lennypartiv
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The GOP is the party of family values.
Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology
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John Edgar Slow Horses
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No, it is not.
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Chapter Four: Domestic Enemies
Part 1
ON NOVEMBER 26, 2018, GRAHAM GOT A TREAT: He would share the stage with Trump at a rally. Graham’s stern words about Trump in 2015 were long forgotten. His tirade against Democrats at the Kavanaugh hearings had made him a hero on the right. And his work to defeat Democratic senators in the midterms had solidified his standing in the GOP.
At the rally in Tupelo, Mississippi, Trump lambasted illegal immigrants and the “Russian witch hunt.” He lavished praise on Graham, recalling the senator’s “brilliant” words in defense of Kavanaugh. And he summoned Graham to the podium, calling him “my friend” and a “star.”
The crowd cheered. Graham beamed. The next day, he was still glowing.
Graham had finally earned Trump’s love. He was earning the love of Trump’s voters, too. These were the voters Graham had shunned as haters in 2015. But now they welcomed Graham, because he was giving them what they wanted: resentment, wrath, and the vilification of Trump’s opponents.
As Trump polarized America, this enthusiasm from his fan base galvanized Republican allegiance to him. Some lawmakers had been with him from the beginning. Others had fallen in line when he captured the nomination or when he became president. Still others, worn down by his aggression, had eventually surrendered to exhaustion or fear.
But as Trump’s base became the party’s base, there was one more reason to give in: Republican politicians who embraced him would be loved. And the more fiercely these politicians affirmed his view of the world, reviling his enemies and defending his abuses of power, the more love they would get.
Four days after the rally in Mississippi, Graham spoke at a Republican breakfast in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He recalled his four minutes of glory at the Kavanaugh hearings. “I spoke for you,” he told the crowd. “I unloaded.”
The fight over Kavanaugh, Graham explained, was just one battle in a great war against Trump’s enemies. Every Republican had to stand with the president, because any attack on the president was an attack on all conservatives. “It’s not just about Trump; it’s about us,” Graham said. The goal of Democrats, he told the audience, was “to destroy us.”
As Graham traveled his home state that winter, this was his message to Republicans: In the struggle between Trump and the Democrats, there could be no middle ground. Democrats were vicious and had to be defeated. “They hate us,” he said. On court appointments and related issues, he charged, “there’s nothing they won’t do.”
In the old days, Graham hadn’t talked this way. He had often worked with Democrats on legislation. He still would, but something had changed. He had decided—or at least had decided to tell himself—that something about the Kavanaugh fight justified a more zealous allegiance to Trump.
Politically, this was the shrewd play. Graham was up for re-election in 2020, and he needed Trump’s voters to win his primary. But that didn’t fully explain his behavior. Even after his re-election, Graham never went back to equivocating about Trump.
He wasn’t alone. To varying degrees, this transition was happening across the party. In Trump’s first two years, many Republican lawmakers had felt obliged to explain or answer for his misdeeds. Often, they had acknowledged inconvenient facts or legal constraints that stood in his way. But over time, fatigue, partisan anger, and political necessity hardened them. They were developing the indifference necessary to protect a tyrant.
To rationalize their increasingly militant devotion, they convinced themselves that the president’s enemies were the greater threat. They claimed that Democrats would do anything to destroy Trump and the country. And that paranoid fantasy created a permission structure for Republicans to do anything in Trump’s defense.
Domestic Enemies
Graham had finally earned Trump’s love. He was earning the love of Trump’s voters, too. These were the voters Graham had shunned as haters in 2015. But now they welcomed Graham, because he was giving them what they wanted: resentment, wrath, and the vilification of Trump’s opponents.
specialto.thebulwark.com
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Part 2
Situational Commitments
ELEVEN DAYS AFTER THE BREAKFAST in North Myrtle Beach, Trump summoned Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer—the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, respectively—to the White House. He told them he would shut down the government unless Congress appropriated money for a wall on the Mexican border. “If the Democrats do not give us the votes,” Trump proclaimed, “the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall.”
The shutdown began on December 22. Two weeks later, on January 4, Trump threatened to declare a “national emergency” that would allow him to bypass Congress and unilaterally fund his wall.
Before Trump became president, Graham had opposed such imperial abuse of executive power. In 2014, when President Barack Obama overhauled immigration policy by executive order, Graham had called Obama’s decision to “unilaterally change immigration” a “tremendous presidential overreach.” In 2016, he had denounced Obama’s order as “unconstitutional.”
But now that Trump held the White House, Graham endorsed unilateral presidential authority. “Speaker Pelosi’s refusal to negotiate on funding for a border wall/barrier . . . virtually ends the congressional path,” said Graham. “Democrats will do everything in their power to stop Trump in 2020,” he concluded. “Mr. President, Declare a national emergency NOW. Build a wall NOW.”
As Democrats held their ground—and some Republicans hesitated to support such a grave expansion of presidential power—Graham dialed up the pressure on senators who dared to resist Trump. “We’re going to build a wall one way or the other,” he toldDemocratic lawmakers on January 30. The president “has all the power in the world to do this,” he said. Raising a finger to punctuate his threat, he warned lawmakers in his own party, “To my Republican colleagues: Stand behind him. And if you don’t, you’re going to pay a price.”
Graham’s threats completed a four-year turn in his views on intimidation. In 2015 and 2016, he had recognized Trump’s despotic personality as a danger to the country. Then, in 2017 and 2018, he had found a good use for the president’s bullying: scaring foreign adversaries. Graham had warned them to comply with Trump’s demands, or else.
Now Graham came full circle. The adversaries he sought to intimidate were no longer foreign governments. They were his own colleagues. And Trump was his weapon.
The wall fight marked a new stage of Graham’s collaboration with the president. He wasn’t just protecting Trump from accountability. He was helping Trump usurp power.
The Constitution prohibits federal spending without congressional authorization. Previous presidents had issued emergency declarations, but never to override Congress. Despite this, Graham said Republicans had to stand with Trump against the Democrats. “What they’re trying to do is basically destroy America as we know it,” Graham said of the opposition party’s resistance. To break that resistance, he contended, the president “has to declare a national emergency.”
Some Republican senators worried about the implications for constitutional democracy. What would happen, they asked, if presidents began to commandeer the Treasury routinely, or if they declared states of emergency to enact other policies they couldn’t pass through Congress?
Graham advised his colleagues not to fuss about that. “To all my Republican colleagues who worry about the precedent we’re setting for the future and the legal niceties, here’s what I would say,” he told them. “It’s not what a Democrat may do in the future [that] should drive your thinking.” He counseled them to set aside such institutional concerns and focus instead on the urgency and popularity of securing the border.
Even if the emergency declaration were to be found unconstitutional, said Graham, Republicans should support it, at least for now, because it was politically useful. If the courts were to block it, he argued, Trump would “be seen as . . . fighting for what he promised, and the Democrats are on the wrong side of border security. There is no losing.” Graham called it “a great issue for 2019 and 2020.”
On February 15, Trump did it. He declared an emergency to take money for the wall, claiming—falsely—that America was under attack. “We have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people,” the president asserted.
Sixteen states filed suit against Trump’s power grab, asking the courts to step in. So Graham began to think about how Trump could manipulate the courts. In a radio interview on February 22, Hugh Hewitt urged Graham to consider “expediting” the confirmations of Trump-friendly appellate judges so they would be in place “before the barrier/wall issue comes up from the district court.” Graham replied, “Yeah, we will get them on the floor. . . . We’re thinking about changing the rules so that the thirty-hour period to debate a judge is reduced to two hours.”
Two weeks later, Graham explained to Sean Hannity how Trump could argue in court that he had congressional approval to seize the money, even though he didn’t. To stop Trump, Congress would have to pass a resolution of disapproval. The president would then veto it. If either chamber failed to muster the two-thirds majority necessary to override his veto, the resolution would fail. “When it goes to court,” Graham proposed, “the president will say, ‘Wait a minute, Congress did act. They [passed] the resolution; I vetoed it; and the Congress sustained my veto. That’s acting.’”
This was an extralegal authoritarian pact between the executive and a faction of Congress. The president, backed by one-third of one chamber, would seize powers constitutionally reserved to Congress. And the judiciary, having been stacked by the executive through unusual procedures, would stand back and accept it.
And that’s pretty much what happened. The House and Senate voted to invalidateTrump’s declaration. On March 15, he vetoed their attempt to stop him. And because Republican lawmakers stood with him, Democrats failed to override the veto.
Three months later, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to proceed with the wall. Brett Kavanaugh cast the deciding vote.
specialto.thebulwark.com
Situational Commitments
ELEVEN DAYS AFTER THE BREAKFAST in North Myrtle Beach, Trump summoned Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer—the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, respectively—to the White House. He told them he would shut down the government unless Congress appropriated money for a wall on the Mexican border. “If the Democrats do not give us the votes,” Trump proclaimed, “the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall.”The shutdown began on December 22. Two weeks later, on January 4, Trump threatened to declare a “national emergency” that would allow him to bypass Congress and unilaterally fund his wall.
Before Trump became president, Graham had opposed such imperial abuse of executive power. In 2014, when President Barack Obama overhauled immigration policy by executive order, Graham had called Obama’s decision to “unilaterally change immigration” a “tremendous presidential overreach.” In 2016, he had denounced Obama’s order as “unconstitutional.”
But now that Trump held the White House, Graham endorsed unilateral presidential authority. “Speaker Pelosi’s refusal to negotiate on funding for a border wall/barrier . . . virtually ends the congressional path,” said Graham. “Democrats will do everything in their power to stop Trump in 2020,” he concluded. “Mr. President, Declare a national emergency NOW. Build a wall NOW.”
As Democrats held their ground—and some Republicans hesitated to support such a grave expansion of presidential power—Graham dialed up the pressure on senators who dared to resist Trump. “We’re going to build a wall one way or the other,” he toldDemocratic lawmakers on January 30. The president “has all the power in the world to do this,” he said. Raising a finger to punctuate his threat, he warned lawmakers in his own party, “To my Republican colleagues: Stand behind him. And if you don’t, you’re going to pay a price.”
