Sen. Mike Lee, Glenn Beck and others join Donald Trump on call directed at Latter-day Saint voters

Former President Donald Trump joined several prominent Latter-day Saint conservatives and Republican lawmakers — including Sen. Mike Lee and Blaze Media CEO Glenn Beck — on a call Sunday night, where Trump and the others pitched voters on why they should support him in the upcoming presidential election.
Many of the people who spoke on the call also joined Trump earlier in the day at a rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona.
Besides Lee and Beck, other speakers on the call included Utah Reps. Burgess Owens and Celeste Maloy, Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich, Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador and organizer and host Travis Padilla. Each is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was not immediately clear how many people listened to the webinar.
One theme of the call was forgiveness — several of the speakers said voters shouldn’t hold Trump’s past mistakes against him — while another was respect for the Constitution.
The call and the Trump campaign’s outreach efforts are not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints or its leaders. The church maintains a neutral position when it comes to politics. The Church recently released an official statement reiterating it “does not endorse, promote or oppose political parties and their platforms or candidates for political office.”
Trump hit on several themes, including the centrality of family, religious liberty and the Constitution, in his remarks on the call.
“We believe that faith in God and our Judeo-Christian values are essential to a healthy American society,” he said. “We believe in family, we believe in parental rights. We believe, in fact, that religious freedom is the foundation of all our freedoms.”
He also criticized his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, on social and economic issues, and on the border. Trump spoke about his relatively strong support among Latino voters, compared to past Republican presidential nominees, and said he would appoint judges, like he did in his first term, who support the Constitution as written.
A few times during the call, Trump asked Latter-day Saints directly to vote for him, saying it would help him in Arizona and Nevada, two swing states Trump hopes to capture in November.
Lee, who represents Utah in the Senate, said he knows both Trump and Harris, and “neither one of them is going to be mistaken for your stake president or your Relief Society president.”
Lee quoted Latter-day Saint scripture on the U.S. Constitution, and said the Constitution is a “special thing, that it was written by the hands of wise men raised up by Almighty God to that very purpose, and that we should defend it.”
Trump would do a better job defending the structural protections provided by the Constitution, Lee said, adding he doesn’t think it’s a “close call, not by a mile.”
In his remarks at the Prescott Valley rally, Lee told a story about a time when his wife’s mother was sick and Trump called to ask him about a “legislative matter,” but after hearing about Sharon Lee’s mother he asked to speak to her. She put Trump on speaker phone, and Lee said he “comforted the entire family.”
At the rally and on the call, Lee spoke about concerns he has about Harris on the issue of religious liberty. He said legislation she sponsored, the Do No Harm Act, would have gutted religious freedom protections found in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
After speaking about the church’s founding and the early persecution of Latter-day Saints, Lee said he has concerns about what could happen to religious liberty moving forward.
“Today, we’re persecuted much more for the fact that many of our church’s teachings and our core doctrines are just incompatible with the woke, radical, progressive agenda, and so that’s the basis of our persecution,” he said. “Today, if you elect Kamala Harris as our next president, you are sowing the seeds for the destruction of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and with it, religious freedom itself.”
Beck, who, like Lee, didn’t support Trump early on, expressed full support for the former president during Sunday’s call and at the rally. But he spent more time outlining his concerns over what he believes Harris would do if she is elected, including on the issues of abortion, free speech and religious liberty.
Beck encouraged those on the call to “go find one person that’s on the fence. Go find one person of our faith that does not, just, ‘I can’t vote for Donald Trump because of XYZ.’”
“If it’s because of who he is as a man, or what he’s done with his you know, his divorces and everything else. If you want to know what Donald Trump thinks about women, ask his daughters,” Beck said. “His daughters are strong, decent, honorable people that love their father. I have to tell you, if I could have the success that that man has had with his family and his daughters in a broken marriage where he still co-parented with his ex-wife, that’s miraculous.”
Several Latter-day Saint Republican members of Congress also expressed their support for Trump on the call.
Owens said he hopes voters won’t hold Trump’s past mistakes against him, saying he has made mistakes as well.
“We’re in a spiritual war” for freedom, Owens said.
“We need someone who loves our nation, who’s bold enough to stand up against the evil forces that are now against us, that want to to maintain those basic concepts of faith, family, free market, education. That’s President Trump,” he said.
Maloy focused her remarks on the “administrative state,” and said Trump would do a better job fighting back against the growing power of the bureaucracy.
“We have bureaucrats making decisions about the air we breathe, the water we drink, the cars we drive, the roads we drive on, what our kids learn in school, how we live our lives,” she said. Almost every aspect of our lives is being governed by rules that have the force of law, that are not law.”
This election is pivotal in the fight for individual freedoms, Maloy said, adding that she believes Trump will continue his work on pushing back against the administrative state.
Biggs, who represents a district in Arizona, focused much of his remarks on the Constitution and on the border.
“Do you want four more years of an open border?,” he asked. “I mean, we all want legal immigration. We actually give more legal status to more people every year than all the other countries in the world combined. But we can’t continue to bring in the entire world without any vetting.”
Biggs also criticized the Biden administration over inflation, and spoke about Trump’s character, saying he finds the former president “gracious,” and said everyone requires “mercy.”
“When I look at where we sit today as a nation, I view us as a kind of in an existential crisis in some ways. But the dichotomy between President Trump and and his opponent are so stark, so large — and when people say, well, he’s got some mean tweets, or he said something wrong or he’s not the kind of man I want to be, or that type of thing. Look, no man and no woman is perfect.”
Harris has also asked Latter-day Saint voters to support her in the upcoming election. She has launched formal efforts targeting Latter-day Saint voters in Arizona and Nevada.
At a rally in Arizona on Saturday, Harris addressed “the LDS community here,” saying, “We have so much more in common than what separates us, especially on the fundamentals. And so, with that, I say that I am committed to all of you to be a president for all Americans and to work as we must together again.”