Lindsey Graham knew better.
When Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015 to begin his hostile takeover of the Republican Party, the long-serving senator from South Carolina, who died Saturday night, was one of the few Republicans to see him for what he was — and say so.
Trump, Graham said at the time, is a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party, he doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.” Later, Graham described Trump as “shallow” and “ill-prepared to be commander in chief,” a man who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about in terms of how our laws work.” After Trump won the nomination, Graham even suggested that he wouldn’t support him in November: “I would have supported Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. I just can’t go where Donald Trump takes the party and the country. I’m sorry, I can’t.”
Graham could see the obvious truth that Trump was a malign and corrosive force in American politics — a destructive figure whose demagoguery threatened our democracy.
But that was when Graham thought Trump would lose.
The calculation changed when Trump unexpectedly won. Graham might have been a skeptic, but he was also a loyal, partisan Republican. More important, he wanted to be in the midst of the action, at the center of attention. With Trump as president, Graham remade himself as the president’s staunchest ally in the Senate and most powerful soldier in Washington.
Some of this was a simple matter of electoral politics; Graham represented one of the most conservative states in the union, a place where Trump could count on deep support across the electorate. If Graham did not conform to the new reality — if he did not bend toward the new boss — then he might find himself out of office and out of influence, yet another Republican forcibly retired by a radical and restless base.
It is one thing to go with the flow — Graham was a politician, after all — but it is something else entirely to throw caution to the wind and embrace a man you denounced, just months earlier, as inimical to your basic values — a man who was as unfit for the presidency on Jan. 20, 2017 as he was on Jan. 20, 2017. For someone as eager for rank as Graham, the temptation of power — of real influence over the new administration — was too much to resist. When it came time to choose between his career and his values, Graham chose Trump, and it would define the rest of his life.
When Trump needed an advocate, Graham was there. When he needed an ambassador to Senate Democrats for one proposal or another, Graham — who was once known for his bipartisan deal making — was there. And when Trump needed an enforcer — as he did during the bitter and contentious hearings for Brett Kavanaugh when he was a Supreme Court nominee — Graham was there, a snarling attack dog turned loose on Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.
Lindsey Graham would have been the first to say that he did all of this for relevance — to be in the mix rather than outside the inner circle.
“Well, OK, from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it’d be odd not to do this,” said Graham in a 2019 profile for The New York Times magazine. By “this,” he meant the quest “to be relevant,” to be in the president’s “orbit” and to “have a say in what’s going to happen today, tomorrow and next week.”
Graham wanted power or, at least, proximity to power. If that meant defending the president’s bigotry or corruption, so be it. Graham would even, after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, lend his influence to the president’s attempt to fabricate the votes he needed to win Georgia, leaning on state election officials as a collaborator in the president’s conspiracy. It should not be forgotten that Graham actually called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to press him to throw out enough ballots to deliver the state to the president.
In 2016, Graham had praised and defended American elections against Trump’s accusations of fraud. Four years later, he too was an election denier.
“If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again,” he said.
Graham seemed to have a change of heart in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — a moment of clarity in the immediate aftermath of the president’s attempted coup. He wasn’t prepared to follow Trump into the abyss. “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” he said. “I hate it being this way. Oh, my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. But today, first thing you’ll see, all I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”
Except, of course, he eventually wanted to be counted back in. When it was clear that Trump would not suffer meaningful consequences — when it was clear, in fact, that he could make a political comeback — Graham, ever the opportunist, was again at his side, making the trek to Mar-a-Lago to show fealty to the once and future president.
In a recent interview on Fox News, Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, said that Graham would be “someone we’re still going to be talking about 100, 200 years from now.”
I doubt that. Graham sat in the seat once held by John C. Calhoun in the 19th century and Strom Thurmond in the 20th. These were ignominious men. They were also consequential ones. Their names survive for a reason. Compared with them, Graham is a minor figure at most, not so anonymous that he’ll be forgotten, but not so noteworthy that he’ll be remembered, outside of South Carolina at least, beyond scholars and the occasional journalist.
Even then, the most anyone might say in the future is that he was an emblematic figure: emblematic of the men and women who defined the Republican Party in the first decades of the 21st century, who lacked both the political strength and the moral character to resist a malign force, a man who chose to join that force and its assault on American democracy rather than resist it.
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