Rep. Susie Lee, a Nevada Democrat representing one of the most competitive swing districts in the country, posted a profanity-laced message on X about President Donald Trump shortly after 1:00 a.m. ET on April 1, then quietly deleted it. The post, a reply to an Associated Press item about Trump's planned attendance at a Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, read: "So f***ing f***ed up. I'll pray they f*** him to his face. Sorry, I say f*** a lot these days."
The message was captured before it vanished. Breitbart News reported that the AP post Lee was responding to noted Trump's visit would make him the "first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the nation's highest court." Lee offered no public explanation for the post or its removal.
For a lawmaker who has built her career on the language of institutional norms, invoking oaths of office, the integrity of elections, and the Constitution, the episode is worth more than a passing glance. Lee's record in Congress is dotted with moments where she wrapped partisan combat in the rhetoric of principle. The deleted post strips that packaging away and shows what's underneath.
Lee first won Nevada's Third Congressional District in the 2018 midterms, flipping a seat Trump had carried in 2016. The district has remained a top Republican target ever since. During the 2018 campaign, Republican Danny Tarkanian described Lee as a creature of Democratic leadership.
"Nancy Pelosi helped recruit her to run, she's raised her millions of dollars, she's raised twice as much money as the incumbent race for the last election. It will probably be the most expensive congressional race in the country."
By November 2019, Lee was at a Las Vegas town hall arguing that Trump had engaged in "clear obstruction" and "abuse of power" over Ukraine, grounds she said were sufficient "to support further fact-finding." The following month, she announced she would vote to impeach the president, declaring that "democracies live or die by the integrity of their elections."
She went further still, saying: "The facts are clear: the President abused the power of his office and blatantly obstructed Congress. I took an oath of office to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." The language was solemn. The framing was constitutional. The implication was that Lee acted out of duty, not partisanship.
That framing is harder to sustain when the same lawmaker fires off a profane, barely coherent post about the sitting president at one in the morning and then scrubs it from the internet. The deleted message wasn't a policy critique. It wasn't a constitutional argument. It was a late-night outburst that Lee herself apparently recognized was indefensible, hence the deletion.
Lee is hardly the only Democrat who has resorted to dramatic gestures against Trump. Dozens of House Democrats boycotted Trump's State of the Union earlier this year, staging rival rallies on the National Mall. But those were at least public, on-the-record acts. Lee's contribution was a profane post she tried to erase before anyone noticed.
The deleted X post is a footnote compared to the financial questions that have trailed Lee for years. In June 2020, she became the subject of an outside ethics complaint after pushing for a change to federal pandemic loan requirements that later benefited her husband Dan Lee's company, Full House Resorts. Two weeks after the rule change, the company received $5.6 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans.
The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, known as FACT, said Lee's involvement with Full House Resorts "created doubt about her impartiality" and raised questions about whether she had acted in the public's best interest. Days after the ethics complaint, Sen. Joni Ernst proposed legislation that would have required lawmakers, their spouses, and congressional employees to disclose PPP loans within 15 days.
The PPP matter was only the beginning. In 2021, Business Insider reported that Lee had failed to adequately disclose more than 200 stock trades since early 2020, valued between roughly $267,000 and $3.3 million. FACT called for an investigation, arguing that the repeated failures could amount to violations of the STOCK Act and House ethics rules. The STOCK Act requires members to report trades within 30 to 45 days.
Kendra Arnold, FACT's executive director, said the disclosure law must be "strictly enforced" to determine if members of Congress are using their positions for self-enrichment. Lee's office responded that she had worked with the House Ethics Committee to file the transactions once she became aware of them.
But the problems didn't stop. In August 2022, Business Insider reported that Lee and her husband had traded eight stocks during 2021 worth up to $155,000 and disclosed them late. The following month, FACT filed another complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics, asking for yet another investigation into the late disclosures. Breitbart News had previously included Lee in a 2021 roundup of 11 Democrats alleged to have violated the STOCK Act.
The pattern is worth spelling out plainly: a lawmaker who lectured the country about constitutional duty and the integrity of democratic institutions repeatedly failed to meet the basic transparency requirements Congress imposed on itself. More than 200 stock trades went inadequately disclosed. Her husband's company collected $5.6 million in pandemic loans after she pushed for a rule change that made it possible. And the response, each time, was some version of "we're working on it."
That kind of record invites comparison with other Democrats who have faced scrutiny for the gap between their public posture and their private conduct. Sen. Elizabeth Warren drew attention for endorsing a candidate with a Nazi-linked tattoo after grilling a Trump nominee over Christian-themed ink, a different species of contradiction, but the same genus.
Lee's seat in Nevada's Third District has been a battleground since she first won it. Republicans have targeted the district cycle after cycle, and the ethics cloud has given them material to work with. Dr. Jeff Gunter, a former Trump ambassador now seeking the GOP nomination to challenge Lee, has been blunt in his criticism.
In a March 1 interview, Gunter said Lee "aided and abetted Joe Biden in flooding our country with illegal aliens" and called her "out of touch" after she voted against the "Big Beautiful Bill," which included provisions for "no tax on tips" and "no tax on overtime." Those are popular positions in a hospitality-heavy state like Nevada, and Lee's opposition gives Republicans a clean line of attack in a general election.
The deleted X post adds a different dimension. Ethics complaints and late financial disclosures are complicated stories that require voters to follow the details. A sitting congresswoman posting profanity about the president at one in the morning and then trying to hide it is not complicated at all. It is the kind of moment that sticks, not because it is the most consequential thing Lee has done, but because it is the most revealing.
Democrats have increasingly resorted to performative hostility toward Trump, from boycotts to leaked calls. A Michigan Democrat was recently caught on a leaked call dodging a question about the killing of Iran's supreme leader in order to protect his Muslim voter base. The common thread is a willingness to say or do things behind closed doors, or in the small hours of the morning, that won't survive daylight.
Lee has not publicly addressed the deleted message. No statement. No apology. No explanation. The post simply disappeared, as if it never happened.
That silence is its own kind of answer. Lee didn't stand behind her words, which means she knows they were indefensible. But she also didn't apologize, which means she either doesn't think she owes one or doesn't want to draw more attention to the episode. Either way, the voters in Nevada's Third District, the ones who have to decide whether Lee deserves another term, now have one more data point.
There is the Susie Lee who invokes her oath of office, speaks gravely about constitutional duty, and lectures about the integrity of elections. And there is the Susie Lee who posts vulgar screeds about the president after midnight and deletes them before sunrise. The voters can decide which one is real. The record suggests they're looking at the same person.
When a lawmaker's first instinct after speaking freely is to reach for the delete button, the problem isn't the post. It's the person who wrote it and the judgment she brings to everything else.
