A phone call on a Mar-a-Lago speakerphone captured the bargain Lindsey Graham struck with Donald Trump, Politico’s Jonathan Martin wrote in a column reflecting on the South Carolina senator, who died Saturday at 71.
Martin recounted the scene from “This Will Not Pass,” the 2022 book he co-wrote with Alex Burns. As the reporters interviewed Trump in 2021, the then-former president took a call from Graham and put it on speaker. Not realizing journalists were listening, Graham shared a scoop that Republicans had landed Herschel Walker to run for Senate in Georgia.
When Trump mentioned the reporters were in the room, Graham switched gears instantly, Martin wrote, talking up the president’s grip on the party and his golf handicap. On a later call, before anything else, he offered the reporters a lesson.
“Is he gone?” Graham asked when they called him back. “Trump is a great conversationalist — when the topic is about Trump.”
Graham’s capitulation was cynical, Martin wrote, and the senator chose relevance over principle, though he allowed that Graham would offer a more finessed accounting. First elected to Congress in 1994, Graham embodied the choice Martin said Republicans faced after Trump’s takeover of the party: adapt or leave.
By Martin’s account, the trade bought real influence. Graham helped keep Trump tethered to NATO and, the columnist argued, nudged him away from abandoning Ukraine. The two got along famously, bonding over golf, and Trump on Sunday called Graham one of the greatest senators he had ever known.
Others were blunter about the bargain, with one analyst saying Graham sold out to Trump for a measure of foreign-policy influence and to keep his seat.
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