’t work. Scott lost to South Dakota Sen. John Thune on the first ballot.
Journalist Tim Alberta, writing in The Atlantic last fall, put Lee’s Twitter evolution this way: “Once a politician who seemed to be fashioning himself as a modern Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the right, Lee is now a very online MAGA influencer. It’s as if Ned Flanders became a 4chan troll.”
@BasedMikeLee’s ‘next chapter’
Lee shows no signs of letting up in the new year.
During the first two weeks of 2025, he’s posted more than 600 times.The senator has referred to Greenland as “MAGAdonia” and suggested the U.S. annex Mexico; he compared Biden to the Roman emperor Caligula and said he will “go down in history as a tyrant”; and asked again, “When will we know who killed Jeffrey Epstein?”
Lee has joined a chorus of Republicans attacking California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state and local officials for policies they asserted led to the devastating and deadly wildfires. The chirping from Lee, Trump and others grew so loud that Newsom set up a web page aimed at debunking the misinformation.
Specifically, Lee alleges that efforts to protect a threatened fish led California officials to let reservoirs get too low to fight the fires. The accusation is untrue. The fish Lee posted that officials wanted to protect lives farther north in a different drainage that provides no water to the parts of Southern California that burned.
He also has shared a made-up video showing Biden eating an ice cream cone in front of houses destroyed in the California wildfires and another video of the wildfires with the caption, “leftists did this.”
Lee posted a video of a helicopter trying to drop water on the fire but missing the flames, which later received a community note indicating it was a different fire three months earlier.
Axson said Lee’s usage of X is “a next chapter of exploring” how he can share his views “and his desire to be upfront out of respect for the people he is engaging with. His Twitter or X posts have been one more example of that.”
Salt Lake Tribune reporter Emily Anderson Stern contributed to this story.
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