Graham’s threats completed a four-year turn in his views on intimidation. In 2015 and 2016, he had recognized Trump’s despotic personality as a danger to the country. Then, in 2017 and 2018, he had found a good use for the president’s bullying: scaring foreign adversaries. Graham had warned them to comply with Trump’s demands, or else.
Now Graham came full circle. The adversaries he sought to intimidate were no longer foreign governments. They were his own colleagues. And Trump was his weapon.
The wall fight marked a new stage of Graham’s collaboration with the president. He wasn’t just protecting Trump from accountability. He was helping Trump usurp power.
The Constitution prohibits federal spending without congressional authorization. Previous presidents had issued emergency declarations, but never to override Congress. Despite this, Graham said Republicans had to stand with Trump against the Democrats. “What they’re trying to do is basically destroy America as we know it,” Graham said of the opposition party’s resistance. To break that resistance, he contended, the president “has to declare a national emergency.”
Some Republican senators worried about the implications for constitutional democracy. What would happen, they asked, if presidents began to commandeer the Treasury routinely, or if they declared states of emergency to enact other policies they couldn’t pass through Congress?
Graham advised his colleagues not to fuss about that. “To all my Republican colleagues who worry about the precedent we’re setting for the future and the legal niceties, here’s what I would say,” he told them. “It’s not what a Democrat may do in the future [that] should drive your thinking.” He counseled them to set aside such institutional concerns and focus instead on the urgency and popularity of securing the border.
Even if the emergency declaration were to be found unconstitutional, said Graham, Republicans should support it, at least for now, because it was politically useful. If the courts were to block it, he argued, Trump would “be seen as . . . fighting for what he promised, and the Democrats are on the wrong side of border security. There is no losing.” Graham called it “a great issue for 2019 and 2020.”
On February 15, Trump did it. He declared an emergency to take money for the wall, claiming—falsely—that America was under attack. “We have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people,” the president asserted.
Sixteen states filed suit against Trump’s power grab, asking the courts to step in. So Graham began to think about how Trump could manipulate the courts. In a radio interview on February 22, Hugh Hewitt urged Graham to consider “expediting” the confirmations of Trump-friendly appellate judges so they would be in place “before the barrier/wall issue comes up from the district court.” Graham replied, “Yeah, we will get them on the floor. . . . We’re thinking about changing the rules so that the thirty-hour period to debate a judge is reduced to two hours.”
Two weeks later, Graham explained to Sean Hannity how Trump could argue in court that he had congressional approval to seize the money, even though he didn’t. To stop Trump, Congress would have to pass a resolution of disapproval. The president would then veto it. If either chamber failed to muster the two-thirds majority necessary to override his veto, the resolution would fail. “When it goes to court,” Graham proposed, “the president will say, ‘Wait a minute, Congress did act. They [passed] the resolution; I vetoed it; and the Congress sustained my veto. That’s acting.’”
This was an extralegal authoritarian pact between the executive and a faction of Congress. The president, backed by one-third of one chamber, would seize powers constitutionally reserved to Congress. And the judiciary, having been stacked by the executive through unusual procedures, would stand back and accept it.
And that’s pretty much what happened. The House and Senate voted to invalidateTrump’s declaration. On March 15, he vetoed their attempt to stop him. And because Republican lawmakers stood with him, Democrats failed to override the veto.
Three months later, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to proceed with the wall. Brett Kavanaugh cast the deciding vote.
Domestic Enemies
Graham had finally earned Trump’s love. He was earning the love of Trump’s voters, too. These were the voters Graham had shunned as haters in 2015. But now they welcomed Graham, because he was giving them what they wanted: resentment, wrath, and the vilification of Trump’s opponents.
specialto.thebulwark.com
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Part 3
Lie for Me
A WEEK AFTER TRUMP VETOED the resolution to deny him emergency powers, Graham moved on to his next mission: burying the Russia investigation.
On March 24, Trump’s new attorney general, William Barr, phoned the senator with a heads up: Robert Mueller had filed his report on the investigation. Barr told Graham that the report was ambiguous as to whether Trump had obstructed justice. The attorney general explained that Mueller had handed off the question of prosecuting Trump, essentially telling Barr, “I don’t know, you decide.”
Barr also sent Graham a summary of the report. The summary included Mueller’s stipulation that the report didn’t “exonerate” the president.
For two years, Graham had promised Trump that Mueller would “clear” him. In June 2017, the senator told Fox News viewers that Mueller had “determined there’s no obstruction case.” In September 2018, he claimed that “Mueller won’t find anything” and “the Russia probe is falling apart.” In February 2019, he predicted that the investigation would “result in no evidence of collusion.”
The actual report, as summarized by Barr, reached no such conclusions. Barr’s summary said the report “did not establish,” at a level sufficient for prosecution, that Trump’s campaign had “conspired or coordinated” with Russia. The summary didn’t say that Mueller had concluded there was no collusion, much less that he had found no evidence of collusion. In fact, the full report—which would soon be released, but hadn’t yet been shown to Graham or anyone else outside the Department of Justice—presented extensive evidence of collusion and obstruction.
But Graham was determined to end the threat to Trump. So he lied. He pretended that the report had cleared the president.
In the days after Barr issued his summary, Graham lied relentlessly:
In fact, he said the whole investigation had been unnecessary. “They spent $25 million trying to figure out whether or not President Trump colluded with the Russians,” Graham told a Republican audience on March 30. “They could have given me 50 bucks, and I could have given them the answer.” The next day on Fox News, he scoffed, “This whole thing was ridiculous if you know the president.”
specialto.thebulwark.com
Lie for Me
A WEEK AFTER TRUMP VETOED the resolution to deny him emergency powers, Graham moved on to his next mission: burying the Russia investigation.On March 24, Trump’s new attorney general, William Barr, phoned the senator with a heads up: Robert Mueller had filed his report on the investigation. Barr told Graham that the report was ambiguous as to whether Trump had obstructed justice. The attorney general explained that Mueller had handed off the question of prosecuting Trump, essentially telling Barr, “I don’t know, you decide.”
Barr also sent Graham a summary of the report. The summary included Mueller’s stipulation that the report didn’t “exonerate” the president.
For two years, Graham had promised Trump that Mueller would “clear” him. In June 2017, the senator told Fox News viewers that Mueller had “determined there’s no obstruction case.” In September 2018, he claimed that “Mueller won’t find anything” and “the Russia probe is falling apart.” In February 2019, he predicted that the investigation would “result in no evidence of collusion.”
The actual report, as summarized by Barr, reached no such conclusions. Barr’s summary said the report “did not establish,” at a level sufficient for prosecution, that Trump’s campaign had “conspired or coordinated” with Russia. The summary didn’t say that Mueller had concluded there was no collusion, much less that he had found no evidence of collusion. In fact, the full report—which would soon be released, but hadn’t yet been shown to Graham or anyone else outside the Department of Justice—presented extensive evidence of collusion and obstruction.
But Graham was determined to end the threat to Trump. So he lied. He pretended that the report had cleared the president.
In the days after Barr issued his summary, Graham lied relentlessly:
- March 25: “The conclusion was firm, without equivocation, that no one on the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians when it came to the 2016 election.”
- March 25: “He [Mueller] has rendered his verdict: There is no collusion.”
- March 26: “Mr. Mueller said there was no evidence of collusion between President Trump or anybody on his campaign with the Russians, period.”
- March 28: “Mueller has concluded there was no collusion.”
- March 31: “The conclusions are, there was no collusion, there was no obstruction. . . . Mr. Mueller, for two years, looked at this very hard. He came out with the conclusion there was no collusion.”
In fact, he said the whole investigation had been unnecessary. “They spent $25 million trying to figure out whether or not President Trump colluded with the Russians,” Graham told a Republican audience on March 30. “They could have given me 50 bucks, and I could have given them the answer.” The next day on Fox News, he scoffed, “This whole thing was ridiculous if you know the president.”
Domestic Enemies
Graham had finally earned Trump’s love. He was earning the love of Trump’s voters, too. These were the voters Graham had shunned as haters in 2015. But now they welcomed Graham, because he was giving them what they wanted: resentment, wrath, and the vilification of Trump’s opponents.
specialto.thebulwark.com
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Part 4
Mueller’s full report, released on April 18, detailed several channels of attempted collusion. In addition to the Trump Tower meeting, the report found that Trump and his aides had tried to coordinate their activities with public releases—planned by Russia’s partner, WikiLeaks—of material hacked by the Russians from Clinton and the Democrats. The report confirmed that after Trump publicly invited Russia to find Clinton’s emails, hackers affiliated with the Russian government had tried to do just that. And Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had passed internal campaign documents to an associate who was connected to Russian intelligence.
Mueller also presented evidence of obstruction of justice. In addition to Trump’s coercion of Comey and Trump’s attempts to fire Mueller, the report showed that the president had told McGahn to give false testimony. And on July 19, 2017, Trump had instructed his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to tell Sessions to abort the Mueller investigation. According to the report, Trump had told Lewandowski “that if Sessions did not meet with [Lewandowski], Lewandowski should tell Sessions he was fired.”
None of this information seemed to trouble Graham. He simply repeated his lies.
Graham now had access to the full report, so he knew that what he was saying wasn’t true. Yet he kept going:
On Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan asked Graham about the June 2017 conversation in which Trump had ordered McGahn to fire Mueller. Graham replied: “I don’t care what happened between him [Trump] and Don McGahn.”
Mueller tried to correct the public misrepresentations of his report. On May 29, he stipulated: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” On July 24, he reaffirmed that “the president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed.”
Graham responded by rebuking the special counsel. The only thing that mattered, said Graham, was that Mueller had failed to prove Trump was “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Mueller said it was up to Congress to decide what to do with his report. But when the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed McGahn to testify about Trump’s obstruction, Trump defied the subpoena and blocked McGahn and other aides from testifying.
Graham endorsed the president’s defiance. He urged Trump to fight the Democrats “tooth and nail” because they were “trying to destroy him and his family.” Stonewalling was justified, according to Graham, because the House inquiry was illegitimate. “You’re not covering anything up when you’re fighting a bunch of politicians trying to destroy you and your family,” he reasoned.
