Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on Wednesday tore into Donald Trump, reciting a laundry list of issues to explain why he hasn’t yet endorsed the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
“Hey look, Steve, I get it. You want me to endorse Trump,” Lee said during an interview with NewsMaxTV host Steve Malzberg, when pressed about why he hasn’t made the endorsement.
{mosads}“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,” he continued, referring to Trump citing a tabloid story that linked Ted Cruz’s father to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who shot President John F. Kennedy.
“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 said he could move past those concerns “if I heard the right things out of him.”
“I hope I can get over these concerns. I hope Mr. Trump can help me identify them,” he said.