Throughout his time in the White House, Donald Trump collected a number of exceedingly reliable footstools. There was Attorney General William Barr, who basically served as the former president’s personal lawyer. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who regularly shedded his dignity on the guy’s behalf. Mike Pence, other than that one time. And, of course, the vast majority of the Republican Party, which lived in constant fear of getting on the wrong side of the then president.
One member of the GOP who consistently stood out from the bunch in his fealty to 45 was Senator Lindsey Graham. After declaring in June 2016 that he wouldn’t support Trump’s bid for office, referring to the then Republican candidate as a “jackass,” a “kook,” “a race-baiting bigot,” and “the most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican Party,” Graham subsequently became one of Trump’s most ardent and obsequious fans.
When Democrats were getting ready to impeach the guy the first time around, over his attempt to extort another country for his personal gain, Graham told reporters the whole thing should be “disposed of very quickly” by the Senate. When people brought up the fact that Trump regularly slandered Graham’s friend John McCain even after McCain was dead, the senator from South Carolina said he was willing to overlook the attacks because “when we play golf, it’s fun.” Two months after a literal insurrection, Graham told Axios: “Donald Trump was my friend before the riot and I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot. I still consider him a friend.” Pressed on the fact that he’d already been reelected for another six years, so politically, he didn’t have to keep this relationship going, Graham doubled down, telling reporter Jonathan Swan it would be “too easy” to simply dump the guy, before claiming, in a highly worrisome way, that while there was a “dark side” to the man who incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, there was also “some magic there.”
In short, Graham has more than proved his servility to Trump over the last six years, and should probably be inducted into some kind of Hall of Fame for boot-licking hacks, or given a key to Mar-a-Lago. Unfortunately, Graham forgot the cardinal rule of serving at the pleasure of Trump, which is that one must vigorously and without fail agree with every single thing the guy does and says, at all times, forever and always. Instead, God help him, the Republican lawmaker expressed an independent thought, and this happened:
Yes, Trump dubbed Graham, a lifelong Republican, a Republican in Name Only, in an interview with Newsmax that aired Tuesday night [February 2022]. That may not sound so bad to some people, but as Trump made clear in 2020, it’s among the worst things he can think to accuse someone of. (“Do you know what RINO is?” he asked a crowd in Arizona. “A RINO may be the lowest form of human life.”) Why is Graham, in Trump’s eyes, a RINO? Because Graham had claimed it was “inappropriate” for Trump to say over the weekend that he might pardon some of the January 6 rioters if reelected in 2024, a move that effectively would allow Trump supporters to get away with waging a violent insurrection.
Which is not a very nice thing to say about someone who’s basically had his head lodged inside your ass for over half a decade now! Though if we know Lindsey, and we think we do, it’ll all be water under the bridge by the end of the month. Last week, the South Carolina senator said in an interview with Fox’s Brian Kilmeade that he’d spent the “whole weekend” with Trump and suggested that the ex-president apparently has total control over the Republican Party. “He will be the nominee in 2024 if he wants it. Stay tuned,” Graham said, adding: “From my point of view, there’s nobody that’s going to beat Donald Trump if he wants to run” (Levin 1).
Sen. Lindsey Graham has some advice, and a warning, for Donald Trump: Focus on the future and making peoples’ lives better, and drop the constant 2020 election claims. But the former president doesn’t appear to be listening.
“Donald Trump is the most consequential Republican in the Republican Party today. He has a great chance of being president again in 2024. He’ll start comparing what he did as president versus what’s going on now, and how to fix the mess we’re in,” Graham, R-S.C., told ABC News on Sunday [February 2022]. “If he looks backward, I think he’s hurting his chances.”
…
In nearly 10 statements released since ABC’s “This Week” program aired Graham’s comments, Trump has made clear he has no intention of taking his sometimes golfing partner’s advice.
Among the messages that have replaced his banned Twitter account are declarations pushing his latest conspiracy theory — this one featuring new claims that Hillary Clinton’s campaign spied on his 2016 campaign and early presidency, which already has been vehemently denied in court.
…
Graham, when pressed by “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos, reiterated his stance that Trump, by focusing so intensely on his false “rigged” 2020 election claims and trying to whitewash the circumstances before and during the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, is threatening to “hurt his cause” for a potential 2024 run.