Trump, for his part, was unrepentant. In fact, he said that if Russia or China were to offer him damaging information about a political opponent—the same pitch that had led to the Trump Tower meeting—he would listen to the offer again. He ridiculed the idea of reporting such an offer to the FBI.
And Graham defended him. In 2017, Graham, alarmed by the Trump Tower emails, had read them aloud at a Senate hearing. He had emphasized that anyone who received such a message—“suggesting that a foreign government wants to help you by disparaging your opponent”—should “call the FBI.” But now Graham needed to excuse Trump’s contempt for that rule. So he argued that reporting such offers from foreign governments “has not been recent practice.”
“I meet with foreign people all the time. So does the president,” said Graham. “Sitting down and talking with somebody is fine. . . . You don’t call up the FBI every time somebody talks to you.”
specialto.thebulwark.com
Mueller’s full report, released on April 18, detailed several channels of attempted collusion. In addition to the Trump Tower meeting, the report found that Trump and his aides had tried to coordinate their activities with public releases—planned by Russia’s partner, WikiLeaks—of material hacked by the Russians from Clinton and the Democrats. The report confirmed that after Trump publicly invited Russia to find Clinton’s emails, hackers affiliated with the Russian government had tried to do just that. And Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had passed internal campaign documents to an associate who was connected to Russian intelligence.
Mueller also presented evidence of obstruction of justice. In addition to Trump’s coercion of Comey and Trump’s attempts to fire Mueller, the report showed that the president had told McGahn to give false testimony. And on July 19, 2017, Trump had instructed his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to tell Sessions to abort the Mueller investigation. According to the report, Trump had told Lewandowski “that if Sessions did not meet with [Lewandowski], Lewandowski should tell Sessions he was fired.”
None of this information seemed to trouble Graham. He simply repeated his lies.
Graham now had access to the full report, so he knew that what he was saying wasn’t true. Yet he kept going:
- April 24: “He was cleared, without any doubt, about colluding with the Russians.”
- May 1: “Mr. Mueller and his team concluded there was no collusion.”
- May 1: “The Mueller report said there was no collusion, no conspiracy. . . . Mueller exonerated the president, in terms of working with the Russians.”
- May 29: “The report shows there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and any member or operative of the Russian government.”
- June 15: “[Mueller] tells us there’s no collusion.”
- July 14: “Mueller said there was no collusion.”
On Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan asked Graham about the June 2017 conversation in which Trump had ordered McGahn to fire Mueller. Graham replied: “I don’t care what happened between him [Trump] and Don McGahn.”
Graham: I don't care what they talked about. He didn't do anything. The point is the President did not impede Mueller from doing his investigation.
Mueller tried to correct the public misrepresentations of his report. On May 29, he stipulated: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” On July 24, he reaffirmed that “the president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed.”
Graham responded by rebuking the special counsel. The only thing that mattered, said Graham, was that Mueller had failed to prove Trump was “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Mueller said it was up to Congress to decide what to do with his report. But when the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed McGahn to testify about Trump’s obstruction, Trump defied the subpoena and blocked McGahn and other aides from testifying.
Graham endorsed the president’s defiance. He urged Trump to fight the Democrats “tooth and nail” because they were “trying to destroy him and his family.” Stonewalling was justified, according to Graham, because the House inquiry was illegitimate. “You’re not covering anything up when you’re fighting a bunch of politicians trying to destroy you and your family,” he reasoned.
Trump, for his part, was unrepentant. In fact, he said that if Russia or China were to offer him damaging information about a political opponent—the same pitch that had led to the Trump Tower meeting—he would listen to the offer again. He ridiculed the idea of reporting such an offer to the FBI.
And Graham defended him. In 2017, Graham, alarmed by the Trump Tower emails, had read them aloud at a Senate hearing. He had emphasized that anyone who received such a message—“suggesting that a foreign government wants to help you by disparaging your opponent”—should “call the FBI.” But now Graham needed to excuse Trump’s contempt for that rule. So he argued that reporting such offers from foreign governments “has not been recent practice.”
“I meet with foreign people all the time. So does the president,” said Graham. “Sitting down and talking with somebody is fine. . . . You don’t call up the FBI every time somebody talks to you.”
Domestic Enemies
Graham had finally earned Trump’s love. He was earning the love of Trump’s voters, too. These were the voters Graham had shunned as haters in 2015. But now they welcomed Graham, because he was giving them what they wanted: resentment, wrath, and the vilification of Trump’s opponents.
specialto.thebulwark.com
fncceo
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THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS IN BIG TROUBLE, and Lindsey Graham knew it. It was January 21, 2016, and the senator was taking questions at a press conference. A month earlier, he had abandoned his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Now two men he despised, Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, were leading the race.
Graham thought either of them, if nominated, would lose the general election. Choosing between them, he told reporters, was “like being shot or poisoned. What does it really matter?”
Two months later, in March, Graham changed his mind. He endorsed Cruz and joked that it was better to be poisoned than shot. “Donald is like being shot in the head,” Graham told talk-show host Trevor Noah. “You might find an antidote to poisoning, I don’t know. But maybe there’s time.”
Graham was wrong. Trump wasn’t a shot to the head. He didn’t kill the GOP. In fact, he won the election.
Trump turned out to be poison. Over the next five years, he thoroughly corrupted Graham’s party. Republican leaders had time to counteract the poison, but they never did. One reason was that the poison moved slowly. Graham and other Republican politicians lost the ability to see what they were becoming. They rallied around an authoritarian, excused authoritarian acts, and embraced authoritarian ideas.
This is a story about how that happened.
BEFORE WE START, I should tell you what this article isn’t. It isn’t a rant about Graham’s servility or hypocrisy. And it isn’t a profile.
Many other journalists have written about Graham and Trump. Most of them have focused on the personal relationship between the two men. They examine the ways in which Graham’s evolution was distinctive.
I’m not interested in what’s distinctive about Graham. I’m interested in what isn’t. How does his story illuminate what happened to the whole Republican party? How did the poison work?
We need to answer these questions because the authoritarian threat is bigger than one man. Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency destroyed the myth that the United States was immune to despotism. Our institutions and the people who run them are vulnerable. We have to confront these vulnerabilities and learn how to deal with them before our democracy is threatened again.
So why focus on Graham?
First, because he was a central player in the Republican party’s capitulation to Trump. And second, because he talked constantly. He produced an enormous trove of interviews, speeches, press briefings, and social media posts. Through these records, we can see how he changed, week to week and month to month. We can watch the poison work.
It’s a slow death. The surrender to despotism doesn’t happen all at once. It advances in stages: a step, a rationalization. Another step, another rationalization. The deeper you go, the more you need to justify. You say what you need to say. You believe what you need to believe.
So let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s see who Lindsey Graham was before he drank the poison.
The Corruption of Lindsey Graham
A case study in the rise of authoritarianism. Sen. Lindsey Graham is a central player in the Republican party’s capitulation to Donald Trump. We can watch the GOP's turn to authoritarianism by reviewing Graham's many public statements.
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Part 5
None Dare Call It Authoritarianism
WHY DIDN’T GRAHAM AND OTHER REPUBLICANS understand that they were enabling authoritarianism? Because they saw themselves as serving a man, not an idea. They thought authoritarianism was a doctrine. If you didn’t espouse the doctrine, you weren’t an authoritarian.
But that isn’t how authoritarianism emerges in a democracy. It doesn’t appear in the form of an idea. It appears in the form of a man.
So Graham and his colleagues didn’t think they were doing anything unusual. Trump was the leader of their party. They would follow him wherever he went. They thought that was how party politics worked.
In some ways, this was less dangerous than an ideological commitment. If Trump were to lose power, then perhaps his party—lacking an explicitly authoritarian belief system—could revert to democratic norms.
But in other ways, it was more dangerous. The party would defend anything Trump did. And he wasn’t just a bully. He was a plunderer and a racist.
On July 14, as Congress was awaiting Mueller’s testimony, Trump lashed out at a group of Democratic congresswomen—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib—who had compared some migrant detention facilities in the United States to concentration camps.
The president said these women “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.” He said they had no business “viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
All three congresswomen were American citizens. Two had been born in the United States. But it wasn’t hard to figure out Trump’s angle. Two of the women were Muslim: Omar was from Somalia; Tlaib was from a family of Palestinian origin. Ocasio-Cortez, born in the Bronx, was of Puerto Rican ancestry.
Three days later, Trump denounced Omar at a rally. The crowd chanted, “Send her back! Send her back!” In his speech, Trump accused the congresswomen of “trying to tear our country down.” “They’re always telling us how to run it,” he said. “If they don’t love it, tell them to leave it.”
Like other elected Republicans, Graham didn’t want to defend such overt racism. But he did want to defend Trump. So he pretended that the president’s attacks on the congresswomen weren’t bigoted. Trump had good reason to “go after” them, Graham said, because “they’re running our country down. He’s tired of that.”
When Democrats complained about Trump’s remarks, Graham tuned them out. “If you are a Republican nominee for President—or President—you will be accused of being a racist,” he tweeted, dismissing the accusation.
On July 18, reporters pressed Graham about Trump’s statements and the rally chant. Graham responded by defining racism in a way that excluded Trump’s remarks. Explicit attacks on a person’s ancestry, including calls to leave the country, weren’t racist, Graham suggested, as long as the targeted person was a member of the political opposition. “A Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back,” Graham asserted. “If you’re a racist, you want everybody from Somalia to go back.”
The congresswomen had it coming to them, said Graham. They had been “incredibly provocative,” he groused. “When you start accusing people of running concentration camps, who work for the United States government, you’re going to be met with some pretty fiery responses.”
With that, Graham crossed a line that was familiar in authoritarian countries. Four years earlier, he had recognized Trump as a race-baiting bigot. Now, with a revised vocabulary and a clear conscience, Graham was rationalizing ethnic persecution. Targeting Americans based on their ancestry was understandable and not racist, under his new definition, if they were guilty of not “embracing Trump.”
Soon after that episode, Graham found a way to accommodate one of Trump’s proposed war crimes: using the U.S. military to loot other countries.
