A few months ago, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox was one of the few prominent Republicans consistently keeping his distance from former President Trump, whose brash style seemed to be the antithesis of a brand of politics Cox had carefully cultivated that centered on unity and respect.

Cox did not vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, and told CNN in July that he would not vote for him this year. The governor said the then-president’s role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol went too far.

Days later, after an assassination attempt on Trump at a Pennsylvania rally, Cox changed his mind.

Cox sent a letter to Trump explaining that his defiant response at the moment of the shooting had spurred a sudden reassessment and switch for Cox.

His turnabout bewildered political observers who, for the past decade, have watched Cox methodically build a persona as a moderate in the manner of Mitt Romney, the Utah senator who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, while climbing the ranks of state leadership.

Cox, 49, said in his note that he believed Trump could save the country “by emphasizing unity rather than hate.”

“You probably don’t like me much,” Cox wrote. “But I want you to know that I pledge my support.”

Trump has not in turn endorsed Cox for reelection.

The pair’s puzzling relationship was thrust into the spotlight again this past week when they put themselves at the center of a controversy at Arlington National Cemetery. After Trump’s staff had an altercation with a cemetery official, Cox broke rules — and likely federal law — in using a graveside photo with Trump in a campaign fundraising email.

Federal law prohibits campaign or election-related activities within the Army’s national cemeteries, and officials at Arlington said that rule had been shared widely before Monday’s ceremony honoring 13 service members, including one from Utah, who died in an airport bombing during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago.

Cox’s campaign issued a swift apology for politicizing the ceremony; Trump’s has insisted it had permission to film in a restricted area. A TikTok video of the visit shared by Trump includes scenes of him and Cox at the cemetery with a voice-over of the former president blaming the Biden administration for the “disaster” of the withdrawal.

The opposing responses highlight the disconnect between their political styles and reignite questions why Cox has chosen to stand by Trump, who said after the assassination attempt that he had no plans to change his ways.

“I’m confident that he was there to support a Utah family, and that’s a laudable goal, but in being there with Donald Trump, he got pulled into something that creates some ethical challenges,” said Chris Karpowitz, a political science professor at Brigham Young University. “He allowed himself to compromise his values, and he’s not the first politician aligning with Donald Trump to have found himself in that position.”

The sudden embrace by Cox, who is up for reelection in a race not expected to be close, is not sitting well with some of the Utah moderates he had worked to win over.

Kyle Douglas of Orem said he lost his trust in Cox when the governor chose to back a presidential candidate who does not share his values.

“I used to be proud that my governor was still one of the good guys,” Douglas said. “It’s so disappointing to see him sell out.”

Lucy Wright of Provo put her disgust more bluntly.

“Trump is a big orange stain on his legacy,” she said.

Karpowitz said he, too, was surprised by Cox’s switch, and recalled thinking the governor’s notion that Trump could be a unifying figure for the nation was “somewhat naive.” Like many in Utah, the professor said he found himself struggling to understand why Cox might have thought backing Trump would help the governor politically.

The decision risks Cox’s reputation with his moderate voting base while likely doing little to win over followers of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, many of whom booed Cox at the state GOP convention this year.

Aligning with Trump has been known to bolster the political profiles of some Republicans, but the former president has not been quite as influential in Utah.

The state is a rare Republican stronghold that has half-heartedly embraced Trump, whose divisive rhetoric and comments about refugees and immigrants do not sit well with many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. About half of Utah’s 3.4 million residents belong to the faith known widely as the Mormon church.

Cox, a Latter-day Saint, said he believes God had a hand in saving Trump’s life, even calling it a miracle.

At the time of the July 13 shooting, President Biden was clinging to his party’s nomination in the face of unrelenting pressure from many Democrats to drop out as they feared he might be unable to win reelection after his disastrous debate against Trump in June.

Cox said in his letter to Trump that he was not looking for a Cabinet position or a role on the team, but the governor told the Atlantic he had come to realize he could not have broader influence within the party if he wasn’t on Trump’s side.

Cox has not publicly expressed a desire to run for national office, but he has worked to raise his profile beyond Utah by chairing the National Governors Assn. His initiative as chairman, “Disagree Better,” focused on restoring civility in politics.

