Conservative GOP Sen. Mike Lee said he will support Donald Trump — provided he gets a guarantee that the presumptive GOP presidential nominee isn’t going to be “authoritarian.”
“I would like some assurances … that he’s not going to be an autocrat, that he’s not going to be an authoritarian, that he’s not somebody who’s going to abuse a document that I have sworn to uphold and defend and protect,” Lee, from Utah, told Newsmax.
Lee went on a rant after the outlet questioned why the senator had not endorsed his party’s presumptive nominee for president.
“We can get into that if you want. We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK,” Lee said, referring to Trump’s repeating a conspiracy theory that GOP rival Ted Cruz’s dad had something to do with the president’s assassination.
“We can go through the fact that he’s made some 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,” he added.
Lee said he could “get over” these complaints “if I heard the right things out of him.”
And there’s no chance that he’ll be supporting Trump’s challenger.
“I can’t vote for Hillary,” he said. “I know there’s no possibility of that.”