Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has been pushing to lower the political temperature for years. But never has he faced a moment more fraught – and more high-profile – than when he stepped to the podium Friday.
With national TV cameras rolling, Governor Cox announced that police had caught the suspected assassin who killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk in his state two days earlier. Even as some members of his Republican Party turned quickly to blame their political opponents, he offered a starkly different message.
“We will never be able to solve all the other problems, including the violence problems that people are worried about, if we can’t have a clash of ideas safely and securely, even especially, especially, those ideas with which you disagree,” said Mr. Cox. “We can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.”
Why We Wrote This
Utah’s governor has made promoting dialogue between political opponents his signature issue. In the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk in Utah, Spencer Cox is continuing to promote civil discourse as an off-ramp to violence.
At a time of increasingly divisive politics in America, Utah’s two-term governor has made “finding an off-ramp” his signature issue. During his chairmanship of the National Governors Association last year, he launched the Disagree Better initiative, which aimed to show the “right kind of conflict” and to “attack ideas, not people” through debates and research.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, has worked closely with Mr. Cox on that initiative. The two spoke at an event promoting bipartisanship just last week.
“As a friend, I’m devastated that he had to deal with this … but as an American, I thank God that it is Spencer Cox who’s helping to lead us through,” Governor Moore told the Monitor after the shooting. “Spencer is uniquely built for this. He is a deeply good and humane person.”
Mr. Cox was one of the first people to reach out when Baltimore’s Key Bridge collapsed last year, killing six people, and Mr. Moore said he called him immediately after Mr. Kirk’s assassination to offer his prayers, and has talked to him each day since.
What kind of watershed?
Political violence in America has seemed to only build, from assassination attempts against President Donald Trump last year to the killing of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, in June. The fatal shooting of Mr. Kirk, while he was debating at Utah Valley University in Orem, has thrust the Utah governor into the national spotlight.
Thus far, Mr. Cox’s push to find an off-ramp from political violence through dialogue has yet to find a strong footing, as other GOP leaders from President Trump on down have taken a much harsher partisan tone. The question now is, Will Mr. Kirk’s killing be the kind of watershed moment that the governor hopes it can be, rather than a turn toward more violence?
“Hopefully, a lesson to be learned from this assassination is that we can all grow and become better people,” says former Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, who chose Mr. Cox as his lieutenant governor in 2013 and now runs a public policy institute at the university where Mr. Kirk was killed. “Wouldn’t it be nice if this is an inflection point where we say, ‘You know what? Enough of this political rhetoric is so mean and demeaning and frustrating for everybody.’ It creates more anger and more divisiveness, and it’s like pouring gasoline on the fire. We ought to get away from that and start treating each other better, and that’s what [Mr. Cox] is saying.”
The immediate responses to Mr. Kirk’s assassination from some of Mr. Cox’s Republican colleagues took a sharply different tone. Some Republicans in Congress have blamed the shooting on Democrats, and in a four-minute video address from the Oval Office Wednesday evening, President Trump said the rhetoric of the “radical left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” On Thursday, Texas Rep. Chip Roy, along with two dozen colleagues in the U.S. House, sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson requesting to form a special committee to investigate “the radical left’s assault on America and the rule of law.” And again on Friday morning while on “Fox & Friends,” Mr. Trump dismissed the notion from an interviewer that there are political extremists on both sides of the political aisle, arguing that “the radicals on the left are the problem.”
Mr. Cox’s call for unity Friday morning drew more praise from Democrats than from Republicans. David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, posted on the social platform X that he had “such respect” for the governor’s “heartfelt, thoughtful plea.” Governor Moore said that he’s urging people to “listen to Spencer Cox, because Spencer Cox is the one who is urging us to be better.”
But Steve Bannon, a close ally of President Trump’s, who had described Mr. Kirk as “a casualty of war,” said he was “underwhelmed” by the governor’s response, and that now was not a time for “happy talk.”
But focusing on the rhetoric of politicians wasn’t at the core of the governor’s plea Friday, in which he sought to put the current moment on the shoulders of the American public.
“History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country,” said Mr. Cox. “But every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.”
Cox’s rise – and political evolution
Mr. Cox began his political career in local government in his hometown of Fairview, Utah, a city of about 1,200 people in the middle of the state where he owns a farm started by his great-great-great-grandfather. Shortly after he was elected to the Utah House of Representatives, Mr. Cox was appointed lieutenant governor in 2013 by then-Governor Herbert, before winning reelection as the state’s No. 2 in 2016.
When Mr. Cox ran for the governorship himself in 2020, he narrowly won the Republican primary against former Utah governor and presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, before easily winning the general election in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since the early 1980s. The most notable moment of the campaign was a campaign video he shot jointly with his Democratic opponent advocating political civility. Mr. Cox easily won reelection in 2024, and has said this election will be his last despite the fact that Utah doesn’t have term limits.
He’s part of a long tradition of Utah Republicans – including former Governors Herbert, Huntsman, and Mike Leavitt; former Sen. Mitt Romney; and current Sen. John Curtis – whose conservatism is tempered, especially in tone, by a more civil, tolerant, and bipartisan approach heavily influenced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But Utah’s more respectful, straight-laced politics have begun to fray in recent years, along with the rest of the nation’s. Conservative firebrand Mike Lee’s 2010 Senate victory in the Beehive State over a moderate Republican helped kick off the tea party movement. While Utah Republicans rebelled against Mr. Trump during his first run for office, they’ve moved gradually toward him.
Rather than vote for his party’s presidential nominee, Mr. Trump, in 2016 or 2020, Mr. Cox says he wrote in candidates for the top of the ballot, and he called on Mr. Trump to resign for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. After initially saying he would not vote for Mr. Trump again in 2024, Mr. Cox changed his mind after the president was shot while holding a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. He sent Mr. Trump a letter, praising the “humility” that the president showed after the shooting – “a side of you most of us have not seen,” he wrote – when Mr. Trump called for unity.
Some saw this as a calculated move. Mr. Cox had just narrowly won his contested 2024 primary against a Trump-backed candidate who called his Disagree Better agenda a “leftist, Marxist tactic,” and was later booed at that spring’s state GOP convention.
In recent years, Mr. Cox has shifted his policies further to the right. After vetoing a ban on transgender athletes in sports in 2022, he has since signed legislation that made Utah the first state to bar minors from gender-transition treatments.
But even as his policies have changed, his tone hasn’t shifted. And that has become increasingly out of step with the rest of his party.
“Donald Trump is Donald Trump,” Mr. Herbert told the Monitor. “I think it’s a little harder for old dogs to learn new tricks. That’s why I think Governor Cox, at [Friday’s] press conference, said, ‘I want to address the young people here, the best hope we have for the future of America.’”