In October, Trump said he would pull American forces out of Syria. He framed this policy as a business decision. “The U.S. is always the ‘sucker,’ on NATO, on Trade, on everything,” the president complained. He protested that America’s Kurdish allies in Syria “were paid massive amounts of money” and that housing ISIS fighters in American prisons was a “tremendous cost.”
On Twitter, Trump made his position clear: “WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT.”
Graham vehemently opposed the pullout. He understood that by “benefit,” Trump meant money. He also understood that Trump had been talking for years about taking oil from Middle Eastern countries. So Graham decided to persuade Trump that keeping troops in Syria could pay off in the form of oil revenue.
On October 14, Graham and retired Army Gen. Jack Keane showed Trump a map of the Syrian region where American forces were present. Graham and Keane pointed out the oil fields. A week later, in a lunch with the president, Graham followed up, stressing the importance of controlling the oil.
It worked. Trump agreed to keep troops in Syria. “He sees the benefit . . . of controlling the oil as part of a counter-ISIS strategy,” said Graham.
To Graham, keeping U.S. forces in Syria wasn’t about the money. It was about standing with the Kurds and thwarting ISIS and Iran. But to please Trump, Graham endorsed what he had condemned in 2015 and 2016: using the military to expropriate foreign oil.
“President Trump is thinking outside the box,” Graham boasted on Fox News on October 20. “I was so impressed with his thinking about the oil.” The senator outlined the business arrangement: “We’re on the verge of a joint venture between us and the Syrian Democratic Forces . . . to modernize the oil fields and make sure they get the revenue—not the Iranians, not Assad. And it can help pay for our small commitment.”
A week later, at a White House briefing, a reporter asked Graham: “By what warrant or legal right in international law does the United States take the oil of the sovereign nation of Syria?” Graham replied that the Syrian government didn’t control the oil fields; the American-backed rebels did. Using the oil revenue to subsidize American troop deployments, as well as to help the rebels, “doesn’t violate any law,” he maintained. In fact, he proposed, “We can double or triple the oil revenues . . . So this is really a brilliant move by the president to lock the oil down.”
Graham was getting exactly what he had bargained for. In exchange for defending and facilitating Trump’s corruption, he was helping to shape America’s role in the world.
But morally, the deal was getting more and more expensive. And there seemed to be no price Graham wouldn’t pay.
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None Dare Call It Authoritarianism
WHY DIDN’T GRAHAM AND OTHER REPUBLICANS understand that they were enabling authoritarianism? Because they saw themselves as serving a man, not an idea. They thought authoritarianism was a doctrine. If you didn’t espouse the doctrine, you weren’t an authoritarian.But that isn’t how authoritarianism emerges in a democracy. It doesn’t appear in the form of an idea. It appears in the form of a man.
So Graham and his colleagues didn’t think they were doing anything unusual. Trump was the leader of their party. They would follow him wherever he went. They thought that was how party politics worked.
In some ways, this was less dangerous than an ideological commitment. If Trump were to lose power, then perhaps his party—lacking an explicitly authoritarian belief system—could revert to democratic norms.
But in other ways, it was more dangerous. The party would defend anything Trump did. And he wasn’t just a bully. He was a plunderer and a racist.
On July 14, as Congress was awaiting Mueller’s testimony, Trump lashed out at a group of Democratic congresswomen—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib—who had compared some migrant detention facilities in the United States to concentration camps.
The president said these women “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.” He said they had no business “viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
All three congresswomen were American citizens. Two had been born in the United States. But it wasn’t hard to figure out Trump’s angle. Two of the women were Muslim: Omar was from Somalia; Tlaib was from a family of Palestinian origin. Ocasio-Cortez, born in the Bronx, was of Puerto Rican ancestry.
Three days later, Trump denounced Omar at a rally. The crowd chanted, “Send her back! Send her back!” In his speech, Trump accused the congresswomen of “trying to tear our country down.” “They’re always telling us how to run it,” he said. “If they don’t love it, tell them to leave it.”
Like other elected Republicans, Graham didn’t want to defend such overt racism. But he did want to defend Trump. So he pretended that the president’s attacks on the congresswomen weren’t bigoted. Trump had good reason to “go after” them, Graham said, because “they’re running our country down. He’s tired of that.”
When Democrats complained about Trump’s remarks, Graham tuned them out. “If you are a Republican nominee for President—or President—you will be accused of being a racist,” he tweeted, dismissing the accusation.
On July 18, reporters pressed Graham about Trump’s statements and the rally chant. Graham responded by defining racism in a way that excluded Trump’s remarks. Explicit attacks on a person’s ancestry, including calls to leave the country, weren’t racist, Graham suggested, as long as the targeted person was a member of the political opposition. “A Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back,” Graham asserted. “If you’re a racist, you want everybody from Somalia to go back.”
The congresswomen had it coming to them, said Graham. They had been “incredibly provocative,” he groused. “When you start accusing people of running concentration camps, who work for the United States government, you’re going to be met with some pretty fiery responses.”
With that, Graham crossed a line that was familiar in authoritarian countries. Four years earlier, he had recognized Trump as a race-baiting bigot. Now, with a revised vocabulary and a clear conscience, Graham was rationalizing ethnic persecution. Targeting Americans based on their ancestry was understandable and not racist, under his new definition, if they were guilty of not “embracing Trump.”
Soon after that episode, Graham found a way to accommodate one of Trump’s proposed war crimes: using the U.S. military to loot other countries.
In October, Trump said he would pull American forces out of Syria. He framed this policy as a business decision. “The U.S. is always the ‘sucker,’ on NATO, on Trade, on everything,” the president complained. He protested that America’s Kurdish allies in Syria “were paid massive amounts of money” and that housing ISIS fighters in American prisons was a “tremendous cost.”
On Twitter, Trump made his position clear: “WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT.”
Graham vehemently opposed the pullout. He understood that by “benefit,” Trump meant money. He also understood that Trump had been talking for years about taking oil from Middle Eastern countries. So Graham decided to persuade Trump that keeping troops in Syria could pay off in the form of oil revenue.
On October 14, Graham and retired Army Gen. Jack Keane showed Trump a map of the Syrian region where American forces were present. Graham and Keane pointed out the oil fields. A week later, in a lunch with the president, Graham followed up, stressing the importance of controlling the oil.
It worked. Trump agreed to keep troops in Syria. “He sees the benefit . . . of controlling the oil as part of a counter-ISIS strategy,” said Graham.
To Graham, keeping U.S. forces in Syria wasn’t about the money. It was about standing with the Kurds and thwarting ISIS and Iran. But to please Trump, Graham endorsed what he had condemned in 2015 and 2016: using the military to expropriate foreign oil.
“President Trump is thinking outside the box,” Graham boasted on Fox News on October 20. “I was so impressed with his thinking about the oil.” The senator outlined the business arrangement: “We’re on the verge of a joint venture between us and the Syrian Democratic Forces . . . to modernize the oil fields and make sure they get the revenue—not the Iranians, not Assad. And it can help pay for our small commitment.”
A week later, at a White House briefing, a reporter asked Graham: “By what warrant or legal right in international law does the United States take the oil of the sovereign nation of Syria?” Graham replied that the Syrian government didn’t control the oil fields; the American-backed rebels did. Using the oil revenue to subsidize American troop deployments, as well as to help the rebels, “doesn’t violate any law,” he maintained. In fact, he proposed, “We can double or triple the oil revenues . . . So this is really a brilliant move by the president to lock the oil down.”
Graham was getting exactly what he had bargained for. In exchange for defending and facilitating Trump’s corruption, he was helping to shape America’s role in the world.
But morally, the deal was getting more and more expensive. And there seemed to be no price Graham wouldn’t pay.
Domestic Enemies
Graham had finally earned Trump’s love. He was earning the love of Trump’s voters, too. These were the voters Graham had shunned as haters in 2015. But now they welcomed Graham, because he was giving them what they wanted: resentment, wrath, and the vilification of Trump’s opponents.
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Chapter Five: The First Impeachment
Part 1
ON SEPTEMBER 26, 2019, GRAHAM RAN INTO two reporters outside a steakhouse in Washington. That morning, the House Intelligence Committee had released a whistleblower complaint that outlined a new Trump scandal. In a July 25 phone call, Trump had pressed Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Joe Biden, who at that time was the Democratic frontrunner to challenge Trump. In the phone call, Trump had reminded Zelensky that the United States, through military aid, was protecting Ukraine.
In the September 26 conversation, as recounted in The Divider, Graham told the reporters that Trump had just called him to ask how to deal with the scandal. The senator’s advice was to deny the allegations and attack the accusers.
“He’s a lying motherfucker,” Graham told the reporters, referring to Trump. But despite this—and despite whatever Trump had done—Graham predicted that congressional Republicans, out of party loyalty, would stand by him. “He could kill fifty people on our side,” said Graham, “and it wouldn’t matter.”
That was the condition of American democracy after three years of Republican consolidation around Trump. The president, shielded by his party, could no longer be held accountable.
“Enough Is Enough”
THE UKRAINE SCANDAL was a natural sequel to two corrupt episodes Graham had already defended.In the Russia affair, Trump had gotten away with soliciting foreign interference to aid his campaign against Hillary Clinton. So in his next campaign, he tried a similar maneuver, this time approaching Ukraine in hopes of targeting Biden.
Trump had also succeeded in confiscating funds for his border wall. So now he tried to override Congress again, this time by blocking money instead of spending it. Before Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, the White House suspended military aid that Congress had approved for Ukraine. Trump and his agents used the suspension—along with a prospective White House meeting, which Zelensky wanted and Trump withheld—as leverage to pressure Zelensky to announce an investigation of Biden.
To the president’s critics, his coercion of Ukraine was confirmation of his unfitness for office. They saw his long trail of corruption—collusion with Russia, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, sexual assault, hush money, crooked pardons—as an accumulation of evidence against him.
But his supporters saw it the other way around. To them, the pattern was persecution: Trump had faced one investigation after another not because he had broken laws but because his enemies controlled the investigating entities—the media, the FBI, the House of Representatives—and were determined to take him down.
