Tenure
In 2011, Club for Growth gave Lee a 100% score. He also received a 100% Conservative voting record for 2011 from the American Conservative Union. The Heritage Foundation gave him a 99% score, tied for first with Jim DeMint. He received a Liberal Action score of 38%.
In March 2016, Lee endorsed Ted Cruz over Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary. He was the first senator to do so. At the time, he said, "I expect I'll be the first of many Republican senators who will endorse Ted Cruz. I'm confident more are on the way, and I welcome others to join." By June, after Trump had become the presumptive nominee, Lee had still not endorsed him, saying he needed "assurances" that Trump would not act as an "authoritarian" or "autocrat" and expressing frustration that Trump had "accused my best friend's father of conspiring to kill JFK"; at several points during the 2016 primary, Trump publicly implied that Ted Cruz's father Rafael had consorted with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Lee voted for Independent Evan McMullin.
On October 16, 2017, Lee endorsed Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama special election runoff to fill the seat of U.S. Attorney General and former senator Jeff Sessions. Moore had been removed as the Alabama Supreme Court's chief justice in 2003 for defying a federal order to remove an illegal Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building. He was reelected chief justice in 2012. In May 2016, Moore was once again removed from the bench by the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission (JIC), permanently via suspension for the rest of his term, making him ineligible for reelection, for ordering state probate judges to ignore a U.S. Supreme Court decision. In a 50-page opinion, the Court of the Judiciary denied Moore's appeal of the JIC's decision, and said his removal was necessary "to preserve the integrity, independence, impartiality of Alabama's judiciary". Nevertheless, Lee praised Moore for his "reputation of integrity" and said he was essential to getting conservative legislation through the Senate. "That is why I am proudly endorsing Judge Roy Moore. Alabamians have the chance to send a proven, conservative fighter to the United States Senate." On November 9, 2017, Moore was accused of molesting a 14-year-old and other girls under age 18 when he was 32.
On November 10, Lee asked the Moore campaign to stop using Lee's endorsement of Moore in its ads. Lee's spokesperson said of the sexual misconduct allegations, "If these allegations are true, Judge Moore should resign." Later that day, Lee rescinded his endorsement of Moore.
On October 28, 2020, Lee compared President Trump to Captain Moroni, a heroic figure in the Book of Mormon, telling rally-goers in Arizona: "To my Mormon friends, my Latter-Day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni." He said that Trump "seeks not the praise of the world" and wants only "the well-being and peace of the American people". His comparison was met with backlash. The overwhelming majority of responses on Lee's Facebook account characterized his efforts as "shameful" or "blasphemous". In a follow-up Facebook post, Lee wrote that he had praised Trump for his willingness to "threaten the established political order", but that the comparison was "perhaps awkward" and that his "impromptu comments may not have been the best forum for drawing a novel analogy from scripture".
Text messages gathered by the January 6 Committee reveal Lee's close coordination with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the aftermath of Trump's defeat in the 2020 election. In the weeks after the election, Lee pursued a series of strategies to overturn the election results, claiming to have been working "14 hours a day" to find a path he could "persuasively defend". The strategies included attempts to persuade state legislatures in states Joe Biden won to put forward alternative slates of electors and promoting the efforts of attorneys Sidney Powell and John Eastman, arguing that "everything changes, of course, if the swing states submit competing slates of electors pursuant to state law." Ultimately, Lee became concerned by what he considered Powell's missteps, the lack of evidence given by her and others of election fraud, state legislatures' failure to convene alternate slates of electors, and what Lee considered the unconstitutional efforts of Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to challenge the election certification in Congress on January 6.
Lee ultimately voted to certify the election, saying that the effort to block the certification "could all backfire badly", but he continued to promulgate disinformation, claiming the FBI was involved in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. To date, only one FBI agent, Brett Gloss, has been identified as having entered a restricted area of the Capitol grounds.
After Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to concede, and a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, Lee said Trump should be given a "mulligan" for his inflammatory January 6 speech immediately before the storming of the Capitol. Lee later defended his remarks, saying, "my reference to taking a 'mulligan' was not referring to Trump, but to Democratic politicians whose inflammatory comments had just been played for me on the air [on Fox News]. I used the term...to avoid needlessly inflaming partisan passions." On May 28, 2021, Lee voted against creating an independent commission to investigate the riot. By April 2022, the January 6 Committee had discovered and released over 100 emails between Lee, Congressman Chip Roy, and Meadows discussing their plans to overturn the election results.
In response to the shooting of two Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party lawmakers and their spouses on June 14, 2025, Lee wrote on his personal X account, "This is what happens When Marxists don't get their way" and "Nightmare on Waltz Street", apparently referring to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who was included on the shooter's list along with Senator Tina Smith. Reports indicated that the shooter had been a supporter of Trump and had targeted Democratic lawmakers. Minnesota senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith criticized Lee for his post. Both spoke to him, with Smith saying, "I wanted him to know how much pain that caused me and the other people in my state, and I think around the country, who think that this was a brutal attack". Lee later removed the posts after facing heavy criticism.
Lee is a prolific user of X, posting an average of 36 times daily in 2024 and an average of 100 times daily in the first four months of 2025. His account was temporarily suspended in 2023 for posts threatening the Prime Minister of Japan. Lee shared a video from Alex Jones's media company Infowars that claimed without evidence that the Biden administration planned to impose new COVID-19-related lockdowns in the fall of 2023. "Over my lifeless body", he wrote in response. In November 2023, Lee shared on X a post endorsing a debunked conspiracy theory that January 6 rioter Kevin Lyons was an undercover federal agent. Lee frequently interacted with Elon Musk on X, where he praised Musk's plans for a Department of Government Efficiency. In July 2025, Lee shared a fake resignation letter allegedly by Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell. He deleted the post after being informed Powell was not resigning. In December 2025, Lee shared a post by antisemitic conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll endorsing the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Lee suggested that the Kirk estate sue novelist Stephen King over a comment he made in the wake of the murder. Raw Story responded with an article titled 'Proof morons pass the bar': GOP senator mocked for lawsuit threat against Stephen King, which quoted legal bloggers who said that defamation suits by decedents' estates have been barred in the US and Britain for at least two centuries.
