Sen. Hatch ‘Grateful’ for Being Named Newspaper’s ‘Utahn of the Year.’ But the Article Was Scathing

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch has been named the Salt Lake Tribune’s “Utahn of the Year,” a designation the lawmaker has since called “a great Christmas honor.”

Sen. Hatch may want to go back and read the Tribune‘s accompanying editorial again.

The piece, which explains the logic behind Hatch’s selection — “lest our readers, or the honoree himself, get the wrong impression” — is far from flattering.

“The selection of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch as the 2017 Utahn of the Year has little to do with the fact that, after 42 years, he is the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history, that he has been a senator from Utah longer than three-fifths of the state’s population has been alive,” it reads. “It has everything to do with recognizing:

The editorial goes on to slam Hatch for the length of his tenure in the Utah Senate, a position he said he would give up after his 2012 reelection campaign. It even suggests that, if the senator doesn’t end his career himself, “the voters should end it for him.”

None of that, apparently, caught Hatch’s attention. Instead, he tweeted the link to a separate, four-day-old Tribune editorial praising the tax plan he helped pass.