On August 9, 2023, Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, found himself sitting across from Joe Biden in an armored presidential limousine as it idled in downtown Salt Lake City. Working up the nerve to pitch a far-fetched idea, he cleared his throat.

“Mr. President, I know this might sound crazy,” Cox said, “but I think you should pardon Donald Trump.”

Trump was, at the time, facing criminal charges in multiple jurisdictions. He was also the Republican frontrunner for president—a man who had promised to drive “Sleepy Joe” (a.k.a. “Enemy of the State,” a.k.a. “Most Corrupt President We’ve Ever Had,” a.k.a. “Worst President in the History of Our Country”) from the White House and imprison members of the “Biden crime family.”

Cox had no loyalty to Trump; though a Republican, Cox had never voted for him and was hoping that his party would nominate someone else in 2024. But he believed that prosecuting a former president would deepen the country’s political crisis. A pardon by Biden, he argued, could deescalate tensions and interrupt the cycle of partisan retribution.

To Cox’s surprise, Biden perked up at the suggestion. “You know, I’ve actually considered this for a while,” Biden said. “In fact, just this week as we were lying in bed, Jill and I had a long conversation about it.” Biden said that although people were “demanding justice” for Trump, he would seriously consider a pardon.

Cox left the limousine convinced it was a real possibility. Of course, it never happened.

A year later, after a gunman nearly killed Trump at a rally, Cox tried again from the other direction. In a letter to Trump, he wrote, “You have the opportunity to do something that no other person on earth can do right now: unify and save our country.” He offered his support for Trump’s candidacy, and encouraged him to respond to the moment with restraint and magnanimity.

Trump happily accepted the endorsement, which Cox made public at a press conference several days later—but Trump the Great Unifier never materialized. Within days, he was back to railing against “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and riffing on illegal immigrants from insane asylums.

Read: Trump has a warning for Spencer Cox

Cox describes his experiences with the two presidents in his new book, Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt, which will be released next month. In the book, these episodes are framed as worthwhile—if ultimately unsuccessful—attempts at depolarization. “When I spoke with President Biden, I hoped he would choose mercy over escalation,” he writes. “When I wrote to President Trump, I hoped he would choose unity over retaliation. In both cases, things didn’t turn out quite the way I’d hoped.”

“It would be fair to suggest I failed,” Cox ventures. Indeed it would. But he prefers not to think of it that way.

Off Ramp is many things—a useful compendium of research on polarization and political violence, a candid memoir of Cox’s uneven attempts at peacemaking, a practical handbook for Americans who want to rediscover how to live with one another. But perhaps more than anything, it is an exercise in an almost-militant optimism that, to skeptics, might border on naivete.

Cox told me that the book had been gestating for more than a decade. He spent years poring over political-science literature and testing his ideas in speeches and interviews; he even launched a project with the National Governors Association: “Disagree Better,” built around the book’s central arguments. But the book acquired a new urgency last year, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah and Cox was thrust into the international spotlight, where he called on Americans to step back from the brink.

“At some point we have to find an off-ramp,” he said then, “or it’s going to get much, much worse.” When Kirk was murdered, Cox writes, “all of my research became painfully pertinent.”

Throughout the book, and in a series of conversations I’ve had with him recently, Cox seems eager to dispel any notion that he has written another anodyne collection of bromides about bipartisanship and civility. The very word civility—with its connotation of, as he puts it, “a milquetoast politeness that would make Ned Flanders seem aggressive”—makes him cringe. What plagues America right now, in Cox’s telling, is not bad manners, or even political division, but contempt—the conviction that those who don’t share our opinions or values are beneath us and unworthy of good-faith engagement. “Healthy conflict is not a toxic symptom of democracy,” he writes. “It is foundational to it.”

The proposition at the heart of Off Ramp is that political combat can be drained of contempt. As a civic aspiration, it’s hard to argue with. But at this moment? With these leaders? In a system that so strongly rewards reciprocal hatred? Cox knows as well as anyone how difficult it now is to practice the politics he’s preaching.

Last month I visited Cox on his family farm in central Utah, where he led me to the backyard. We sat with his wife, Abby, on wicker furniture overlooking a sprawling pasture with mountains in the distance.

I wanted to ask Cox about a cryptic line in Off Ramp. It appears during the book’s account of the controversy that followed his 2024 endorsement of Trump. Allies and admirers publicly turned on him, he writes; people in his life privately urged him to reconsider. When Cox told one friend that he had prayed about the decision, the friend shot back, “Well, maybe you should pray again.”

