Mike Lee Needs an Intervention

The senator spends nearly every waking hour in an online bubble

(Composite by Hannah Yoest / GettyImages / Shutterstock)

“I can’t talk now,” said Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) as she sped through the Senate basement Monday evening. She was on a mission, she said, to find Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).

Utah’s senior senator has drawn widespread condemnation for his behavior since the political assassinations over the weekend in Minnesota. Within hours of the murder of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, Lee had gone to his happy place: engrossed in the X app on his phone, using it to spread nonsense conspiracy theories and crack cruel jokes about the violence.

On Tuesday afternoon, Lee deleted the offending tweets. But the fact that he put them up in the first place—and that it apparently took a very rare, personal rebuke from a fellow senator to get him to take them down—is the clearest illustration to date of the fact that even United States senators can have their brains (and hearts) rotted out by social media.

Since he began browsing and posting with his “@BasedMikeLee” handle on X a few years ago, Lee has become increasingly unstable on the app. The latest garbage to make its way from Lee’s mind to his 600,000 follower-strong X account is in keeping with what he posts on a nearly nightly basis. He routinely propounds the dumbest nonsense you’ve ever heard while sweating for liberal tears with aggressive memes and attempts at cutting jibes.

“This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” Lee posted Sunday morning as a caption to a still from security footage of the killer who gunned down two Minnesota politicians.

The alleged shooter was still on the lam. People were dead. Some of Lee’s colleagues in Congress were also potential targets. Normal human thoughts and feelings may have compelled someone to just give the shitposting a rest. But Lee couldn’t resist the endorphin rush of going viral. “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” he posted later that morning, a jeering reference to the killer’s silicone mask and his alleged connection to Gov. Tim Walz, whose last name he misspelled.

That was too much for Smith. “Senator Lee this weekend posted a picture of the man who murdered my friend, a security photo taken by the door—presumably shortly before the shots were fired and this assassin killed my friend—with a headline saying, ‘This is what happens,’” she told reporters after pulling Lee out of the Republicans’ tax briefing just off the Senate floor. “I wanted him to know how much pain that caused me and the other people in my state and I think around the country, who think that this was a brutal attack.”

In the decorous chamber that is the Senate, such direct confrontation is often considered taboo. But Smith hadn’t just brushed aside decorum. She had done something that rarely happens when online trolls spread their misery: She sought out the poster to discuss his vile behavior with him in person.

“I think that he honestly just seemed a little surprised to be confronted,” Smith said.

While Smith made her feelings known to Lee in a face-to-face conversation, she was far from the only one to publicly condemn his behavior. Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) railed against Lee in a floor speech Monday, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the posts “beneath the dignity of [Lee’s] office” in his own speech from the floor.

Later in the evening, Lee walked in smirking silence while ignoring repeated questions from the Capitol press corps about his posts and his conversation with Smith.¹ Like a typical internet troll, he seemed to have clammed up when called on his bullshit.

Or, maybe, he wanted to get back to a place where he could shitpost again. After all, Smith’s words didn’t appear to have left much of an impression.

That evening, while Lee was presumably nose-deep in his iOS, a user with the handle “@BubbleBathGirl” replied to a jocular post from Lee about the developing situation in Iran by writing: “According to Democrats you’re not allowed to make sarcastic posts anymore!” Lee, with apparently nothing better to do in his life, felt compelled to engage the conversation. “Ah yes,” he replied “I must seek their permission.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio was still tagged in replies. Soon, Lee was fully back in regular form online, teasing old 2020 conspiracy theories about mail-in voting.

And while Lee did end up deleting three of his offending tweets on Tuesday, he did leave one up related to the shooter.

The Bulwark conducted a review of Mike Lee’s Twitter feed, @BasedMikeLee, over the past month. During that time period (30 days), the senator posted nearly 1,400 times, or about 46 posts a day. Of those posts, about half (697) were original tweets. The rest where retweets of other accounts or his own posts. The posts came mostly during normal business hours. But not exclusively. Of the nearly 700 posts Lee authored on Twitter, 47 of them came between the hours of 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. eastern daylight time.

Lee’s online persona has been a noisy congressional sideshow for years, but his most recent turn to amoral edgelordism has pushed the envelope in deeply personal and uncomfortable ways. And it’s put lawmakers and staff on edge. In a letter from one of Smith’s top staffers to a counterpart in Lee’s office, the staffer outlined the ways Lee and his staff had behaved cruelly and hurtfully following the killing of a woman many of Lee’s colleagues had known for years. The staffer wrote:

It is important for your office to know how much additional pain you’ve caused on an unspeakably horrific weekend. I am not sure what compelled you or your boss to say any of those things, which, in addition to being unconscionable, also may very well be untrue.

But that is not the point. Why would you use the awesome power of a United States Senate Office to compound people’s grief? Is this how your team measures success? Using the office of a US Senator to post not just one but a series of jokes about an assassination—is that a successful day of work on Team Lee? Did you come into the office Monday and feel proud of the work you did over the weekend?