This was a major reason why the institutions of a free society failed to stop Trump. His accumulating transgressions didn’t just galvanize the opposition. They also galvanized his allies. Every new investigation became, in the eyes of his supporters, another reason to stand with him against the media, the Democrats, and the “Deep State.”
Even allies who recognized Trump’s corruption, as Graham did, lost patience with the investigations. They grew tired of defending the president, but they didn’t blame him. They blamed the investigators. Every day that Graham had to spend talking about Trump’s latest scandal—Russia, Ukraine, whatever—was exasperating. Graham just wanted it to end.
“This constant nagging and criticizing everything he does has driven me into his camp, like a lot of people,” Graham told Sean Hannity in January 2019. “Enough is enough.”
Corruption of Lindsey Graham: The First Impeachment
To the president’s critics, his coercion of Ukraine was confirmation of his unfitness for office. But his supporters saw a pattern of persecution: Trump had faced one investigation after another not because he had broken laws but because his enemies controlled the investigating entities—the...
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Part 2
Don’t Even Pretend To Be a Fair Juror
REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS had no interest in hearing about Trump’s latest misconduct. Before the Ukraine investigation could even begin, they dismissed it.
On September 25, the day after Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would open an inquiry to collect evidence and determine whether impeachment was warranted, Graham rejected the idea and denounced the inquiry as illegitimate. “The only reason Democrats are trying to impeach the president,” he scoffed, “is because they don’t believe they can beat him at the ballot box.”
Graham pursued the strategy he had recommended to Trump: deny and attack. “I have zero problems” with the Trump-Zelensky phone call, he declared on September 29, three days after his conversation outside the steakhouse. Instead, Graham targeted the public servants who had exposed Trump’s extortion. “I want to know who told the whistleblower about the phone call,” he demanded.
In 2018, Graham had blamed the Russia investigation on anti-Trump conspirators in the FBI and the Department of Justice. Now he blamed the Ukraine investigation on the “intel community,” especially the CIA. “When you find out who the whistleblower is, I’m confident you’re going to find out it’s somebody from the Deep State,” he predicted on Fox News. “It would blow them out of the water if, in fact, the whistleblower was connected to a Democratic candidate and came from the CIA world that’s been trying to destroy the Trump presidency [since] before he got elected.”
The new evidence against the president could be ignored or discounted, in Graham’s view, because the Ukraine investigation was part of the plot against Trump. It was “just a continuation of an effort to destroy the Trump presidency,” he told reporters on November 1. “It seems to never end.” On November 14, he urged Senate Republicans to tell Democrats: “You had your shot with Mueller. Nothing happened. Let it go.”
Graham called the Ukraine inquiry “a lynching in every sense.” “The whole thing is illegitimate,” he said. He assured Trump’s supporters, “I have the president’s back, because I think this is a setup.” Privately, he indicated that he believed Trump had blocked the aid to pressure Zelensky to open a Biden investigation. But in public, Graham insisted, “There is no evidence at all the president engaged in a quid pro quo.”
Weeks before the House began its hearings, Graham pronounced the impeachment case “dead on arrival in the Senate.” He refused to read transcripts of witness testimony, watch the hearings, or hear witnesses in a Senate trial. “I have made up my mind,” he announced on December 14. “I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror.”
[A printable PDF of this project is available here and a Kindle edition is here.]
Graham still claimed to believe in democracy. But democracy, as he now interpreted it, meant that no president could be removed during his term. To begin with, Graham argued that removal would override the will of the voters who had elected the president to serve a full four years. It would be “destroying a mandate from the people,” he said. In addition, conviction in the Senate could bar Trump from holding office in the future—a prohibition that, according to Graham, would “nullify the upcoming presidential election,” in which Trump was seeking another term.
Only the people, voting every four years, could choose the president, Graham insisted. Any other intervention would “take the voters’ choice away.”
Protected by this semi-autocratic theory of democracy, the president could do as he pleased. During the Russia investigation, Graham had struggled to excuse Trump’s obstruction of the fact-finding process. But in the Ukraine investigation, Graham didn’t bother to invent excuses. He openly encouraged Trump to bar aides from testifying and to withhold documents requested by Congress. “If I were the president, I wouldn’t cooperate with these guys at all,” he said.
Graham also expanded his defense of collusion. He did this to justify Trump’s requests to the Ukrainian government, which—while nominally disguised as appeals to expose corruption—were clearly aimed at helping Trump politically. The requests had come from Trump and his personal agents, not from the Department of Justice. And the requested act was a televised announcement—specifically, it was planned for CNN—not a careful examination of what Biden had or hadn’t done.
For three years, Graham had been sleepwalking toward authoritarianism by following a lawyerly reflex: Every time Trump abused his power, Graham broadened his interpretation of presidential authority to cover the offense. That was what Graham did now. He argued, in effect, that the president was entitled not only to obstruct the House investigation, but also to conspire with and coerce Ukraine.
At a news conference on January 24, 2020, a reporter asked Graham: “What legitimate foreign-policy interest could be served by having the president of Ukraine go on CNN and announce an investigation into one of [Trump’s] political rivals?” Graham replied that Trump had every right to “insist that the Ukrainians cooperate with us on an investigation.”
Two days later, the Times reported that John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, had witnessed—and had documented in a book manuscript—a meeting in which Trump opposed releasing the aid to Ukraine until Zelensky’s government helped Trump and his allies investigate Biden and other Democrats. Several
Share
Republican senators wanted Bolton to testify at the impeachment trial. But Graham worked behind the scenes to make sure he was never heard.
Even if everything Bolton had reported was true, said Graham, it wouldn’t matter. The senator maintained that even if Trump had explicitly told aides to “put a freeze on the aid because I want to look at the Bidens,” that was okay. “The president would have been wrong not to ask the Ukrainians to help,” said Graham.
On February 4, as Republican senators prepared to formally reject the articles of impeachment, Graham gloated that they had “kicked Schumer’s butt.” “The biggest winner of all, by far, is President Trump,” he crowed. “He comes out of this thing stronger.”
The next day, Trump was acquitted on a party-line vote. Then came the retaliation. On February 7, Trump began to purge officials who had told the truth about his scheme.
By now, Graham was a practiced apologist for the president’s reprisals. In 2017, he had defended Trump’s firing of Comey. In 2018, he had defended Trump’s firing of Sessions. And in January 2020, he had defended Trump’s removal of Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who had been targeted by Trump’s agents in that country as an obstacle to their plot against Biden. When Graham was asked about the ouster of Yovanovitch, he shrugged that Trump “can fire anybody he wants to.”
So on February 7, when the White House expelled Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer who had testified about Trump’s phone call and other elements of the Ukraine scheme, Graham again stood with the president.
The expulsion was flagrantly vengeful: Vindman and his brother—who had also worked for the NSC but, unlike Vindman, hadn’t testified—were marched out of their offices by security guards. But Graham implied that Vindman deserved it. “People in his chain of command have been suspicious of him regarding his political point of view,” the senator insinuated. “When a military officer engages in political bias, they need to be held accountable.”
Graham wasn’t done. He called on the Senate to investigate Trump’s enemies and track down the whistleblower who had revealed the president’s extortion attempt. “We’re not going to let it go,” Graham vowed. “Who is the whistleblower?” he demanded.
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Don’t Even Pretend To Be a Fair Juror
REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS had no interest in hearing about Trump’s latest misconduct. Before the Ukraine investigation could even begin, they dismissed it.On September 25, the day after Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would open an inquiry to collect evidence and determine whether impeachment was warranted, Graham rejected the idea and denounced the inquiry as illegitimate. “The only reason Democrats are trying to impeach the president,” he scoffed, “is because they don’t believe they can beat him at the ballot box.”
Graham pursued the strategy he had recommended to Trump: deny and attack. “I have zero problems” with the Trump-Zelensky phone call, he declared on September 29, three days after his conversation outside the steakhouse. Instead, Graham targeted the public servants who had exposed Trump’s extortion. “I want to know who told the whistleblower about the phone call,” he demanded.
In 2018, Graham had blamed the Russia investigation on anti-Trump conspirators in the FBI and the Department of Justice. Now he blamed the Ukraine investigation on the “intel community,” especially the CIA. “When you find out who the whistleblower is, I’m confident you’re going to find out it’s somebody from the Deep State,” he predicted on Fox News. “It would blow them out of the water if, in fact, the whistleblower was connected to a Democratic candidate and came from the CIA world that’s been trying to destroy the Trump presidency [since] before he got elected.”
The new evidence against the president could be ignored or discounted, in Graham’s view, because the Ukraine investigation was part of the plot against Trump. It was “just a continuation of an effort to destroy the Trump presidency,” he told reporters on November 1. “It seems to never end.” On November 14, he urged Senate Republicans to tell Democrats: “You had your shot with Mueller. Nothing happened. Let it go.”
Graham called the Ukraine inquiry “a lynching in every sense.” “The whole thing is illegitimate,” he said. He assured Trump’s supporters, “I have the president’s back, because I think this is a setup.” Privately, he indicated that he believed Trump had blocked the aid to pressure Zelensky to open a Biden investigation. But in public, Graham insisted, “There is no evidence at all the president engaged in a quid pro quo.”
Weeks before the House began its hearings, Graham pronounced the impeachment case “dead on arrival in the Senate.” He refused to read transcripts of witness testimony, watch the hearings, or hear witnesses in a Senate trial. “I have made up my mind,” he announced on December 14. “I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror.”
[A printable PDF of this project is available here and a Kindle edition is here.]
Graham still claimed to believe in democracy. But democracy, as he now interpreted it, meant that no president could be removed during his term. To begin with, Graham argued that removal would override the will of the voters who had elected the president to serve a full four years. It would be “destroying a mandate from the people,” he said. In addition, conviction in the Senate could bar Trump from holding office in the future—a prohibition that, according to Graham, would “nullify the upcoming presidential election,” in which Trump was seeking another term.
Only the people, voting every four years, could choose the president, Graham insisted. Any other intervention would “take the voters’ choice away.”
Protected by this semi-autocratic theory of democracy, the president could do as he pleased. During the Russia investigation, Graham had struggled to excuse Trump’s obstruction of the fact-finding process. But in the Ukraine investigation, Graham didn’t bother to invent excuses. He openly encouraged Trump to bar aides from testifying and to withhold documents requested by Congress. “If I were the president, I wouldn’t cooperate with these guys at all,” he said.
