“I love the Mormons,” Donald Trump bellowed at a Utah campaign stop one week before the state’s Republican caucus. “I have many friends that live in Salt Lake City,” Trump continued. “I’ve had many Mormons work for me.”
The feeling was less than mutual. Trump would finish a distant third in that primary before eking out a modest 45.5 percent of the state’s general election vote—the lowest of any Republican nominee in modern history. Nine months later, not much has changed.
In the most conservative state in the union, Trump polls under 50 percent. Unsurprising but important, a Utah Policy poll shows that 46 percent of Utahns approve of the president while another 50 percent do not. What’s interesting is that those approval ratings haven’t slipped much, much farther.
Western congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints don’t have a lot in common with Trump, except their teetotaling ways. The personal life of the trash-talking triple-divorcee clashes with clear-cut LDS family values. And his policies on immigration, particularly the travel ban from Islamic nations, grates on members of the minority religion who make up the majority of the Utah electorate.
While Mormons have become mainstream in America, their history is one of religious persecution. They remember the 1838 Mormon War, when they were run out of the state of Missouri because of their faith. They also remember the Utah War, when President James Buchanan sent an expeditionary force into the territory in 1857.
Thinking of that history, Utah Sen. Mike Lee refused to endorse his party’s nominee. Trump’s “wildly unpopular in my state,” Lee explained in a June 2016 interview, “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.”
Considering those combined personal and policy differences, it’s notable that Trump hasn’t slumped further. Compared to the 37 percent of Americans who approve of the president nationally, Utah seems begrudgingly tolerant. The Mormons don’t love Trump but, at least for now, they don’t hate him.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