None of this surprised me. I had interviewed Cox in the governor’s mansion just a few days after he wrote that letter to Trump, and I remembered how conflicted he seemed even then—how he’d bounced from one rationalization to another, how he’d sounded like he was trying to justify the endorsement to himself as much as to me. I remembered the betrayal expressed by those who’d worked with him in the fight against polarization, as well as the edge in Cox’s voice when he said, “They’re very angry at me, and that’s fine.” The pile-on had clearly been unpleasant.

But what caught my attention was a brief line in the book alluding to what the episode had been like for Cox. “These can be dark and lonely times,” he wrote.

Dark and lonely? I asked Cox to elaborate, and he became quiet.

“I knew there would be backlash,” he told me, tentatively. “It was much stronger than I expected.”

He went on to describe a period of despair and depression that sounded, to my uncertified ear, almost clinical. Close friends and family members condemned his decision and distanced themselves from him. He feared his reputation as a champion of depolarization—developed over years of earnest, painstaking work—was ruined. He spent “a lot of long, dark nights,” he told me, wishing he could take the decision back.

Cox’s faith, usually a source of comfort in such moments, seemed to make the experience even more fraught. He believes God answers prayers, and he said he’d prayed intensely over whether to endorse. He was quick to clarify that he was not claiming that God wanted Trump to win—but he felt strongly that he was supposed to offer his support to the candidate, for reasons he couldn’t entirely articulate.

As the governor spoke, I noticed that Abby, who had been largely silent throughout our conversation, was pursing her lips. I asked her what she remembered about that summer, and she started to cry.

“In our marriage, I have never seen him like that,” she told me. She was especially hurt that some of the people who criticized Cox most harshly, dismissing him as craven and disingenuous, were those who had the closest relationships with him. “The people who know you best should trust that you aren’t just doing this on a whim.”

I noted that, back in 2024, Abby herself had not been a fan of her husband’s endorsement.

“I’m still not,” she said. “We see things differently. But I trusted him.”

Cox now believes that he was guided to improve his relationship with Trump in 2024 so that he would be prepared to deal with the defining crisis of his governorship a year later: Kirk’s assassination.

Read: A disorienting weekend with the women of Turning Point

During and after the tense 33-hour manhunt for Kirk’s killer, Cox was able to coordinate closely with the Trump administration while also using his high-profile news conferences to offer necessary counterprogramming to the This-means-war rhetoric coming from much of MAGA world. Cox urged calm, condemned all political violence, and called for his fellow Americans to reject politics that “feels like rage.”

This balancing act was widely praised. As my colleague David Graham wrote at the time, “In any other state,” local politicians might have either become targets for Trump “or leapt to inflame the situation. But the Beehive State’s governor is perhaps the most consistent voice of calm and conciliation in the GOP.”

More important, Cox notes, his performance won approval from the president, who largely let the governor lead the official response without interference.

Cox’s critics will no doubt find this narrative self-serving, perhaps even grandiose. But Cox doesn’t seem to care how it looks.

“Charlie’s death could easily have been the match that lit the tinderbox of a nation,” he writes in his book. “However, that didn’t happen, and I hope that at least one small reason for that was the positive relationship that has developed between the president and me. It might have made it easier for him to trust my leadership and allow an off ramp to de-escalation.”

When it came time for Cox to give me a tour of his hometown, he walked me to an old, beat-up pickup truck parked out front and told me to get in. The choice of vehicle was clearly a stunt for my benefit—Cox writes about learning to drive a 1974 Chevy on the farm when he was only 5—but the contrivance didn’t bother me until he casually admitted that this was only the third time he had driven a car since becoming governor five years ago. I buckled my seat belt.

It was the day before Pioneer Day, when Utahns celebrate Brigham Young’s arrival in Salt Lake Valley, and people were already saving their spots on Main Street for the town’s regionally famous parade.

Fairview was settled by Cox’s great-great-great-great grandfather in 1859, and his family is practically built into the infrastructure of the place. He showed me the cemetery where he installed a flagpole for an Eagle Scout project, and the phone company that had been run by the Coxes since 1919, and the various houses he had grown up in.

