The Minnesota shootings illuminate the character of the Trump era | Sidney Blumenthal

In the early morning of 14 June, according to authorities, Vance Luther Boelter, disguised as a police officer and wearing body armor and a face mask, drove his black Ford Explorer SUV, equipped with flashing lights, to the home of the Minnesota state senator John Hoffman. There, he shot Hoffman nine times, critically wounding him, and shot his wife eight times as, relatives say, she threw her body over her daughter to shield her. He next drove to the home of the former house speaker Melissa Hortman, forced his way in, and killed her and her husband, officials say.

The police arrived and Boelter fled, abandoning his car. In it they allegedly discovered a “kill list” of dozens of federal and state Democratic officials, mostly from Minnesota but also prominent Democrats in other midwestern states, and the sites of women’s healthcare centers and Planned Parenthood donors. He left behind notebooks with detailed descriptions of his target locations. On the lam, Boelter sent a text message to his family: “Dad went to war last night.”

As soon as the earliest reports of the murders were published, with the sketchy information that Boelter had been appointed by Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, to one of many state boards, on which there are currently more than 342 vacancies, the rightwing swarm began spreading the falsehood that he was Walz’s hitman. Mike Cernovich, a notorious conspiracy-monger with a large following on X, tweeted: “Did Tim Walz have her executed to send a message?”

Elon Musk jumped in, writing on X: “The far left is murderously violent.” The far-right activist Laura Loomer, who occasionally surfaces as an intimate of Donald Trump, tweeted that Boelter and Walz were “friends” and that Walz should be “detained” by the FBI.

Within hours, Mike Lee, a Republican senator for Utah, used the platform of his office to push the disinformation. Over eerie night-time photos of Boelter in his mask and police outfit standing at Hortman’s door seconds before he opened fire, Lee tweeted, first at 9.50am on 15 June: “This is what happens. When Marxists don’t get their way.” At 10.15am, he tweeted, “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” misspelling Walz’s name.

Lee expressed no sympathy or shock over the assassinations. He assumed the distance of the online tormentor gave him license. Like the mask-wearer, both were disinhibited by their contrived personas. Anything goes. Lee was doing more than blaming Walz for carrying out a bloody vendetta that conspiracy theorists had conjured. Lee created a cartoon. The killer was enlisted by the evil liberal governor to rub out someone who was in reality one of his closest allies. Like Boelter, Lee felt a compulsion to push himself in. The clamor of the far right pre-empted the emergence of the facts for Lee and served as his incitement.

But, of course, Lee is a learned man who knew that what he was doing was malicious. The facts were always irrelevant. He trivialized a tragedy in order to implicate Walz as the villain commissioning the hit. Lee’s tone was one of mocking derision to belittle and distort. The killer, Walz and the victims were all tiny, dehumanized figures he arranged to illustrate his tweets. His manipulation was more than a maneuver. It was a revelation of Lee’s own mentality and political imagination he believed would be embraced to his advantage. His depraved humor was designed to cement fellow feeling between the jokester and his intended audience. He was playing to the gallery that he knew how to own the libs. He would gain approval and acceptance. In the hothouse in which he operates, he thought his mindless cruelty passed as wit.

Soon enough it was reported that Boelter was not a Marxist or for that matter a hitman hired by Marxists. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Walz “did not know him” and Walz was on his “kill list”. Boelter was reportedly an abortion opponent, an evangelical Christian and a registered Republican who attended Trump rallies.

Mike Lee is also a man in a mask. He altered his identity, discarding the veneer of a statesman for the Maga mask. Both Boelter and Lee profess to be men of faith, draping themselves in the authority of the law as one allegedly committed murder and the other hooted at it. They have both posed as heroic avengers and truth-tellers as they target victims. While speaking of God, the law and a higher calling, they worship at the shrine of Trump. The alleged assassin and the character assassin embody parallel lives that have intersected at the tragedy under the influence of Trump.

One grew up in a traditional middle-class family; the other is a privileged son. Each of their fathers were prominent in their communities – one a high school coach, the other solicitor general of the United States. One graduated from St Cloud State University, the other from Brigham Young and its law school. One appeared susceptible to the latest conspiracy theories; the other knows these are lies but amplifies them anyway for personal aggrandizement to win the approval of the mob and its boss. One is a true believer; the other is a cynical opportunist. One is a “loser” in the Trump parlance. The other is a winner in the Trump galaxy. Both put their enemies in their crosshairs. One has been booked for homicide; the other is disgraced as a moral reprobate. One is indicted for his alleged crimes; the other has indicted himself. Both spiraled under Trump and both became lost souls, though Boelter would believe that he was found at last.

Vance Luther Boelter grew up in the town of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, one of five siblings, living in a large house, the captain of the high school basketball team, voted “most courteous” and “most friendly”, according to the Washington Post, and his father acclaimed in the Minnesota State High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame. But when he was 17, the mainstream Lutheran young man became a born-again Christian, living in a tent in the local park and shouting sermons to passersby.

After he received a degree from a state university, he wound up at the Christ for the Nations Institute, a Texas Bible school that emerged in 1970 from a faith healing group founded by Gordon Lindsay. On the lobby wall of the school is a Lindsay saying: “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day.”