The first step to overcoming any addiction is admitting you have a problem. That’s a step that Lee has not yet taken when it comes to his phone. Perhaps he finds value in being this online. Perhaps it’s good for his political brand, or for fundraising. Maybe he just lives for the liberal tears.

But maybe he should enlist the help of a former colleague who quit Twitter after considering “the data about the way social media is designed to create dopamine hits for teenage kids.” Until then, you can expect more deranged and adolescent behavior from Lee. In the meantime, props to Sen. Smith for confronting him about it.

Based Mike Crapo

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) released his committee’s version of the reconciliation text for the Big Beautiful Bill, setting up a showdown with House Republicans who have arbitrarily set July 4 as the deadline to reach a deal.

Among the Finance Committee’s decisions that have House Republicans on edge is the utter disregard their Senate colleagues have shown for the expansion of the state and local tax deduction limit from the existing $10,000 to $40,000. House Republicans had strenuously negotiated that new cap in the version of the bill they sent to the upper chamber. The Senate version brings the cap back down to $10,000, which is essentially their way of telling the House to pound sand (salt?).

“I’m generally satisfied with what I’m seeing,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) shortly before the bill became public.

The same can’t be said by the House Republicans, who, despite having much higher aspirations at the start of negotiations, still managed to shake every last bit of SALT out of GOP leadership. Without a win on the SALT issue, many blue-state Republican representatives could be doomed come Election Day.

“DEAD ON ARRIVAL,” posted Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), one of those blue-state Republicans, after learning of the Senate’s unmoving SALT cap.

“The Senate doesn’t have the votes for $10k SALT in the House,” wrote Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.). “And if they’re not sold on the House’s $40k compromise, wait until they crash the OBBB and TCJA expires—when SALT goes back to unlimited at year-end. They won’t like that one bit.”

These House Republicans have plenty of incentives to hold out. After all, the rest of the bill is a bag of dirt for them. The GOP looks set to conduct a massive wealth transfer from the poorest Americans to the most affluent, rake Medicaid over the coals, and disrupt nutritional assistance for the share of the population who can’t sufficiently afford food. Blue-state Republicans, at a minimum, need to show their high-state-tax-paying constituents that they delivered—well, something. Then again, if they tank the bill completely over SALT, then the current $10,000 SALT deduction cap will simply expire, meaning it will return to the pre-TCJA levels with no cap whatsoever.

All of this is to say that House Republicans have three paths forward, and two of them are politically viable: If they get what they want and a higher SALT deduction cap ends up in the final bill, their constituents will have something to be happy about. If the bill fails entirely, their constituents will be pleased to have their SALT deductions fully uncapped. But the worst case scenario for vulnerable Republicans—the one in which their constituents are hung out to dry with an unchanged SALT deduction cap—is still a real possibility because it will only happen if they give up their resistance and do what they’re told, which would be a very in-character move.

While House Republicans are fixated on raising the SALT cap, Senate Republicans don’t have any political need to do so. Their majority reflects the presidential map; their cohort does not draw its members from the wealthy, high-tax liberal coasts that sometimes send GOP representatives to Congress.

Republicans won’t have a House majority if they can’t keep their members from blue states in office. The party also doesn’t get to do sweeping bills like this unless it holds both chambers. But that might not matter to Senate Republicans. For them, the time to spend political capital is now.

Seersucker Thursdays every day

Summer will officially start this weekend, and with summer comes the Senate tradition of Seersucker Thursdays in the Capitol. Meanwhile, today is the first day of Pitti Uomo in Florence, Italy. So, as a palate cleanser to get all that SALT off your tongue, I have some menswear content for you.

With a few exceptions, Seersucker Thursdays are the near-exclusive purview of southern politicians and their staff, which means everyone who participates looks a bit like Atticus Finch.

But seersucker—a weaving method that alternates between looser and tighter, giving the fabric its characteristic dimpling and lift—is actually great for everybody during the summer months. The minute puckering on the fabric allows the majority of the fabric to be subtly lifted off your body, creating more airflow and reducing sweat.

If you want to participate in Seersucker Thursdays, keep cool, and actually look cool, then I have some recommendations for you.²

• Buck Mason makes a Japanese seersucker suit in brown, black, and cream colorways. Get it here, or better yet, visit a store. This suit is unstructured, so it will have a more relaxed fit.

• Todd Snyder’s double-breasted seersucker suit is made in Italy and comes in a nice, light color without the customary stripes.

• Real ones know about Spier and Mackay, a Canadian brand that punches way above its weight in terms of value for money. They sell an Italian-made wool/cotton blended seersucker suit in navy, a versatile option for any occasion throughout the summer.

Each of the above will last you a lifetime, if you take care of them, and they’ll help make the summers a little bit easier to navigate sartorially. And if you’re on Capitol Hill, you’ll be able to participate in Seersucker Thursdays all the way through happy hour while looking a bit more James Bond than Felix Leiter.

1. This, too, isn’t out of character for Lee. Unlike most of his colleagues, he rarely engages in “walk and talk”–style interviews.

2. Apologies to the ladies, but I’m only writing about what I know, which is menswear.