From left: Celeste Maloy, Ammon Bundy and Phil LymanMother Jones; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/ZUMA; Cem Ozdel/Anadolu Agency/Getty; Charles McClintock Wilson/ZUMA
Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.
Last Wednesday night, President Donald Trump inserted himself into a Utah GOP primary by endorsing incumbent Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) for Congress. “Celeste has a strong Record of Success, and resounding support from her Community,” he wrote on Truth Social. “SHE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!”
Maloy’s opponent, however, former state legislator Phil Lyman, has his own MAGA cred. In 2020, Trump pardoned him for an old conviction for illegally riding an ATV on public lands. And in this mostly rural district full of Sagebrush Rebellion supporters, the pardon might be more of a selling point.
“He absolutely could win,” says Bryan Schott, founder of the online news site Utah Political Watch who has been closely tracking the under-the-radar race. “He is a true iconoclast. His supporters are very passionate.”
Back in May 2014, Lyman, then a San Juan County commissioner, organized a protest against the Bureau of Land Management for banning motorized vehicles in Utah’s Recapture Canyon. The canyon had been closed since 2007 to protect prehistoric archeological sites, but just weeks before the protest, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy had led an armed standoff with the BLM after it attempted to impound his cows that were illegally grazing on federal land. The standoff set off a wave of anti-government activism across the West, including in Utah.
During their protest, Lyman and others, including Bundy’s son Ryan, illegally rode ATVs through the fragile canyon, a brazen move that got Lyman prosecuted for riding off-road vehicles on closed roads. A federal jury convicted him of two misdemeanors. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail and three years of probation, and ordered to pay nearly $96,000 in restitution.
The prosecution turned an unrepentant Lyman into something of a local folk hero for facing off with the federal government, which owns 64 percent of the land in Utah. Utah Republicans of all stripes, including then-Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox, tripped over each other to show their support for him. Gov. Gary Herbert even tried to use $100,000 in state tax money to pay for Lyman’s appeal.
When that failed, Republican politicians pledged thousands of dollars of their own money to pay Lyman’s legal fees. “We are proud to support one of our own,” Cox said, after adding $1,000 to a pile of cash collected by lawmakers at a meeting in the state capitol. “Commissioner Lyman is one of the finest individuals I know.”
“We are proud to support one of our own.”
Lyman lost his appeal, but in 2020, after urging from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Trump pardoned him, suggesting he’d been a victim of selective prosecution. “Mr. Lyman is known to be a man of integrity and character,” White House officials wrote.
In 2018, his notoriety propelled him into the state legislature, where he was a member of the Yellowcake Caucus, a group of conservative legislators from rural counties known for uranium mining. During the extreme drought in 2022, when many state Republicans were taking steps to keep Great Salt Lake from drying up, Lyman organized a meeting at the state Capitol to expose what the caucus considered the real culprit behind the lake’s plight. “Trees are the enemy,” said one of the witnesses, suggesting that trees sucked up too much water. Lyman had been lobbying legislators to devote money to tree-thinning projects rather than forcing alfalfa farmers to conserve.
Then, in 2024, Lyman launched an upstart campaign to run against incumbent Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, who only a few years earlier had been chipping in for Lyman’s legal defense. During the campaign, he took aim at Cox’s signature initiatives: Disagree Better, a program he’d created as head of the National Governors Association to urge people to dial back exactly the sort of polarizing rhetoric Lyman specializes in. It won Cox plaudits nationally, but in Utah, Lyman found “Disagree Better” a rich source of campaign punchlines. At an event I attended in 2024:
Lyman told the crowd that basically, Cox’s initiative is predicated on a lie. The notion that “you either agree with me, or you disagree with me on my terms. And that’s what’s happening right now in this in this state and this election with Governor Cox.” In fact, the whole effort was “a leftist, Marxist tactic to get people to drop their opinions. It’s manipulation to silence them.” He insisted that the whole enterprise might work if people on the other side would tell the truth, “Then maybe,” he said, “we could disagree better.”
Lyman ultimately lost the GOP primary but ran as a write-in candidate in the November general election, which he also lost. Undeterred, he filed challenges and lawsuits against various state officials, trying to prove that Cox had stolen the election. He had some familiarity with this strategy, having been active in the “election integrity” movement kicked off by Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Lyman even appeared at events with My Pillow guy Mike Lindell that promoted fraudulent election conspiracy theories.
