Sen. Mike Lee’s hyperactive social media account has kicked into overdrive since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, with the Utah Republican doubling his already astonishingly prolific rate of posting on the platform X about everything from buddying up to Elon Musk to “Making Greenland Green Again” by emitting more carbon dioxide.
“I’m 53 and I love dank memes,” Utah’s senior senator boasted in one post.
During the first three months of 2025, Utah’s senior senator created 9,310 posts on X, formerly Twitter, on pace to crush his eye-popping mark of 13,142 posts created in all of 2024.
Over the 90-day span, Lee averaged more than 103 posts a day, working out to once every 15 minutes without stopping. While Lee does post a lot of memes, there are also numerous posts about conservative policy positions, diplomatic threats, culture war grievances and snarky jokes.
March was a particularly busy month for the senator, who created 4,475 posts for the X, averaging a tweet every 10 minutes for the entire month — a metric that is likely more frequent, presuming he took breaks to sleep.
On March 10, he posted 343 times from his first post that morning until his last post of the day a little more than 14 hours later, meaning he was adding new content to the platform every 260 seconds during those waking hours.
“For Senator Lee, obviously social media is a huge part of [his] communications strategy,” said James Curry, a political science professor at the University of Utah.
As the number of posts Lee generates on X has shot up in 2025, the number of accounts following him has grown as well. In January, 453,000 accounts were following the senator’s personal account, @BasedMikeLee. Today, the number has surpassed 587,000, and his posts were viewed 2.26 billion times in the first quarter of the year.
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When The Salt Lake Tribune reported in January on the surge in Lee’s X posts, the senator shared a screenshot of the story and captioned it: “For more awesome insights like this follow me — @basedmikelee — on @X!”
His followers praised him for his posts, and Lee responded to one saying, “Legacy media doesn’t like unfiltered public commentary. How’s that working out for them?”
But Diane Lewis, chair of the Utah Democratic Party, said living on social media is not a good use of the senior senator’s time.
“He should be doing his job for the people of Utah,” she said, “not tweeting and trying to become the next greatest influencer of the world.”
As was the case in January, a Lee spokesperson did not respond to questions about how much time the senator spends posting on X, whether it is a distraction from his official duties and how constituents benefit from his social media presence.
He also did not respond to whether Lee gets paid for producing content for X.
Defending DOGE
(Eric Lee | The New York Times) Elon Musk boards Air Force One for a flight with President Donald Trump to New Jersey, at Joint Base Andrews, Md., March 21, 2025.
Beginning in August 2023, the platform began paying Premium subscribers like Lee, based on how many people see their posts. But the platform changed its formula last November, so the payment is now based on interactions with other verified users.
If Lee made more than $200 from his X posts, he is required to report them on his Senate personal financial disclosure due in May. His last report, covering the 2023 calendar year, did not include any payments from X. He had launched his account in July 2022.
Lee mentioned Musk’s account 478 times and the account for the billionaire’s government-slashing project, dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, 159 times since the beginning of the year.
Musk, who bought Twitter in late 2022 for $44 billion and later changed the name to X, interacts with Lee more than any other member of Congress, according to an October tally by Roll Call. And The Tribune reported in January that Lee engages overall with Musk’s account more than any other.
Three months later, that still holds true.
Engagement with the world’s richest man accelerated after Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, when Musk sat behind Trump and pumped his fist as the president backed getting Americans on Mars — a project long pursued by Musk’s SpaceX.
After attending the event himself, Lee posted a joke comparing Musk and the second richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who was also positioned behind the president), to the two main characters in the movie “Step Brothers.”
“I was hoping to see @elonmusk and @JeffBezos sing a duet at the inauguration,” the senator wrote that afternoon.
From SpaceX to Tesla, Musk’s companies have been the subjects of numerous investigations by federal agencies. Multiple national outlets have reported that Trump has taken aim at those agencies in DOGE-suggested cuts.
When criticism of Musk’s conflicts of interest surface, Lee dismisses them.
“.@ElonMusk has nothing to gain through his @DOGE efforts and much to lose,” Lee posted last month. “And yet he does it anyway — because he’s a patriot. We should all be grateful.”