Then came the warning. “I do believe that if he talked about what he’s capable of doing and remind people what he did in the past, he has a chance to come back,” Graham said. “If he continues to talk about the 2020 election, I think it hurts his cause, and quite frankly, hurts the Republican Party” (Bennett 1).
It took only 24 hours for Donald Trump to hail Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dismembering of independent, democratic, sovereign Ukraine as an act of "genius."
The former President often accuses his enemies falsely of treason, but his own giddy rush to side with a foreign leader who is proving to be an enemy of the United States and the West is shocking even by Trump's self-serving standards.
… Trump's remarks on a conservative radio show on Tuesday [February 2022] will not only find a warm welcome in the Kremlin. They also will concern allies standing alongside the US against Russia who fear for NATO's future if Trump returns.
…
"I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, 'This is genius.' Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine, of Ukraine, Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful," Trump said in an interview on "The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show."
The ex-President added: "So Putin is now saying, 'It's independent,' a large section of Ukraine. I said, 'How smart is that?' And he's going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That's the strongest peace force," Trump said. "We could use that on our southern border. That's the strongest peace force I've ever seen. ... Here's a guy who's very savvy. ... I know him very well. Very, very well."
...
… Trump's status as the likely favorite for the Republican nomination in 2024 -- and the possibility that he could return to power -- takes his latest crowing over Putin's gangsterism to a new level. He's sending the promise of future favors and approval of Putin's illegal land seizures, which suggest he would do little to reverse them as president.
…
Trump lauded Putin in the interview Tuesday as a "tough cookie" who loves his country and he insisted that he had stopped Putin from invading Ukraine on his watch.
"I knew that he always wanted Ukraine. I used to talk to him about it. I said, 'You can't do it. You're not going to do it.' But I could see that he wanted it," the former President said. In reality, Trump suggested during his 2016 campaign that Russia could keep Crimea, another Ukrainian territory which Putin had annexed in 2014. "The people of Crimea, from what I've heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were," Trump said, parroting a Kremlin talking point (Collinson 1-3).
On Wednesday, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham insisted that former President Donald Trump had made a “mistake” when he referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a "genius" for his invasion of Ukraine.
But a mistake implies that Trump did it once -- unintentionally misspeaking in a way that didn't represent his actual views.
Which is, um, not what Trump did.
…
The day after he made … [his initial comments], he effectively doubled down on them. "They say, 'Trump said Putin's smart.' I mean, he's taking over a country for two dollars' worth of sanctions," Trump told a crowd at a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, according to a recording of the event. "I'd say that's pretty smart. He's taking over a country -- really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in."
Then, in a speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend [March 2022], Trump, again, repeated his praise of Putin. "Yesterday reporters asked me if I thought President Putin was smart," he said. "I said, 'Of course, he's smart,' to which I was greeted with 'Oh, that's such a terrible thing to say.'" I like to tell them, 'Yes, he's smart.'"
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, well, I must be just plain clueless.
And it's not just these three times that Trump has praised Putin. Not even close!
…See, the thing is, Trump's praise for Putin is a feature, not a bug. He has long admired Putin's strongman tendencies and the power he exerts over his people.
Which means you shouldn't buy what Graham is selling here. Mistakes are things people do unintentionally and then try to fix. Trump's praise for Putin's invasion doesn't fit that bill (Cillizza “Donald” 1).
Sen. Lindsey Graham’s call for a Russian citizen to perform a hit job on Vladimir Putin is such a self-evidently terrible idea that even Ted Cruz, himself a bottomless lode of 24-carat wretched thinking, dunked on its stupidity.
Graham proposed Putin’s assassination on both a Thursday broadcast [March 2022] of “Hannity” and on his Twitter feed. “Is there a Brutus in Russia?” Graham asked on Twitter. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country — and the world — a great service.”
As if addressing a five-year-old, Cruz used his brief tweet to explain to his fellow Republican senator that the assassination of a foreign head of state was not something that belonged in the American playbook. Sanction Russia, Cruz argued, provide military aid to the Ukrainians, boycott Russian gas and oil, but don’t encourage someone to whack him.
