Editor’s note: The Deseret News has invited congressional candidates for the closely contested party primaries to visit with its Editorial Board. This story is one in a series of candidate previews on issues.
Phil Lyman — who is running against Rep. Celeste Maloy in the 3rd Congressional District primary after election losses in 2024 and 2025 — knows exactly where he fits into the Republican Party of 2026.
The GOP establishment in Congress represented by House Speaker Mike Johnson is too top-down, he said, while the “MAGA loyalists” are inconsistent in enforcing constitutional restraints on federal power.
Lyman frames himself as fitting squarely within the House Freedom Caucus, where he said he hopes to fight, if elected, as the face of anti-establishment conservatism in the state of Utah.
“I save all my criticism for the Republicans because I see a willingness to go along with policies and operations that they should be standing up against,” Lyman told the Deseret News/KSL editorial board on Thursday.
A crusade against the “go-along-to-get-along” GOP motivates Lyman’s latest bid to restore small-r “republicanism.” It also underlies his fundamental distrust in state democratic institutions.
After two years of disputing election outcomes, challenging electoral processes and hitting dead ends in court, Lyman has emerged more convinced than ever that the political system is rotten to the core.
Trust is earned through transparency, and where it is denied, corruption can be assumed, according to Lyman, who believes definitively that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from President Donald Trump.
Is Trump in control?
His worldview has convinced Lyman that Trump’s Iran foreign policy has been “hijacked” by deep-state actors in his Cabinet or military who want U.S. intervention to extend past the president’s initially limited goals.
While he said he supports preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb, Lyman said he would not vote to authorize further military action because he believes the battle over the Strait of Hormuz has turned into a “fiasco.”
“On one hand, I’d like to believe that Trump is in charge of those decisions. But on the other hand, it seems inconsistent with what he started, to then find himself in a quagmire of dysfunctional, bad policy,” Lyman said.
There are “penetration agents” in government working against America’s interests, Lyman said, pointing to former CIA Director John Brennan, who was involved in a 2017 report on Russian interference in 2016’s election.
Brennan continues to hold sway over the CIA, Lyman alleged, accusing the CIA of raiding Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s office allegedly to prevent the full release of files on President John F. Kennedy.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna made similar claims this week, saying the CIA removed files related to JFK and the CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA. On Tuesday, Gabbard’s spokesperson said “This is false. The CIA did not raid the DNI’s office.”
This does not change Lyman’s view that foreign policy is being shaped by “a massive propaganda operation underway at the federal level.” Lyman applies an equally dim prognosis to the nation’s spending problem.
It is impossible to recover from the $39 trillion in debt, Lyman said. Americans should distance themselves from a broken dollar by investing in digital currency, like Bitcoin, which Lyman said should not be regulated.
There should also be little to no federal regulation of public lands, according to Lyman, who often cites his arrest as a San Juan County commissioner in 2014 for protesting the government’s closure of an ATV trail.
Is Utah’s success a ‘facade’?
If elected to Congress, Lyman said he will help ensure Washington, D.C., acts on his priorities of land access, energy independence and water rights in a way that protects control by state and local leaders.
In reaction to recent congressional actions, Lyman said he would vote to protect American’s right to privacy from surveillance, to hold corporations accountable and to limit government control of their property.
The mentality that a class of well-known politicians and wealthy activists know what is best for the people is to blame for malfeasance at the capitols in Washington, D.C., and Salt Lake City, according to Lyman.
As a state lawmaker and candidate, Lyman lambasted public-private partnerships to renovate sports arenas, to grade offensive political speech and, more recently, to incentivize a massive AI data center in Box Elder County.
“When government gets involved with that, then if those ideas fail, then the entire state is harmed,” Lyman said. “It’s not government by the people. It’s government by an oligarchy. It’s not conducive to liberty.”
Metrics that show Utah as having the top GDP increase, median household income, economic outlook and upward mobility in the country are “a facade” that do not reflect the experience of everyday Utahns, Lyman said.
Residents remain “overtaxed,” and “overregulated” and are right to hold current elected leaders responsible for the unaffordable housing market and controversial approaches to managing growth, Lyman said.
“The problem is not lack of trust,” Lyman said, repeating his phrase from April’s GOP nominating convention. “It’s trusting people who are not trustworthy. And trustworthy is a component of competence, reliability and honesty.”
Election skepticism
Lyman doubts all three when it comes to the election system. His skepticism is centered in the lieutenant governor’s refusal to provide him with a record of Gov. Spencer Cox’s 2024 primary signature petitions.
An investigation into fraud by signature gatherers working on a different race for the same firm Cox contracted, and an audit finding errors in verifying Cox’s signatures has persuaded Lyman that Cox did not qualify.
Ultimately, Cox won the race soundly, 55%-45%. But Lyman did not concede, saying he needed to verify the election returns through an independent, third-party audit first. Lyman has never conceded the loss.
On Thursday, Lyman did not say whether he would trust the results of his 3rd District primary race this year against Maloy. He will “verify the election results,” Lyman said, by looking at a “statistical analysis.”
In 2024, Lyman asked the Utah and U.S. high courts to reverse the election outcome and to place him on the general ballot. Lyman later dismissed the rulings against him, saying they were not decided on the merits.
Lyman said he does not “challenge election results” unless there are indications of fraud, like he claims to have found in the 2024 primary. Lyman referenced that he accepted his loss in the GOP chair race last year.
“When I’m defeated, when I’m done I will go away. I’m a very good loser. I’m happy to lose in a fair fight,” Lyman said. “It’s hard to walk away from something midstream mid-fight when we’re making so much progress.”
After waging a historic write-in campaign in 2024, that saw more than 200,000 Utahns write in Lyman’s name for the general election, Lyman promised his supporters he would run for governor again in 2028.
That race proved his message of transparency “really resonated with people,” he said Thursday. Lyman did not say if he still planned to run for governor. His current bid, he said, gives him “an opportunity to continue the fight.”