At my request, we stopped at the Fairview Museum of History and Art, where kitschy pioneer artifacts were arranged in displays with delightfully literal names: the “Tool Room” contained an array of old tools; the “Dentist Room” featured (you guessed it) old dental equipment. An older woman working at the front desk beamed at Cox and remarked how nice it was to see him “all grown-up.”

Cox has deployed Fairview as a device in his speeches for years, and it plays a central role in Off Ramp. He uses his hometown as a stand-in for the qualities America urgently needs: thick community, strong institutions, and the prioritizing of our obligations to one another above the wanton inflammations of politics.

This is hardly an original trope in politicians’ memoirs, but Cox seems to come by his boosterism honestly. He writes that his parents’ divorce, when he was 10, sent him into a spiral of anger, fear, and profound sadness. “Many times,” he writes, “I thought that the world would be a better place without me.” What carried him through was Fairview: the next-door neighbors whose refrigerator was always open to him, the uncle who took him into the mountains and showed him how to herd sheep, the teacher who taught him to love books, the scoutmaster who took him camping. When he felt on the verge of giving up, he writes, they “made my situation their business.”

When Cox became lieutenant governor in 2013, he insisted on keeping his family in Fairview and regularly commuted the roughly 200 miles to Salt Lake City and back—three hours round trip—rather than surrendering his life there. Off Ramp is dedicated “to my family, my friends, and my Fairview.”

Lately, though, Cox has worried that his sanctuary has been breached. The town Facebook group, once a clearinghouse for reports of loose chickens and missing Amazon packages, is periodically littered with comments about Trump and immigration. In the book, Cox describes watching right-wing talk radio transform his father-in-law, a local rancher, from a “beautiful, gracious man” into an angry, combative crank perpetually spoiling for a political fight. (Eventually, a family intervention would pull the man away from talk radio and back to his old self.) Cox himself can relate to the deleterious effects of excessive political-news consumption: In one admirably unflattering passage, he writes about his own addiction to Twitter and its “information heroin.” It got so bad that he had to delete social-media apps from his phone.

Cox seems to recognize the dangers of publishing a book like this. No matter how many self-effacing caveats he includes, he risks looking like he’s holding himself up as a role model of civic virtue. The truth, he says, is that the precepts he articulates don’t come naturally to him.

“I’m a hothead,” he told me. “I’ve gotten punched in the face. I’ve punched people in the face.” Once he was even kicked out of a game while coaching his kid’s flag-football game. “That’s who I am.”

He said he works to temper those impulses, which seem omnipresent in our politics, but that he doesn’t always succeed. “It’s hard to be the Disagree Better guy, because you’re under a microscope,” Cox said. “When I say something disrespectful or lash out, people pounce.”

In Off Ramp, he revisits a moment at a Utah Republican convention, when, after being booed by Trump supporters, he snapped: “Maybe you hate that I don’t hate enough.” The retort was so satisfying in the moment. “The words coming out of my mouth felt good,” he writes. But he later came to regret it—he had answered contempt with contempt, making it that much harder for him and his opponents to understand one another. In the weeks afterward, he personally apologized to some of the people who had booed him.

A similar episode took place at a Disagree Better event at George Washington University, when a student confronted him over Utah’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, linking it to suicide rates among transgender kids. Cox responded defensively, accusing the student of “bad faith.” “I want these kids to thrive,” he said. “I want these kids to be successful.” But, he continued, “I think there’s a better way to do that than having genital-mutilation surgeries before they’re 18." Cox, quickly catching himself, said he should have given his interlocutor the last word, and invited the student backstage after the event to keep talking.

But even as Cox tries to model healthy political debate, he rejects the idea—often floated by his critics—that “disagreeing better” means never staking out controversial positions or supporting divisive policies. “I’m going to be a partisan,” he told me. “I want my team to win. When my team wins, we’re going to try to implement those things.” Politics, he told me, doesn’t have to rid itself of partisanship to become less contemptuous.

When I asked Cox whether he ever worries that his optimism is misplaced, he answered immediately: “I think about that every day.” He does not pretend, he told me, that “a book from a governor of Utah is going to change the course of history.”

But he remains stubbornly hopeful that America’s political culture is ready for a reset. He cites letters from people who have reconciled with their parents after politics had poisoned their relationships, and Disagree Better workshops attended by hundreds of legislators and policy makers. He’s convinced that the movement is growing, though he concedes that the evidence is mostly anecdotal.

“We’ll have an actual measuring stick soon,” he told me, “when we see if people buy the book.”