Politically, there’s not a whole lot of distance between Lyman’s views and those of his much better-funded opponent, Celeste Maloy, particularly when it comes to federal control of public lands—a hot-button issue in the district. In fact, while Lyman protested in Recapture Canyon with the Bundys in 2014, Maloy is actually related to them. She’s Cliven Bundy’s niece by marriage and cousin of the far-right militant Ammon Bundy, Cliven’s son who staged an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016.
Maloy’s ties to Utah don’t run particularly deep. She grew up in a small town in Nevada but did attend college and law school in Utah. She was first elected in a special election in 2023 to fill the remaining term of retiring Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), for whom she’d worked as an attorney. Stewart backed her campaign, but even then, Maloy barely made it through the three-way primary.
A challenger unsuccessfully sued to get her off the primary ballot, arguing that she was ineligible to run because her voter registration in Utah was inactive before she filed as a candidate, and she hadn’t voted in the state in 2020 or 2022. As a Hill staffer, she’d been living in Virginia, but Maloy had claimed her sister’s address in Cedar City as her permanent residence. She ultimately prevailed and remained on the ballot. But even cousin Ammon endorsed someone else in the race.
When Maloy ran for her first full term in 2024, Trump backed her, as did most of the Utah congressional delegation—except Sen. Mike Lee, who supported one of her opponents. Even with the support of the state’s Republican establishment, she won the GOP primary by just 176 votes—less than one percent and hardly a sign of a deep well of support. This year, she’s had an 8-1 fundraising advantage over Lyman. Yet Maloy barely bested him at the GOP nominating convention in April.
Utah candidates have two paths for getting on a primary ballot. They can collect petition signatures or win enough delegate votes at a state nominating convention. Lyman has been wildly popular with convention delegates, who tend to be more MAGA than other Republicans. When he ran for governor in 2024, convention delegates overwhelmingly voted for him over Cox, whom they booed.
Lyman ultimately lost that primary—but by less than 9 points, which was far closer than anyone expected him to get. (Democrats are such a nonfactor in Utah that the winner of the GOP primary generally wins in November, a problem that prompts many Democrats to register as Republicans so they can influence the process—even a little.) This year, Maloy beat Lyman at the convention, but by a razor-thin margin: 50.9 to 49.09 percent. Both of them advanced to the June 23rd primary.
The 3rd district congressional race may be surprisingly close because the district is new, redrawn this year in response to a court order ending partisan gerrymandering. Maloy had previously represented the 2nd district but switched to run in the new 3rd after redistricting. The 3rd district includes a lot more counties that Lyman won handily in his statewide race against Cox. According to Schott’s math, 60 percent of registered Republicans in the district have never seen Maloy on a ballot, even though this will be her fifth election in three years. If Lyman wins the congressional primary, says Schott, “it’s because people know him.”
There’s little polling in the race. Prediction markets suggest Maloy will crush Lyman. Yet the ultimate results will rest on turnout, and Lyman is “a partisan warrior. She’s a technocrat,” Schott says. “Partisan warriors inspire people to vote.”
Maloy hasn’t made much effort to counter Lyman’s base by reaching out to more moderate voters—and there are some. In this rural, red Utah district, tourism has become a growth industry since President Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument 30 years ago over objections from many local officials, who to this day would prefer to see it turned into a coal mine.
Blake Spalding is one of the two founding executive chefs of the award-winning Hell’s Backbone Grill & Farm in Boulder, Utah, and co-owner of Boulder Mountain Lodge next door. Located inside the monument, the operation is one of the largest private employers in Garfield County, which is in Maloy’s district. Spalding says Maloy has never been there. She’s voting for Lyman.
“It’s not like I love Phil Lyman,” she explained. “And he has definitely never eaten in my restaurant.” As a longtime public lands advocate, Spalding is well aware that both Lyman and Maloy are hostile to federal protections for Grand Staircase. But she believes “it’s better not to vote for Trump- endorsed candidates, and Trump endorsed Celeste.”
That said, she’ll be voting for a Democrat in November. “I’m gonna vote for whoever is going to do the best job for the hummingbirds.”
