Mike Lee Isn’t Ready to Embrace Trump

It doesn’t appear that Utah senator Mike Lee is inching any closer to supporting his party’s presumptive nominee, Donald Trump.

In an interview with NewsMaxTV’s Steve Malzberg, Lee didn’t shy away from his serious reservations regarding Trump, telling Malzberg, “Hey look, Steve, I get it. You want me to endorse Trump. We can get into that if you want.”

We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father [Rafael Cruz, the father of Texas senator Ted Cruz] 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.

Lee told Malzberg, “I hope I can get over this, because I can’t vote for Hillary. I know there’s no possibility of that.”

But he did caution that Trump has a lot of work to do if he wants to reconcile himself with conservative voters: “I would like some assurances on where he’s going to stand his ground. I’d like some assurances that he’s going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution.”