Do we like them?Do we like Spencer Cox?
Our score: 5 out of 10. Real civility and a first-of-its-kind Pride proclamation, set against signing and defending the ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth.
Spencer Cox is the Republican governor of Utah, and lately he's the bloke telling America to cool it. His new book, Off Ramp, is part memoir and part pitch for fierce disagreement without treating each other as enemies.
The moment that turned him into a national figure came after Charlie Kirk was shot dead in Utah. Cox became a prominent voice urging Americans to step back from political hatred and violence, and he says the real rot is personal: friendships and family ties ending over politics. His line in the PBS interview was “politicians are not worth ending friendships over.”
His Trump story is a bit of a ride. Cox says he opposed Trump's 2016 and 2020 nominations and tried an adversarial approach that didn't work. After the assassination attempt on Trump he wrote him a long letter pledging help, and the two now work together on things like the Great Salt Lake and energy. Whether you read that as grown-up pragmatism or a convenient flip depends on where you sit.
Now the harm check, and this is where it gets uncomfortable. Cox signed Utah's 2023 ban on gender-affirming care for minors, calling it a “pausing” of treatments until more research arrives. In June 2025 the Salt Lake Tribune reported he said the ban was “probably in the right place right now”, weeks after a Legislature-commissioned review reportedly found benefits from such care. He pointed to European and UK reports, though his office didn't say which studies he meant.
On the other side of the ledger, in 2021 he declared June as LGBTQ+ Pride Month in Utah, which the Utah Pride Center considers the first such declaration by a sitting Utah governor. That's a real gesture from a Republican in a conservative state. It doesn't cancel the youth care ban, and we haven't found anything in what we read on his record on climate or vaccines, so that's a gap.
On the good-person side, there's one messy story. In 2021 an outside investigation, commissioned by Cox and his lieutenant governor, substantiated claims of sexual misconduct by his 2020 campaign manager (no relation), who resigned before it finished. The manager's lawyers denied the allegations. Cox apologised to the staffer and others and took “full responsibility” for the campaign's failings, which is how you'd want a boss to handle it.