The Trump endorsement came a month after Cox breezed to victory in the primary over ardent Trump supporter Phil Lyman, who espoused false claims of election fraud after the 2020 presidential election. Lyman remained defiant and encouraged his supporters to write his name on the November ballot instead of voting for Cox, who is expected to defeat his Democratic opponent even without the support of the state’s MAGA faction.

Cox is not the first moderate Republican, nor even the first from Utah, to be lured closer to Trump despite previous opposition.

Romney had been one of Trump’s most strident critics in the 2016 election, calling him a phony and a fraud. But after Trump’s victory, Romney met the president for dinner to discuss a top diplomatic job in Trump’s administration. After the meeting, he even praised Trump but has since reverted to being one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics.

Schoenbaum writes for the Associated Press.

Over the past 40 years, memorials to America’s 20th century wars have sprung up across Washington, D.C., with one conspicuous omission: There was no national memorial to veterans of World War I in our nation’s capital.

“If you ask anybody on the streets where the World War I memorial is in D.C., most of them will point you to the D.C. Veterans Memorial,” said Joe Weishaar. “For a long time people assumed that it was the national memorial. But the little rotunda that’s there is only to district residents.”

In 2015, Weishaar was a 25-year-old intern at a Chicago architecture firm when he heard about an open design competition for D.C.’s first national World War I memorial. “I set up a shelf in my closet, I set my computer on the shelf, and that was my office,” he said. “I was doing this, like, in nights and weekends after work.”

He sent off his design and then forgot about it, until … “I got a very strange phone call and they’re like, ‘You’re one of five finalists. We need you in Washington, like, tomorrow,’” he said.

Weishaar had never even been to Washington. “No, I had never been. Didn’t own a suit!”

Weishaar’s design beat out more than 360 applicants from over 20 countries.   

When the memorial opened to the public in 2021, only one thing was missing: an intricate, 60-foot-long bronze relief, the memorial’s centerpiece, created by classical sculptor Sabin Howard, a firebrand and self-appointed bulwark against the scourge of modern art. “Artists like de Kooning or Jackson Pollock, I’m in opposition to them,” said Howard. “It’s a scam, what’s happened in the last 100 years. I’m here to rectify that scam.”

For his tableau depicting World War I, he said, “I threw out the last hundred years of history in the art world, and I went back to what preceded that period of time.”

Shepherding Howard through the byzantine approvals process was his client, the Congressionally-created World War I Centennial Commission.

“You go to these meetings, and none of the people in the room are artists; they’re all lawyers and, you know, Washington bureaucrats,” Howard said. “The commission asked me, ‘We need to see more – a dying soldier, perhaps, and more suffering.’ I started posing the models. You had madness, you had amputations, death. So, I went pretty deep.”

When he brought that iteration into the commission office, he said chairs were literally thrown in the room.

“I was treated as, ‘You’re working for us.’ And I took that for a long time. But then we got to a moment in the relationship, I stood up and I said, ‘I will not compromise this design. And if you don’t like it, you sculpt it, and I’ll send you some webinars.’”

The World War I Centennial Commission said they are “proud of the magnificent Memorial that Joe Weishaar and Sabin Howard have created,” and that it “provides a model of how a complex and collaborative process can work.”

Howard may lack tact, but he doesn’t lack confidence. His sculpture charts a soldier’s wartime journey, from his ambivalent departure, to his wordless homecoming, to the animal savagery of combat in-between. Pointing to one soldier, he said, “If you look at this figure, I don’t think in the history of art that there’s ever been a figure with this much explosive energy.”

Howard’s “movie in bronze,” consisting of 38 figures weighing 25 tons, ends with a soldier, home from war, lowering a helmet to a young girl.

For World War I historian Jennifer Keene, the sculpture’s final tableau illustrates the heavy toll the war exacted on its veterans: “They were not prepared for what they were going to find – the quagmire, the terror of artillery shells, rats and lice and trench feet. No, they are completely unprepared.”

Keene said, “I think that idea at the end, that it’s just a gesture, right? ‘Here’s the helmet.’ There’s no words there, because maybe there aren’t words that can really describe what that soldier has been through.”

The sculpture, which will be unveiled at a ceremony later this month, took nine years of Sabin Howard’s life. “Yeah, but that’s not a lot, when you think about it,” he said.