Lindsay was also an organizer for the Anglo-Saxon World Federation, an antisemitic organization in the 1930s and 1940s that spread the doctrine of what was called British Israelism, that Anglo-Saxons, not the Jews, were the chosen people of God. The group distributed Henry Ford’s antisemitic tract, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, as well as Nazi propaganda, and preached that God would punish Franklin D Roosevelt. Lindsay was a close associate of Gerald Winrod, a pro-Nazi demagogue, who ran a group called Defenders of the Faith and was indicted for seditious conspiracy in 1944. After the war, British Israelism was rebranded as Christian Identity, a theocratic doctrine based in part on racist distinctions between superior and inferior races. Lindsay preached “spiritual war” against the satanic demons of secular culture.

Boelter graduated in 1990 from the Christ for the Nations Institute with a degree in practical theology. He wandered as a missionary spreading his gospel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In one sermon, he said: “There’s people, especially in America, they don’t know what sex they are. They don’t know their sexual orientation. They’re confused. The enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul.”

Boelter claimed he was the CEO of the Red Lion security group. He continued his soul-saving. “In the Middle East, I went to the West Bank, the Gaza strip, southern Lebanon, and I would give pamphlets to everybody I could,” he said in one sermon. He created a website for a religious group he called Revoformation. He managed a 7-Eleven store, a gas station, and after taking courses in mortuary science worked transporting bodies to a funeral home. He listened to Alex Jones’s stream of conspiracy-mongering, Infowars.

Boelter created a website for a security firm called Praetorian Guard for which his wife was listed as the CEO and he was the head of security. He bought two cars that he fitted out to look like police cars, stockpiled weapons and uniforms, but had no known business. On 14 June, with his “kill list” in hand, he sent a message to a longtime friend: “I made some choices, and you guys don’t know anything about this, but I’m going to be gone for a while. May be dead shortly …”

Boelter’s apparent disguise as a law enforcement officer was an expedient that tricked his victims into opening their doors. Pretending to be a police officer, he traduced the law to impose his idea of order.

Christ for the Nations Institute issued a statement renouncing Boelter: “Christ For The Nations does not believe in, defend or support violence against human beings in any form.” It added that the school “continues Gordon Lindsay’s slogan of encouraging our students to incorporate passion in their prayers as they contend for what God has for them and push back against evil spiritual forces in our world”.

Mike Lee took the news of the assassinations as the signal for him to tweet. Lee was born to Mormon royalty in Utah. His father, Rex Lee, was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, a principled conservative with an independent streak. He resisted pressure to argue cases on behalf of the administration against separation of church and state that would endorse government-sponsored prayer and religious symbols. He resigned in 1985, stating: “There has been a notion that my job is to press the Administration’s policies at every turn and announce true conservative principles through the pages of my briefs. It is not. I’m the solicitor general, not the pamphleteer general.” Rex Lee became the president of Brigham Young University and dean of its law school, both of which his son attended.

Lee was elected to the Senate in great part on the strength of the family name. In 2016, Lee endorsed Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination for president. When Trump wrapped up the nomination, Lee refused to endorse him. “I mean we can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK,” Lee said. “We can go through the fact that he has made some statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant.” Lee demanded: “I would like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender of the US constitution. That he is not going to be an autocrat. That he is not going to be an authoritarian.” Lee remained a holdout at the convention until the very end.

By 2020, Lee touted Trump as a virtuous figure, comparing him to the self-sacrificing leader in the Book of Mormon. “To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” a hero in the Book of Mormon, Lee told a rally, with Trump standing beside him. “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the wellbeing and the peace of the American people.”

After Trump lost the 2024 election to Joe Biden, Lee sent John Eastman, a law professor with a scheme to have the vice-president throw out the votes of the electoral college on January 6, to the Trump White House. While Trump focused on the insurrection, Lee strategized with the chief of staff, Mark Meadows – “trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend”, Lee texted Meadows. Lee diligently worked to realize the coup plan using fraudulent electors. “I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow,” Lee wrote Meadows.

The journalist Tim Alberta, writing in the Atlantic, described a conversation Lee recounted with one of his staffers about Trump that went far to explain his motive for switching from a critic of Trump’s authoritarianism to a defender. “Donald Trump walks up to the bar,” said the staffer, “and he’s got a beer bottle in his hand, and he breaks the beer bottle in half over the counter and brandishes it.” Lee said he replied: “Immediately, a bunch of people in the room get behind him. Because he’s being assertive. And odds are lower, as they perceive it, that they’ll be hurt if they get behind him.”

As Vance Boelter’s life unraveled, perhaps he imagined himself risen into a spirit warrior.

Mike Lee knows better. To know better, but not to be better, is his peculiar disgrace. He lacks introspection into the source of his hateful behavior, except to offer the excuse that he won’t “be hurt” by Trump. Not to feel any ordinary emotion for the victims of a terrible and unprovoked crime and instead to engage in taunts betrays his father’s legacy and the shining figure of Captain Moroni, whom Lee has upheld. His fall from grace is one of the incidents that illuminates not only his but also the true character of the Trump era.

• Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist and co-host of The Court of History podcast