Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who has a part-time job filling in as Sen. Ted Cruz's shadow during sunny days, is not yet climbing aboard the Trump Trike.
“Hey look, Steve, I get it. You want me to endorse Trump,” Lee told NewsMaxTV’s Steve Malzberg when asked why he wasn’t “trumpeting Trump.”
Heh. NewsMax. So that's what Mike Lee does with his time during the brief pauses it takes for the Fox News cameraman to switch batteries.
“We can get into that if you want,” he continued. “We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK. We can go through the fact that he’s made statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant. We can get into the fact that he’s wildly unpopular in my state, in part because my state consists of people who are members of a religious minority church. A people who were ordered exterminated by the governor of Missouri in 1838. And statements like that make them nervous.”
Mind you, Mr. NewsMax wasn't going to just let such insults slide without some pushback.
When Malzberg commented that Trump merely said Cruz’s father might have conspired to kill former President John F. Kennedy Jr., Lee said, “Right, right, he said that. He actually said that. He said that without any scintilla, without a scintilla of evidence. Now that concerns me.”
Also, and not for nothing: Mike Lee says Ted Cruz is his best friend? Wow. This may be the first time I've ever felt sympathy for the poor guy.