The pitch to terminate Putin, Julius Caesar-style, may sound appealing. Who among us has never wished a maximally violent end on an evil dictator who is committing monstrous acts? But that’s not the way our government works anymore. Assigning Putin’s death might be plausible if we were already at war with Russia, but we’re not — yet! And the unintended consequences of murdering Putin need our consideration before we think of locking and loading.
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It might be a different matter had Graham called for the assassination of Putin after the United States declared war on Russia. In times of absolute war, heads of state are legitimate targets. But no such state of war currently exists between our two countries.
…
U.S. sponsorship of Putin’s assassination also could easily backfire if Russians interpreted his killing as an act of American escalation that would unite them in favor of new acts of counter-escalation. Russian citizens who share little affinity with Putin or his war today could become patriotic Putinites overnight.
As horrible as the Ukraine war is, there are still ways for it to end far better or far worse. Today, only one person in Russia appears to have the power to end the invasion, and that’s the man who started it. In the short term, Putin should be viewed — perversely — as a potential asset of peace. The quick end to this war requires the West to build more exit ramps for him than can be found on the Santa Monica Freeway. Marking Putin for death would provide a prompt exit for the Russian leader but not the exit ramp we need (Shafer 1-2).
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Friday defended calling for Russians to assassinate President Vladimir Putin, saying it would be the quickest way to end the war in Ukraine.
In an interview on Fox News' "Fox and Friends," Graham said he hopes someone in Russia will understand that Putin is "destroying Russia and you need to take this guy out by any means possible."
The comment came after he floated the suggestion in a Fox News interview Thursday night and again on Twitter.
…
"The only people who can fix this are the Russian people," he wrote in a second tweet. "Easy to say, hard to do. Unless you want to live in darkness for the rest of your life, be isolated from the rest of the world in abject poverty, and live in darkness you need to step up to the plate."
Russian officials pounced on Graham's comments, with Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov telling reporters, "Unfortunately, in such an extremely tense atmosphere, there is a hysterical escalation of Russophobia. These days, not everyone manages to maintain sobriety, I would even say sanity, and many lose their mind."
The Russian ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, said on Facebook that Graham's statement was "unacceptable and outrageous" and said the degree of Russophobia and hatred of Russia in the U.S. is "off the scale."
"It is impossible to believe that a senator of a country that promotes its moral values as a 'guiding star' for all mankind could afford to call for terrorism as a way to achieve Washington’s goals in the international arena," he continued, demanding an official explanation and condemnation of the "criminal" comments.
Graham responded to the ambassador in the Friday interview, saying he is supporting a war criminal who is engaged in war crimes in front of the world.
The Republican senator also faced backlash from conservative members of his own party.
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., tweeted that the world needs leaders with "calm minds & steady wisdom. Not blood thirsty warmongering politicians trying to tweet tough by demanding assassinations."
And Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., tweeted, "When has Sen. Graham encouraging regime change ever ended badly" (Shabad 1)?
Mark Sanford thinks the state of the Republican Party at the moment can be explained entirely through the actions of his one-time colleague: South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.
"We started in Congress together and he's very much of a different school on these kinds of things and adapts where he needs to adapt to hold power," the former South Carolina governor and House member writes in a memoir – titled “Two Roads Diverged” -- out Tuesday, adding: "But I would use him as a canary in the coalmine and the degree to which he has doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on Trump says everything. Whether you like him or not, he has a good political nose for his base."
That is a correct assessment of Graham. And it's the only one that explains how Graham went from an understudy to Sen. John McCain in the early part of this decade to a full-fledged Trumper by the end of it.
As The New York Times put it in a recent profile of Graham:
"What emerges from interviews with more than 60 people close to him, and with the senator himself, is a narrative less of transformation than of gyration — of an infinitely adaptable operator seeking validation in the proximity to power. It is that yearning for relevance, rooted in what he and others described as a childhood of privation and loss, that makes Mr. Graham's story more than just a case study of political survival in the age of Trump."
Put more simply: Graham likes to be close to power and influence -- and will do (and say) whatever it takes to get there. His beliefs are, generally speaking, fungible (Cillizza “How” 1).
Lindsey
Graham is not very comfortable with the truth. That’s my “bless
your heart” genteel Southern way of saying the senior senator from
the great state of South Carolina is full of it. He’s a comfortable
liar. He’s shameless. He’s unprincipled. Untruth pours out of his
every pore, except when a blatant self-righteousness seeps out of
them first. He’s gotten worse over the years.
