How Lindsey Graham Lost His Way

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Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump were born nine years and one month apart. Trump came first, but when they appear side by side, as they often do these days, the men look about the same age. On November 6th, in the East Room of the White House, the president held an event to mark the record number of federal judges his administration has appointed, and Graham was there, having played a critical role in the achievement as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Trump’s staff had scheduled the event in part to shift focus from the House impeachment investigation, to remind any wobbly Republicans of the reason they’d held their noses and voted for the guy in the first place.

Over the course of his three terms representing South Carolina in the Senate, Graham had become predominantly known for two things: extreme hawkishness on foreign policy, following the lead of his close friend and mentor, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, and a bipartisan streak that resulted in high-profile attempts to cut big deals on issues like immigration reform and climate change. A former senior staffer for a Democratic senator who has worked alongside Graham on bipartisan legislation tells me, “Like John McCain, he was a conservative Republican, but it was always worth asking where he was going to be on a particular issue, because he wasn’t completely beholden to party orthodoxy. He’d often be way out ahead of his staff, negotiating on the Senate floor unbeknownst to them, and they would be playing catch-up.”

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Like much of the GOP establishment, Graham had opposed Trump during the 2015 primary, but he spoke out more forcefully than most, and in the general election, he wrote in third-party candidate Evan McMullin. Which has made his subsequent capitulation all the more breathtaking, even in the context of a modern Republican Party completely transformed into the party of Trump. In the past few months alone, in advance of a likely Senate impeachment trial, Graham has doubled down on the president’s inflammatory characterization of the House inquiry, calling it a “lynching in every sense”; preemptively announced he wouldn’t be reading any of the transcripts of deposed House witnesses, though he’ll be a juror in the trial, telling reporters he’d “written the whole process off?.?.?.?this is a bunch of B.S.”; and most recently, requested documents for a Judiciary Committee investigation into the entirely baseless claims that Trump’s leading 2020 rival, Joe Biden, pressured the government of Ukraine to fire its lead prosecutor in an effort to help his son Hunter.

Shortly after Graham’s office requested documents pertaining to the Biden investigation, a 2016 video surfaced in which Graham paid heartfelt tribute to the former vice president, calling him “as good a man as God ever created” and saying, “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person?.?.?.?you need to do some self-evaluation.” It felt like a taped confession to a future crime, as if the old Graham, the Graham who knew better, had put his soul in a time capsule in order to shame his craven Trump-era self. Here was video evidence of Graham’s willingness to protect a man he knows to be corrupt by falsely accusing a friend of corruption. By that point, though, Graham’s debasement had been so thoroughly realized, the hypocrisy on display barely made an impact.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/lindsey-graham-senate-trump-928948/