Graham also expanded his defense of collusion. He did this to justify Trump’s requests to the Ukrainian government, which—while nominally disguised as appeals to expose corruption—were clearly aimed at helping Trump politically. The requests had come from Trump and his personal agents, not from the Department of Justice. And the requested act was a televised announcement—specifically, it was planned for CNN—not a careful examination of what Biden had or hadn’t done.
For three years, Graham had been sleepwalking toward authoritarianism by following a lawyerly reflex: Every time Trump abused his power, Graham broadened his interpretation of presidential authority to cover the offense. That was what Graham did now. He argued, in effect, that the president was entitled not only to obstruct the House investigation, but also to conspire with and coerce Ukraine.
At a news conference on January 24, 2020, a reporter asked Graham: “What legitimate foreign-policy interest could be served by having the president of Ukraine go on CNN and announce an investigation into one of [Trump’s] political rivals?” Graham replied that Trump had every right to “insist that the Ukrainians cooperate with us on an investigation.”
Two days later, the Times reported that John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, had witnessed—and had documented in a book manuscript—a meeting in which Trump opposed releasing the aid to Ukraine until Zelensky’s government helped Trump and his allies investigate Biden and other Democrats. Several
Share
Republican senators wanted Bolton to testify at the impeachment trial. But Graham worked behind the scenes to make sure he was never heard.
Even if everything Bolton had reported was true, said Graham, it wouldn’t matter. The senator maintained that even if Trump had explicitly told aides to “put a freeze on the aid because I want to look at the Bidens,” that was okay. “The president would have been wrong not to ask the Ukrainians to help,” said Graham.
On February 4, as Republican senators prepared to formally reject the articles of impeachment, Graham gloated that they had “kicked Schumer’s butt.” “The biggest winner of all, by far, is President Trump,” he crowed. “He comes out of this thing stronger.”
The next day, Trump was acquitted on a party-line vote. Then came the retaliation. On February 7, Trump began to purge officials who had told the truth about his scheme.
By now, Graham was a practiced apologist for the president’s reprisals. In 2017, he had defended Trump’s firing of Comey. In 2018, he had defended Trump’s firing of Sessions. And in January 2020, he had defended Trump’s removal of Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who had been targeted by Trump’s agents in that country as an obstacle to their plot against Biden. When Graham was asked about the ouster of Yovanovitch, he shrugged that Trump “can fire anybody he wants to.”
So on February 7, when the White House expelled Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer who had testified about Trump’s phone call and other elements of the Ukraine scheme, Graham again stood with the president.
The expulsion was flagrantly vengeful: Vindman and his brother—who had also worked for the NSC but, unlike Vindman, hadn’t testified—were marched out of their offices by security guards. But Graham implied that Vindman deserved it. “People in his chain of command have been suspicious of him regarding his political point of view,” the senator insinuated. “When a military officer engages in political bias, they need to be held accountable.”
Graham wasn’t done. He called on the Senate to investigate Trump’s enemies and track down the whistleblower who had revealed the president’s extortion attempt. “We’re not going to let it go,” Graham vowed. “Who is the whistleblower?” he demanded.
Corruption of Lindsey Graham: The First Impeachment
To the president’s critics, his coercion of Ukraine was confirmation of his unfitness for office. But his supporters saw a pattern of persecution: Trump had faced one investigation after another not because he had broken laws but because his enemies controlled the investigating entities—the...
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Part 2
Strange New Respect
GRAHAM WAS WORKING HIS WAY through a transformation that became common among Republican politicians during the Trump years. The first stage was selective toleration of the president’s abuses. The second was a gradual loss of will to resist him. The third was descent into a polarized worldview that made it easier to rationalize devotion to him. Graham had embraced that worldview during the Kavanaugh hearings. Now he finished his conversion by retracting his prior heresies.
He began by renouncing the Mueller investigation. In 2018, Graham had acknowledged that Mueller’s inquiry was well founded and responsibly managed. “He’s looking at things unrelated to the dossier,” the senator had reminded Mueller’s conservative critics.
Now Graham rewrote that history. On May 6, 2020, he declared, “The entire Mueller investigation was illegitimate to begin with.” On Twitter, he wrote: “Now I know why Mueller didn’t find anything -- there was nothing there to find. Before it even started, they (FBI/DOJ) knew.” On July 28, he claimed that the FBI’s Russia investigation “was rotten to the core and the Mueller investigation had no lawful predication.”
One by one, Graham went through the roster of Trump’s accomplices, seeking to exonerate them or minimize their crimes. He cast aside his previous acknowledgments of their corruption.
The Flynn case, in particular, illustrated Graham’s transformation. Flynn had been handsomely paid by Russian state media prior to the December 2016 phone calls in which he signaled to Russia’s U.S. ambassador that Trump would relax American sanctions against Moscow. Flynn had also worked secretly as a foreign agent for Turkey.
Graham understood that all of this was suspicious. In February 2017, he had criticizedFlynn for undercutting the sanctions. And in May 2017, he had faulted the Trump White House “for not properly vetting Gen. Flynn’s contact with Turkey and Russia.” The senator had praised Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general, for reporting Flynn’s conversations with the ambassador to Trump’s White House lawyers.
But by later that year, after Trump was caught trying to squelch the FBI’s investigation of Flynn, Graham shifted his position. In December 2017, he said Flynn’s offer to loosen the sanctions was fine.
And Graham’s shift didn’t stop there. In September 2019, he claimed that the true villains were the U.S. officials who had exposed Flynn’s calls. “It should bother every American that the president-elect’s transition team is being surveilled by the intelligence community,” he fumed. “They’re about to set new policy. What business is it of the outgoing administration to surveil the incoming administration?”
On May 25, 2020, Graham joined Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, for a half-hour conversation streamed by video and sponsored by Trump’s re-election campaign. Graham defended Flynn’s calls with the Russian ambassador and said the Obama administration “had no business listening” to what was said. He suggested that Obama’s officials had listened in because they were “trying to spy on the Trump campaign”—a bizarre allegation, since Flynn’s calls had taken place after the campaign was over.
Lara Trump denounced the whole investigation. She praised Graham for “leading the charge” to find out how “this Russian hoax started.” She suggested that “the whole thing was actually an attempt to nullify the legitimate results of the 2016 election.”
Graham nodded as she spoke. “Right,” he said.
During their conversation, Graham also tried to whitewash the evidence against Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, who had participated in the Trump Tower meeting. Mueller had found that during Trump’s campaign, Manafort met with and ordered the sharing of campaign documents with an associate who was connected to Russian intelligence. But in the video with Lara Trump, Graham claimed that in Manafort’s case as well as Flynn’s, there wasn’t “any evidence found to suggest that they worked with the Russians in any way during the campaign.”
Why would Graham say such things? What had happened to him?
One answer appeared in the video as he spoke with Lara Trump. “Huge Memorial Day Sale,” said a banner across the bottom of the screen. “Get your I Heart Trump Tee!” said another. “Get the limited edition Boaters For Trump hat!” said a third. “Visit shop.donaldjtrump.com.”
Graham wasn’t just a senator anymore. He was part of Trump’s fundraising operation. And the relationship was mutual. In the months after Republican senators acquitted the president, Graham used his alliance with Trump to solicit donations for his own re-election. He routinely went on Fox News to ask viewers for money—“If half the people listening today would send me a buck”—in the name of fighting for the president. Later, to build up his database of donors and supporters, he would launch an annual “Trump Graham Golf Classic.”
Money wasn’t driving all of Graham’s decisions. But it was part of the web that gradually corrupted him and other Republican politicians. Trump controlled what they needed: endorsements, money, and Republican primary voters.
By the spring and summer of 2020, Trump was in the cleanup stage of the Russia and Ukraine scandals. While exacting vengeance against people who had stood up to him, he was determined to protect those who had remained loyal. That meant blocking the justice system from punishing his accomplices who had been convicted of crimes.
One was Roger Stone, who in 2016 had served as the chief conduit between Trump and WikiLeaks, Russia’s partner in the operation to hack Clinton and help Trump. In November 2019, Stone had been convicted of witness tampering, false statements, and obstruction of the congressional investigation into Russia’s election interference.
Trump intended to pardon Stone or commute his sentence so he would never go to jail. It was a transparently corrupt bargain: Stone had covered for Trump, and now Trump was paying him back. And Graham said it was fine. Trump had “all the legal authority in the world” to pardon Stone, the senator asserted in February 2020. Graham claimed, preposterously, that Trump’s unilateral power to pardon Stone was part of “a brilliant and intricate system of checks and balances.”
In July, when Trump commuted Stone’s sentence, Graham endorsed the decision, arguing that the Mueller investigation was “biased and corrupt.” Trump would later grant all three men—Flynn, Manafort, and Stone—full pardons. On Twitter, Graham applauded the pardon of Flynn, calling him “the victim of a politically motivated investigation and prosecution.”
The pardons were a classic authoritarian move. They exploited a weakness in the Constitution—a virtually unchecked presidential power—to shield Trump’s accomplices from the rule of law. By doing so, they also shielded the president, against whom the accomplices had refused to testify.
But the pardons were backward-looking. They tied up loose ends from Trump’s previous crimes.
The next stage of Trump’s assault on democracy wasn’t going to be about corruption. It was going to be about violence, ruthlessness, and civil war.
specialto.thebulwark.com
Strange New Respect
GRAHAM WAS WORKING HIS WAY through a transformation that became common among Republican politicians during the Trump years. The first stage was selective toleration of the president’s abuses. The second was a gradual loss of will to resist him. The third was descent into a polarized worldview that made it easier to rationalize devotion to him. Graham had embraced that worldview during the Kavanaugh hearings. Now he finished his conversion by retracting his prior heresies.He began by renouncing the Mueller investigation. In 2018, Graham had acknowledged that Mueller’s inquiry was well founded and responsibly managed. “He’s looking at things unrelated to the dossier,” the senator had reminded Mueller’s conservative critics.
