useful idiot: a person who propagandizes for … a bad cause originating from a devious, ruthless source … The term was … [popularized] during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation.
Nowhere is the opportunism of American politics more evident than in the political panic of Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who in October of 2020 — as Donald Trump looked on approvingly, like a Svengali proud of his apprentice — shamelessly perverted a Book of Mormon scripture and its protagonist to assert that Trump is like Captain Moroni who “seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the ‘fake news,’ but he seeks the well-being and the peace of the American people.”
This a mere two months before Trump would lead an insurrection on January 6, 2021, for the sole purpose of seeking power by pulling down the results of a free and fair election through a disruption of the peace among the American people.
Trump’s gift for seducing with power politicians such as Lee is evidence of Trump’s natural genius for mass manipulation of our worst instincts. And because such manipulation has power, there are an increasing number of idiots — moral and otherwise — in our national politics. Not idiots as necessarily defined by stupidity (although that often plays a part with Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene).
No one would suggest Mike Lee is stupid (whatever his misinterpretation of who Donald Trump is or Captain Moroni was). But he has proven himself to be a useful idiot as defined by what appears to be his moral indifference, intentional blindness and a lust for power that makes him a lemming to a power broker such as Trump, who himself fulfills the qualification for only half the title (he may have been useful to Russia or whomever he was stealing top secret documents for, but “idiot” suffices).
The danger of such outrageous useful idiocy and cronyism as Lee has exhibited is that, while laughable in the moment, it becomes a blight that encouraged the Capitol invasion of January 6, threatening the taproot of liberty nurtured by the founders of our republic to assure reliably and demonstrably free elections.
How different from Captain Moroni, who raised the Standard of Liberty to marshal the defeat of a man who, like Trump, aspired to become king.
Who could have anticipated that after two-and-a-half centuries of struggling to establish one of the freest and most transparent electoral systems in the history of the world, it is elections themselves that our democracy must defend. Or that many in Utah — where Lee is so threatened by McMullin’s truth-telling that he would go whining to Mitt Romney for support — are persuaded by the politics of rage currently infecting the Republican Party? Or that a U.S. Senator from Utah would participate in a perversion of scripture to support so perverse a person as Donald Trump?
When The Salt Lake Tribune reported that a TV ad attacking Evan McMullin (sponsored by the Super PAC “Club for Growth” supporting Mike Lee) is “dishonest,” Brother Lee and his representatives said nothing. When, during the October 17 debate, McMullin challenged Lee to disavow the ad, Mike minced.
How unlike the response of John McCain on live television when Republican supporters accused candidate Barack Obama of being a “cohort with terrorists” and “an Arab.” Mike Lee could not bring himself to say, as did McCain, that his opponent is a “decent family man [and a] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with.”
Perhaps Mike Lee is morally crippled by the fact that the same man who compared Captain Moroni to Donald Trump has more in common with Donald Trump than with Captain Moroni.
Clifton Jolley
Clifton Jolley, Ph.D., is president of Advent Communications, Ogden.