…
The examples have been piling up for years. The latest example of Graham’s cravenness was on full display during hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. When he wasn’t grilling Jackson about her faith, about how real was her Christianity, he was making dubious remarks about race while his colleagues tried to suggest Jackson was a friend of sexual predators. He blamed his childishness on Democratic treatment of conservative nominees such as Brett Kavanaugh. Never mind that a woman came forward with an ugly allegation against Kavanaugh and that it would have been unseemly to have not considered that in his nomination process. Graham and others voted for him even though 4,500 tips to the FBI on Kavanaugh only led to 10 interviews (Bailey 1).
The
issue of child-pornography sentences is ripe for bad-faith partisan
exploitation for several reasons. It is hard to talk about, or
perhaps too easy to speak about demagogically—as when Senator
Lindsey Graham, in the hearing, interrupted Jackson to say that he’d
be happy to see anybody caught looking at any quantity of child
pornography on a computer sent to prison for fifty years—and added,
in reference to that criminal behavior itself, “You don’t think
that’s a bad thing.” (She noted that, of course, she thinks it’s
a horrible thing; she also noted that each of the perpetrators they’d
been talking about was someone whom “I sent to jail.”) When
Jackson noted that the tools judges have when sentencing include
supervised release, Graham expressed amazement that she would think
such a measure was “a bigger deterrent... versus putting them in
jail.” “No, Senator, I didn’t say ‘versus,’” Jackson
said. “That’s exactly what you said!” Graham responded. (It is
not what she said.) (Sorkin 3).
Never
mind that Graham voted to appoint Jackson to U.S. Court of Appeals
for the District Circuit. He now claims she’s a victory for the
“radical left.”
Men like him can’t be shamed; only
men with a shred of integrity can be.
He can’t be reasoned with.
All he cares about is power and proximity to even more power.
He isn’t fighting for better health care for needy residents of one of the poorest states in the nation.
He isn’t fighting for the working-class, black, white or Latino. He doesn’t care that thousands of vulnerable kids were forced back into poverty when extended child tax credit payments were discounted in January. He doesn’t care about everyday South Carolinians.
All he cares about is Lindsey.
He’s
in his element during Supreme Court hearings because he can act a
fool. That’s all he knows. That’s all he wants to know (Bailey
2).
Works cited:
Bailey, Issac. “Lindsey Graham Plays the Fool Again at Kentanji Brown Jackson Hearing.” Charlotte Observer, March 25, 2022. Net. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article259764145.html
Bennett, John T. “Donald Trump Is Ignoring Lindsey Graham’s Warnings about 2020 Election Obsession.” New York Times, February 16, 2022. Net. https://rollcall.com/2022/02/16/donald-trump-is-ignoring-lindsey-grahams-warnings-about-2020-election-obsession/
Cillizza, Chris. “Donald Trump Calling Vladimir Putin a 'Genius' Was No Mistake.” CNN, March 3, 2022. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/03/politics/trump-putin-russia-ukraine-graham/index.html
Cillizza, Chris. “How Lindsey Graham Is the Perfect Vessel To Understand Donald Trump's Death Grip on the GOP.” CNN, August 24, 2021. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/politics/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-mark-sanford-2022/index.html
Collinson, Stephen. “Trump Sides with Putin as Biden Tries To Stop a War.” CNN, February 23, 2022. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/23/politics/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-joe-biden/index.html
Levin, Bess. “Lindsey Graham Spent Six Years with His Head up Trump’s Ass for Nothing.” Vanity Fair, February 2, 2022. Net. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/02/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-rino
Shabad, Rebecca. “Sen. Lindsey Graham Defends Calling for Russians to Assassinate Putin.” NBC News, March 4, 2022. Net. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-lindsey-graham-defends-calling-russians-assassinate-putin-rcna18703
Shafer, Jack. “On the Stupidity of Lindsey Graham’s Putin Death Sentence.” Politico, March 4, 2022. Net. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/04/lindsey-graham-assassination-putin-dumb-00014309
Sorkin, Amy Davidson. “The Republicans’ Wild Attacks at Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Confirmation Hearing.” The New Yorker, March 24, 2022. Net. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-republicans-wild-attacks-at-ketanji-brown-jacksons-confirmation-hearing