Now Graham rewrote that history. On May 6, 2020, he declared, “The entire Mueller investigation was illegitimate to begin with.” On Twitter, he wrote: “Now I know why Mueller didn’t find anything -- there was nothing there to find. Before it even started, they (FBI/DOJ) knew.” On July 28, he claimed that the FBI’s Russia investigation “was rotten to the core and the Mueller investigation had no lawful predication.”
One by one, Graham went through the roster of Trump’s accomplices, seeking to exonerate them or minimize their crimes. He cast aside his previous acknowledgments of their corruption.
The Flynn case, in particular, illustrated Graham’s transformation. Flynn had been handsomely paid by Russian state media prior to the December 2016 phone calls in which he signaled to Russia’s U.S. ambassador that Trump would relax American sanctions against Moscow. Flynn had also worked secretly as a foreign agent for Turkey.
Graham understood that all of this was suspicious. In February 2017, he had criticizedFlynn for undercutting the sanctions. And in May 2017, he had faulted the Trump White House “for not properly vetting Gen. Flynn’s contact with Turkey and Russia.” The senator had praised Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general, for reporting Flynn’s conversations with the ambassador to Trump’s White House lawyers.
But by later that year, after Trump was caught trying to squelch the FBI’s investigation of Flynn, Graham shifted his position. In December 2017, he said Flynn’s offer to loosen the sanctions was fine.
And Graham’s shift didn’t stop there. In September 2019, he claimed that the true villains were the U.S. officials who had exposed Flynn’s calls. “It should bother every American that the president-elect’s transition team is being surveilled by the intelligence community,” he fumed. “They’re about to set new policy. What business is it of the outgoing administration to surveil the incoming administration?”
On May 25, 2020, Graham joined Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, for a half-hour conversation streamed by video and sponsored by Trump’s re-election campaign. Graham defended Flynn’s calls with the Russian ambassador and said the Obama administration “had no business listening” to what was said. He suggested that Obama’s officials had listened in because they were “trying to spy on the Trump campaign”—a bizarre allegation, since Flynn’s calls had taken place after the campaign was over.
Lara Trump denounced the whole investigation. She praised Graham for “leading the charge” to find out how “this Russian hoax started.” She suggested that “the whole thing was actually an attempt to nullify the legitimate results of the 2016 election.”
Graham nodded as she spoke. “Right,” he said.
During their conversation, Graham also tried to whitewash the evidence against Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, who had participated in the Trump Tower meeting. Mueller had found that during Trump’s campaign, Manafort met with and ordered the sharing of campaign documents with an associate who was connected to Russian intelligence. But in the video with Lara Trump, Graham claimed that in Manafort’s case as well as Flynn’s, there wasn’t “any evidence found to suggest that they worked with the Russians in any way during the campaign.”
Why would Graham say such things? What had happened to him?
One answer appeared in the video as he spoke with Lara Trump. “Huge Memorial Day Sale,” said a banner across the bottom of the screen. “Get your I Heart Trump Tee!” said another. “Get the limited edition Boaters For Trump hat!” said a third. “Visit shop.donaldjtrump.com.”
Graham wasn’t just a senator anymore. He was part of Trump’s fundraising operation. And the relationship was mutual. In the months after Republican senators acquitted the president, Graham used his alliance with Trump to solicit donations for his own re-election. He routinely went on Fox News to ask viewers for money—“If half the people listening today would send me a buck”—in the name of fighting for the president. Later, to build up his database of donors and supporters, he would launch an annual “Trump Graham Golf Classic.”
Money wasn’t driving all of Graham’s decisions. But it was part of the web that gradually corrupted him and other Republican politicians. Trump controlled what they needed: endorsements, money, and Republican primary voters.
By the spring and summer of 2020, Trump was in the cleanup stage of the Russia and Ukraine scandals. While exacting vengeance against people who had stood up to him, he was determined to protect those who had remained loyal. That meant blocking the justice system from punishing his accomplices who had been convicted of crimes.
One was Roger Stone, who in 2016 had served as the chief conduit between Trump and WikiLeaks, Russia’s partner in the operation to hack Clinton and help Trump. In November 2019, Stone had been convicted of witness tampering, false statements, and obstruction of the congressional investigation into Russia’s election interference.
Trump intended to pardon Stone or commute his sentence so he would never go to jail. It was a transparently corrupt bargain: Stone had covered for Trump, and now Trump was paying him back. And Graham said it was fine. Trump had “all the legal authority in the world” to pardon Stone, the senator asserted in February 2020. Graham claimed, preposterously, that Trump’s unilateral power to pardon Stone was part of “a brilliant and intricate system of checks and balances.”
In July, when Trump commuted Stone’s sentence, Graham endorsed the decision, arguing that the Mueller investigation was “biased and corrupt.” Trump would later grant all three men—Flynn, Manafort, and Stone—full pardons. On Twitter, Graham applauded the pardon of Flynn, calling him “the victim of a politically motivated investigation and prosecution.”
The pardons were a classic authoritarian move. They exploited a weakness in the Constitution—a virtually unchecked presidential power—to shield Trump’s accomplices from the rule of law. By doing so, they also shielded the president, against whom the accomplices had refused to testify.
But the pardons were backward-looking. They tied up loose ends from Trump’s previous crimes.
The next stage of Trump’s assault on democracy wasn’t going to be about corruption. It was going to be about violence, ruthlessness, and civil war.
Corruption of Lindsey Graham: The First Impeachment
To the president’s critics, his coercion of Ukraine was confirmation of his unfitness for office. But his supporters saw a pattern of persecution: Trump had faced one investigation after another not because he had broken laws but because his enemies controlled the investigating entities—the...
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Part 3
Summer of Rage
IN MAY, POLICE OFFICERS IN MINNEAPOLIS killed a black man, George Floyd, in the course of arresting him for allegedly passing a fake $20 bill. The killing—for which one officer was later convicted of murder—was captured on video and broadcast everywhere. Protests and riots erupted in many cities, and Trump responded by threatening to send in troops. “Liberal Governors and Mayors must get MUCH tougher or the Federal Government will step in and do what has to be done,” he tweeted. “And that includes using the unlimited power of our Military.”
Graham endorsed the president’s threat. “I fully support the use of federal forces, if necessary, to restore order,” he wrote. Three weeks later, as some people tore downstatues in protest over police violence and other grievances, Graham condemned these troublemakers as domestic enemies. “We’re at war with them, politically. They want to destroy America as we know it,” Graham told Fox News viewers. “To the listeners out there: You may not believe you’re in a war. But you are, politically. And you need to take sides, and you need to help this president.”
In Washington, Trump and Graham wielded power without remorse. In September, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and Republicans—having already installed two Supreme Court justices during Trump’s term—vowed to ram through a third.
Grabbing the third court seat was, like the pardons, constitutionally permitted. But it was an egregious betrayal. In 2016, Graham and his Republican colleagues had refused to let President Obama fill a vacant Supreme Court seat on the grounds that it was an election year. In 2018, Graham had pledged to apply the same rule to Trump. “If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait till the next election,” Graham promised at the time.
Now Graham abandoned that promise. “The rules have changed,” he declared. Speaking for his Republican colleagues, he vowed, “None of us are going to blink.”
As Election Day approached, Graham made the rounds on conservative radio and TV, raising money by hawking himself as a Trump diehard and scourge of liberals. “They hate my friggin’ guts,” he boasted on Sean Hannity’s radio show on September 17. “Let’s kick their ass.” A week later, on Mark Levin’s show, he bragged, “The liberals hate me for Kavanaugh. They hate me for Trump. . . . I need people listening to your radio show, if you can afford five or ten bucks, go to LindseyGraham.com.”
Meanwhile, Trump prepared his followers for battle. He claimed that massive election fraud was underway, and he refused to say that he would surrender power if he lost the official vote count. “The Democrats are trying to rig this election, because that’s the only way they’re going to win,” he alleged on September 12. When reporters asked whether he would “accept the results of the election” and commit to a “peaceful transferral of power,” he refused to answer. “There won’t be a transfer,” he said. “There’ll be a continuation.”
On October 7, during the vice presidential debate, moderator Susan Page noted Trump’s ominous statements. She asked Mike Pence: “If Vice President Biden is declared the winner and President Trump refuses to accept a peaceful transfer of power . . . what would you personally do?”
Graham ridiculed the question. Page’s query “about a peaceful transfer of power was the dumbest question in the history of #VPDebates,” he tweeted. “Only in Washington is this an issue.”
Even after multiple threats by Trump to defy the election results, Graham kept feeding the fires of rage. On October 31, at a rally in Conway, South Carolina, the senator bragged that liberals “hate my guts.” He pledged to stand with Trump, and he celebrated the president as America’s bully. “Donald Trump has got everybody you want to be scared, scared,” Graham told the crowd, naming Mexico and China in particular. He joked that he had warned foreign leaders about Trump: “He’s a little crazy. I’d watch what I do, If I were y’all.”
But it wasn’t Mexico or China that Trump was about to attack. It was the United States.
specialto.thebulwark.com
Summer of Rage
IN MAY, POLICE OFFICERS IN MINNEAPOLIS killed a black man, George Floyd, in the course of arresting him for allegedly passing a fake $20 bill. The killing—for which one officer was later convicted of murder—was captured on video and broadcast everywhere. Protests and riots erupted in many cities, and Trump responded by threatening to send in troops. “Liberal Governors and Mayors must get MUCH tougher or the Federal Government will step in and do what has to be done,” he tweeted. “And that includes using the unlimited power of our Military.”Graham endorsed the president’s threat. “I fully support the use of federal forces, if necessary, to restore order,” he wrote. Three weeks later, as some people tore downstatues in protest over police violence and other grievances, Graham condemned these troublemakers as domestic enemies. “We’re at war with them, politically. They want to destroy America as we know it,” Graham told Fox News viewers. “To the listeners out there: You may not believe you’re in a war. But you are, politically. And you need to take sides, and you need to help this president.”
In Washington, Trump and Graham wielded power without remorse. In September, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and Republicans—having already installed two Supreme Court justices during Trump’s term—vowed to ram through a third.