As DOGE’s recommendations have led to protests and raucous congressional town halls across the country, including in Utah, Lee repeatedly has made posts deflecting blame from Musk and the department’s operations.
So far, Utah has seen an end to research projects at public universities meant to solve problems faced by vulnerable communities, resources clawed back from the departments overseeing public health, staff cuts at its revenue-driving national parks and a reduction in jobs in the state — where federal entities comprise three of the top 20 employers.
“In our meeting today, @elonmusk clarified that @DOGE personnel have no authority to fire federal workers or cancel federal contracts or payments,” Lee posted after the Senate DOGE Caucus sat down with Musk at the White House in February.
“Rather,” the senator continued, “they make recommendations to department heads and other executive-branch personnel who have such authority. Those most inclined to demagogue @DOGE are attributing to @DOGE authority it does not have.”
Pushing Trump’s talking points
Beyond his interaction with Musk, the tone and tenor of Lee’s posts range from grievance to goofy, leaning heavily toward the former.
He continued his campaign to end U.S. support for Ukraine as it fights to stave off a Russian invasion. Lee reposted a photo of former President Joe Biden standing next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and said, “I prefer presidents who stand with Americans.”
On Feb. 19, he reposted a video that purported to be Ukrainian soldiers burning Trump in effigy and said, “Not another dime for Ukraine.” The original poster, a convicted and later pardoned Jan. 6 rioter, acknowledged in a subsequent post that the video was fake and is reportedly Russian propaganda.
In all, he referenced Ukraine more than 80 times, calling to end U.S. backing.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) A digital sign depicts Sen. Mike Lee and Russian President Vladimir Putin in downtown Salt Lake City on Wednesday, March 5, 2025.
Lee has also rallied support for Trump appointees, particularly FBI Director Kash Patel; continued his crusade to do away with mail-in voting; called for impeaching “corrupt” judges after courts blocked Trump’s executive orders; and retweeted a post by Musk and complained about not being allowed to go inside Fort Knox — apparently a reference to a right-wing conspiracy theory that the U.S. gold repository is empty.
The senator called for eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Public Broadcasting System, National Public Radio, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Reserve, the Transportation Security Administration and for the U.S. to leave NATO and the United Nations.
He continued his campaigns for burger restaurants to cook fries in beef tallow and for the government to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, posting a baseless conspiracy theory on Feb. 7, “How much do you suppose USAID paid the guy who killed Jeffrey Epstein?”
He dismissed Trump’s national security team sharing attack plans with a journalist via Signal as a Democratic distraction and criticized reporters for covering it. He also spun a fictional “Constitution-themed romance novel” that he called “Letters of Marque” that he said would “invigorate the senses while teaching basic constitutional principles.”
During his brief trip to Greenland with Vice President JD Vance, Lee took to X to joke that he and Vance “were tempted to take a cold plunge in the frigid water” where they visited, but Vance’s wife talked them out of it. And he posted “Make Greenland Green Again; Emit CO2.”
In roughly six dozen other posts, Lee has ridiculed the concept of climate change.
Curry said there is a dichotomy in Congress between members who are workhorses and show horses — although he thinks the terms are unnecessarily pejorative.
While the workhorses get into the weeds on policy issues — which Curry said Lee does to an extent — the showhorses get the attention. “[Lee] spends a lot of time trying to shape the national conversation by trying to be this hard-edged conservative senator,” Curry said, “and he has always done that by taking clear, unambiguous public stances on issues and being really loud about it.”
“If you’re loud and garner attention and do that through a communications strategy,” Curry said, “you can often become someone who is more important and more influential quicker.”
The bulk of Lee’s posts are simple interactions with supporters, thanking them for compliments or often just a single word or emoji when they agree with his views.
“So basically, we have a senator who is so insecure that he has to have people on [X] say, ‘You’re so wonderful.’ He has to build himself up,” Lewis said. But the Utah Democrat suspects Lee may face a backlash at home.
“He’s trying to follow in his mentor’s footsteps, which is Trump,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s going to work … because look at what’s happening now with President Trump and all these rallies and all these people coming out — thousands of people at the Bernie Sanders and [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] event the other day. People are fed up and turning out and ready to do something.”
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