Asked what he hopes visitors to the memorial a century from now would experience, Howard replied, “I want the visitor 100 years from now to have the same feeling that I had when I went to go see the David when I was 25. We are made in God’s image. That sculpture is made in God’s image. So is mine. It’s a simple thing, but very deep.”

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Story produced by Robert Marston. Editor: Joseph Frandino. 

      
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Four games. That’s how long it took for the Arizona State defense to generate its first turnover in 2023.

Forty seconds. That’s how it long it took for ASU to get its first turnover for this 2024 season. 

Redshirt junior linebacker Zyrus Fiaseu read Wyoming junior quarterback Evan Svoboda perfectly and intercepted the Mesa Red Mountain alum on the second play of the game, returning it for a touchdown to start the year in near-perfect fashion for the Sun Devils to establish an early 7-0 lead.

They didn’t stop there either.

On the very next offensive drive for the Cowboys, facing a long third-and-23, the ASU defense again capitalized on a mistake from Svoboda, this time as another linebacker – junior Keyshaun Elliott – intercepted Svoboda on an overthrown pass. Seven plays later, redshirt sophomore Ian Hershey booted a 29-yard field goal to make it 10-0 at the 6:19 mark in the first quarter.

Coach Kenny Dillingham called the linebacker room the “most improved” during the preseason. And less than 10 minutes into the first game, the group proved him right. It’s also a testament to ASU’s ability in the transfer portal as both Fiaseu and Elliott are transfers. The Sun Devils picked up 30 transfers this past offseason, with the class ranking No. 30 in the nation and fourth in the Big 12, according to 247Sports.

ASU added its third turnover of the game in the third quarter when Svoboda attempted to hit wide receiver Tyler King on a swing pass to the left, but threw the ball behind his intended target. ASU redshirt senior Justin Wodtly scooped it up and ran 6 yards for the touchdown to make it 41-0 with 6:07 to go in the third quarter.

It was all part of a superb evening from the ASU defense, which held Wyoming to just 53 yards of total offense in the first half. Wyoming didn’t score its first points until 2 seconds remained in the game.

One of the themes of spring and fall camp for ASU was emphasizing the need for turnovers.

Great play all around: Sam Leavitt leads ASU to convincing victory in 1st career start

“I expect us to run to the football, and I expect us to get takeaways this year,” ASU head coach Kenny Dillingham said ahead of the season.

ASU didn’t get its first takeaway until the first quarter of the fourth game of last season against USC when linebacker Tate Romney recovered a fumble. The Sun Devils were the last team among FBS schools to force their first turnover last season.

ASU was a dismal 127th — out of 130 schools — last year in turnover margin. Rice, Nebraska, and Temple were the only schools to finish below ASU in 2023.

That trend is now shifting in favor of the Sun Devils. The message is starting to get through.

“It’s incredible,” Dillingham said in his postgame news conference. “Every single day — guys are probably bored of it — we start our team meeting and the only two things I show are: effort plays and takeaways. That’s it. Bad ball security, takeaways, effort. That’s it. I don’t show anything else. It’s those two things, over and over. It’s just to get in their mind that if you play really hard and you win the turnover battle, all these schemes that you’re about to go do are awesome, but they’re obsolete. And we have to be able to do those two things, and then go play smart football. That was game-changing when you turn the ball over at that rate. It was as close to a shutout as you can possibly get. So in my mind, it’s a shutout and it’s two defensive touchdowns. Awesome job by our defense tonight. They deserve it because they’ve been working hard.”

ASU also executed on running the ball as senior running back Cam Skattebo (11 carries, 49 yards, one touchdown) and redshirt senior running back DeCarlos Brooks (six carries, 47 yards, one touchdown) led a potent, multipronged ground attack. 

Even redshirt sophomore quarterback Sam Leavitt got in on the action, showcasing his scrambling ability to the tune of 47 yards on eight carries.

In all, the Sun Devils rushed for 241 yards on 49 carries as a team. ASU had 499 yards of total offense on the night in a commanding 48-7 victory.

Logan Stanley is a sports reporter with The Arizona Republic who primarily focuses on high school, ASU and Olympic sports. To suggest ideas for human-interest stories and other news, reach out to Stanley at logan.stanley@gannett.com or 707-293-7650. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @LSscribe.