Utah Gov. Spencer Cox told a room of Republican leaders on Monday that America needs more Beehive State values to counter the contempt in national politics.
Cox shared the stage with two former governors, Mike Leavitt and Gary Herbert, who said he might be in the best position to make that happen.
Herbert, who served as Cox’s predecessor from 2009 to 2021, said of his former lieutenant governor, “He’s running for president, it’s nice to know.”
To which Cox quickly responded, “That is not a thing, it is never going to be a thing, it is not happening, so we can put that to bed right now.”
But that did not stop Herbert and Leavitt from making the case for Cox — arguing that his criticisms of social media and calls for respectful dialogue deserve a national stage.
Leavitt, who served as governor from 1993 to 2003 before joining the Bush administration, said Cox demonstrated this caliber of leadership after the Charlie Kirk assassination.
“There was a moment and he met it,” Leavitt said. “The Republican Party, and the country as a whole, owes him a really big debt of gratitude for the fact that he has become a voice of reason on this.”
The room broke into applause. In attendance at the Elephant Club fundraiser were GOP legislators, lobbyists and policymakers, along with a handful of Democratic state lawmakers, who are usually not invited to these events.
Has Cox become a national leader?
Cox quickly became the face of the country’s response to Kirk’s killing at Utah Valley University. In widely viewed press conferences and media appearances, Cox reflected grief and anger, but urged fellow citizens to “find an off-ramp,” with Utah “showing the way.”
Since serving as chair of the National Governors Association from 2023 to 2024, Cox has championed a “Disagree Better” approach to improving political discussions as a way to reduce demonization of political opponents and to prevent political violence.
A string of history-making acts of political violence have drawn national attention to Cox’s message. In 2024, Trump narrowly avoided two assassination attempts. This preceded attacks on state lawmakers in Minnesota, and against Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in 2025.
Cox has also taken a leading stance on holding social media companies accountable for algorithms that downplay cooperation and promote “conflict entrepreneurs who benefit off of tearing us down, and seeding lies in our party, and outside of our party,” as he said on Monday.
“It’s so hard for us as a society to operate as a society when we’re not working with shared facts,” Cox said. “When you get to choose your facts, we can be talking about the same issue and talking completely past each other.”
The divided states of America
Cox has many of his own critics from the right and left that say he has contributed, not decreased, partisan animosity.
A number of Utah Republicans, including former gubernatorial candidate Phil Lyman, have accused Cox of compromising conservative principles in an attempt to appease Democrats and woo liberal elites around the country.
Meanwhile, Utah Democrats have lambasted the governor for his about-face in his support for Trump, when Cox endorsed him in 2024, and have criticized Cox’s more public defense of Trump’s tough-on-immigration policies.
Getting communication right is one of the “toughest” and most important things a leader must do, according to Herbert. And good communication is something Herbert believes is in short supply in today’s GOP.
Herbert, who defines himself as a “common-sense Reagan Republican,” said he “got along well” with President Donald Trump during his first term in office. But he said the GOP standard bearer has crossed the line of acceptable rhetoric.
During the 2024 presidential race, Trump took to calling one of his GOP primary opponents, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, “birdbrain,” Herbert said, even going so far as sending a birdcage and bird food to Haley’s hotel room.
“Why would we tolerate that?” Herbert said.
Herbert also mentioned Trump’s response to the alleged homicide of director and progressive activist Rob Reiner. On Monday, Trump attributed Reiner’s death to so-called “Trump derangement syndrome,” in a post on Truth Social.
To step off the country’s “pathway to division,” Herbert said Republicans and Democrats need to “hold our candidates to a higher standard,” and reward politicians who are doing a good job of trying to disagree better.
Cox identified the problem of increasing political polarization — and how it could bring governance and social trust to a grinding halt — earlier than most, according to Leavitt, who called Cox a “spokesman for good, rational thought.”
“And I think Americans are hungry for that,” Leavitt told the Deseret News.
‘More of Utah’
Cox deflected the praise of Herbert and Leavitt, saying he did what either of them would have done in the face of tragedy in the case of Kirk’s assassination. Utah has a “legacy of governors who aren’t bomb throwers, who try to bring people together,” Cox said.
But Cox said that he recognized that the stakes and scrutiny were higher after the Sept. 10 shooting. The reputation of Utah for many Americans would be shaped by how the state responded to one of the most high-profile political assassinations in U.S. history, Cox said.
What many people did not realize, however, is that Utah’s response came from a deep culture of charity and compassion that is “very easy to destroy” and “takes forever to get it back,” according to Cox.
The only way to maintain that culture is to elect leaders, like Herbert and Leavitt, Cox said, who value integrity as much as outcomes, who believe that “the right thing done the wrong way is no longer the right thing.”
“The country desperately needs us, more of us, more of Utah right now,” Cox said. “People are tired of the divisiveness. They’re desperate for something different — in both parties. There’s a market failure in our politics today. No one is offering anything different."
