"MAGA Makeover" Put to the Test in Utah
Unfortunately for Mayor Trent Staggs, his town's public pronouncements from the COVID era are undoing his core campaign mes
In advance of tomorrow’s Utah’s GOP convention, a Republican’s “MAGA Makeover” is undergoing fresh scrutiny–it turns out that the Senate candidate who helmed a boner pill company is lying about his record as a small-town mayor, and hoping that he can get away with it.
Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs, who’s running as an anti-establishment, MAGA candidate with backing from Kari Lake, Vivek Ramaswamy, Matt Gaetz, and others, is actively rewriting history; despite boasts about how he chose “not to get the covid vaccine” and how “in Riverton, we believe in freedom and that people know better how to govern their lives than DC bureaucrats,” it turns out that his town council meetings were actually restricted to the public “due to COVID-19 restrictions,” as simple Google searches will show.
This of course runs counter to his campaign website claiming that “his city hall always remained open and he held his council meetings in person, not just online.” Posts from April and May of 2020, for example, from the city’s official social media account, clearly state that “attendance at City Hall is restricted.”
Helming a city government at the onset of COVID-19 was assuredly not an easy task, but there’s no need to so obviously lie about your record, especially when your own city government clearly contradicts campaign literature.
But, this is shaping up to be a habit from the Staggs campaign. The now-self-proclaimed “worst enemy” of woke took the opposite tack as Riverton’s mayor, boasting about “anti-bias” training for police and praising “the level of equitable policing in our community.” This is a stark contrast with his current campaign language that laments “the soft-on-crime philosophy [that] is frequently couched in terms of ‘racial justice.’” Back in 2019, Staggs even moved to rename his city’s “Public Events Committee to the Public Events and Inclusion Committee,” according to city council minutes.
Perhaps most hilariously has been Staggs’s heel turn on the man he’s running to replace: Senator Mitt Romney. While the current featured video on Staggs’s website is called Trent Staggs vs. Mitt Romney for Utah Senate, Staggs was all too happy to trot out Mitt’s endorsement during his failed 2020 campaign for mayor of Salt Lake County–well after Romney’s march with Black Lives Matter, which Staggs now decries in his advertising.
In a now-deleted tweet from his failed mayoral campaign, Staggs thanked Romney for his “dedicated service” and for his endorsement. Since launching his Senate bid, he’s done a full-180, attacking Romney for fighting for “the establishment, wokeness, open borders, impeaching President Trump and putting us even deeper into debt.”
One plugged-in Utah Republican strategist has a simple explanation for Staggs’s shifts, telling me that “when your out-of-state MAGA pay for play political consultants tell you to construct a new political identity out of whole cloth like your principles are a Halloween costume, it’s important to make sure that it doesn’t require flip-flopping on every position you’ve ever held on Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, DEI, COVID lockdowns, and George Soros.”
While Staggs’s rebrand is blatantly self-evident, perhaps the most fatal mistake he made was pushing for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to run for president in 2024. Shortly after the 2022 midterms, Staggs joined almost 100 Utah elected officials in urging DeSantis to run–and we all know how that turned out.
With Trump now having locked up the delegates to be the GOP’s standard-bearer heading into November, his team has been exacting revenge on Republicans who backed DeSantis over his fellow Florida man. Look no further than the crusade that Trumpworld is on against Congressman Bob Good, the head of the Freedom Caucus, who also backed DeSantis over Trump.
Tomorrow, Utah Republicans will have their convention where Staggs’s MAGA Makeover will be put to the test. He’d better hope the internet cuts out, because it’s a pretty easy one for him to fail.