Grabbing the third court seat was, like the pardons, constitutionally permitted. But it was an egregious betrayal. In 2016, Graham and his Republican colleagues had refused to let President Obama fill a vacant Supreme Court seat on the grounds that it was an election year. In 2018, Graham had pledged to apply the same rule to Trump. “If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait till the next election,” Graham promised at the time.
Now Graham abandoned that promise. “The rules have changed,” he declared. Speaking for his Republican colleagues, he vowed, “None of us are going to blink.”
As Election Day approached, Graham made the rounds on conservative radio and TV, raising money by hawking himself as a Trump diehard and scourge of liberals. “They hate my friggin’ guts,” he boasted on Sean Hannity’s radio show on September 17. “Let’s kick their ass.” A week later, on Mark Levin’s show, he bragged, “The liberals hate me for Kavanaugh. They hate me for Trump. . . . I need people listening to your radio show, if you can afford five or ten bucks, go to LindseyGraham.com.”
Meanwhile, Trump prepared his followers for battle. He claimed that massive election fraud was underway, and he refused to say that he would surrender power if he lost the official vote count. “The Democrats are trying to rig this election, because that’s the only way they’re going to win,” he alleged on September 12. When reporters asked whether he would “accept the results of the election” and commit to a “peaceful transferral of power,” he refused to answer. “There won’t be a transfer,” he said. “There’ll be a continuation.”
On October 7, during the vice presidential debate, moderator Susan Page noted Trump’s ominous statements. She asked Mike Pence: “If Vice President Biden is declared the winner and President Trump refuses to accept a peaceful transfer of power . . . what would you personally do?”
Graham ridiculed the question. Page’s query “about a peaceful transfer of power was the dumbest question in the history of #VPDebates,” he tweeted. “Only in Washington is this an issue.”
Even after multiple threats by Trump to defy the election results, Graham kept feeding the fires of rage. On October 31, at a rally in Conway, South Carolina, the senator bragged that liberals “hate my guts.” He pledged to stand with Trump, and he celebrated the president as America’s bully. “Donald Trump has got everybody you want to be scared, scared,” Graham told the crowd, naming Mexico and China in particular. He joked that he had warned foreign leaders about Trump: “He’s a little crazy. I’d watch what I do, If I were y’all.”
But it wasn’t Mexico or China that Trump was about to attack. It was the United States.
Corruption of Lindsey Graham: The First Impeachment
To the president’s critics, his coercion of Ukraine was confirmation of his unfitness for office. But his supporters saw a pattern of persecution: Trump had faced one investigation after another not because he had broken laws but because his enemies controlled the investigating entities—the...
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Chapter Six: Insurrection Day
Part 1
THREE HOURS AFTER THE POLLS CLOSED in South Carolina on November 3, 2020, Graham got the good news: The Associated Press projected that he would win re-election. His job was secure for another six years.
When Trump saw the news, he phoned Graham to congratulate him. Graham responded with encouragement. “Hang in there,” he told the president. “It’s looking pretty good for you.”
But the night wasn’t good for Trump. As ballots were counted into the next day, it became increasingly evident that he would lose.
This was Graham’s chance to let go. Like many other Republicans, he had offered his fealty when Trump won the presidency. Then, for four years, Graham and his colleagues had defended or ignored Trump’s abuses of power. They had rationalized this complicity as a necessary bargain: By earning the president’s trust, they had influenced his policy decisions and restrained his worst impulses.
Now that bargain was no longer necessary. Trump would soon be out of power. The danger he posed to the United States and to the world was receding. Graham was free.
But Graham couldn’t let go. Those four years had changed him. He wasn’t his own man anymore. He was Trump’s man.
When a politician submits to an authoritarian, the politician tells himself that the alliance is only temporary. Sometimes the authoritarian has a mass following; sometimes he already has power. The politician wants access to that following and that power. He imagines that eventually he can leave the alliance just as easily as he went into it.
But submission changes the one who submits. The more you contort yourself to serve the leader, the more you forget what you once believed. The more you rely on the leader for strength, the weaker you become. The more you cater to the leader’s adherents, the more you become what those adherents want you to be.
The outcome of this process isn’t just that you can’t leave. It’s that you no longer want to.
To let go of Trump, Graham needed one of three things:
- an understanding of the gravity of Trump’s crimes and the threat Trump posed to the country;
- an alternative vision of the Republican party—one guided by principles, not by devotion to Trump; or
- a willingness to lose the next election to the Democrats.
The first thing Trump wanted was a united push by Republicans to discredit the election results. He made this clear in public and in private phone calls with Graham. So the senator complied. “The allegations of wrongdoing are earth-shattering,” Graham told Fox News viewers on November 5. “Philadelphia elections are crooked as a snake. . . . You’re talking about a lot of dead people voting. You’re talking about in Nevada, people voting who are not legal residents.”
This was a big change from 2017. Back then, when Trump claimed that voter fraud had robbed him of victory in the 2016 popular vote—though he had won the Electoral College—Graham had warned the president that such reckless allegations would “shake confidence in your ability to lead the country.” But now that the nation’s political system had rejected Trump, the president no longer cared about public confidence. He didn’t want to preserve faith in the system. He wanted to destroy it.
Over the next month, Graham peddled one bizarre tale after another: rigged computers, dead voters, fake ballots from nursing homes. In private, he ridiculed affidavits that alleged voter fraud. “I can get an affidavit tomorrow saying the world is flat,” he told an aide. But on TV, he hyped affidavits as evidence that the election results couldn’t be trusted.
Graham, like Trump, was repeatedly advised that his allegations were baseless or far-fetched. And like Trump, he refused to back down. In a press briefing on November 6, a reporter alerted Graham to what Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania had said that morning: There was “simply no evidence” of “any kind of widespread corruption or fraud” in Pennsylvania’s election. Graham shrugged off the warning. “Philadelphia’s not the bastion of free and fair elections,” he sneered.
The next day, as continuing tabulations closed off any chance of a Trump victory, all the major TV networks, including Fox News, announced that Biden had won. But Graham refused to accept their verdict. “These computers in Michigan do not pass the smell test,” he protested, adding that the same “software was used all over the country.” He went on: “We have evidence of computers flipping Republican votes to Democratic votes. . . . Do not concede, Mr. President. Fight hard.”
On November 12, Fox News host Steve Doocy pointed out that the election wasn’t particularly close. Trump trailed Biden by “tens of thousands of votes” in several states, Doocy reminded Graham, and therefore the outcome could be reversed only by “some sort of systemic fraud, some gigantic thing.” Graham replied that thousands of votes should be disqualified in Nevada, and he rehashed bogus stories about fraudulent ballots.
By the end of November, all the decisive states had certified their election tallies. On December 1, Attorney General William Barr added that despite investigations by the FBI and U.S. attorneys of various Republican allegations about the election, he had “not seen fraud on a scale” that could change the result.
But Graham still didn’t let up. “I sent an affidavit over, signed by a gentleman in Pennsylvania . . . about backdating ballots,” he told Fox viewers on December 3. “Sean Hannity had a gentleman on his show a night or two ago that claims that he took ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. . . . That would be an earth-shaking revelation.” (Both stories were unfounded.) On December 11, Graham endorsed a Texas lawsuitthat sought to void the election results from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The Corruption of Lindsey Graham - Insurrection Day
Graham had lost faith in the viability of a Trump-free Republican party. And he had convinced himself that Democratic-led government would be ruinous. Therefore, Republicans had to win the next election. And to win, they had to placate Trump.
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Part 2
Overturning the Vote
GRAHAM DIDN’T JUST DISPUTE the election’s outcome. He tried to overturn it. On November 13, he phoned Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, and asked whether Raffensperger could discard all mail ballots from counties in which relatively high numbers of voter signatures were thought to be dubious. Raffensperger interpreted this as a corrupt suggestion; Graham later insisted he was just asking questions.
Meanwhile, Graham openly pressured Georgia officials to override the state’s results. A week after the call to Raffensperger, Graham claimed on Fox & Friends that fishy signatures should have voided 39,000 ballots in Georgia, “more than enough” to put Trump ahead. “We’re going to fight back in Georgia. We’re going to fight back everywhere,” he vowed.
On December 7, after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp refused to overturn Georgia’s results, Graham responded with a public threat: “if you’re not fighting for Trump now when he needs you the most as a Republican leader in Georgia, people are not going to fight for you when you ask them to get re-elected.”
At no point did Graham endorse violence or explicitly ask state officials to do anything illegal. Despite his incendiary rhetoric and his misleading claims of fraud, he made it clear that he would accept court rulings and would support the peaceful transfer of power. American democracy survived the weeks after the 2020 election in part because Graham and other senior Republicans didn’t cross that line.
But that low standard, paradoxically, allowed Graham and his colleagues to rationalize their complicity in spreading propaganda about election theft. They pretended that their personal scruples—each of them, individually, would stop short of violence or open defiance of the Supreme Court—kept them faithful to democracy and the rule of law.
They were officially against arson, even as they soaked the house in gasoline.
Later, in books and articles about this period, Graham would depict himself as a voice of reason, working behind the scenes to calm the president’s anger. But even in private, he didn’t push Trump to concede. In fact, he encouraged Trump to “keep fighting” in the courts.
At the same time, on TV, Graham fed Trump’s supporters many of the falsehoods and apocalyptic fantasies that would ultimately drive them to insurrection. He didn’t use the word “rigged,” but he repeatedly told Fox News viewers that the electoral system was so stacked against them and so riddled with fraud that Republicans couldn’t prevail. “If we don’t fight back in 2020, we’re never going to win again presidentially,” he charged.
On November 9, Graham told Sean Hannity’s four million viewers that Democratic victories in elections were systematically corrupt. “We need to fight back,” he demanded. “We win because of our ideas. We lose elections because they cheat us.” On December 7, he told Hannity’s audience that Democrats in Georgia had to be stopped before they “steal another election.” On December 9, he suggested that the presidential vote tallies couldn’t be trusted because Trump had “won 19 of 20 bellwether counties that predict 100 percent who’s going to be president.” “How could it be,” Graham asked, that Republicans “grow our numbers in the House, hold the Senate, and Trump loses?”
Even after the Supreme Court dismissed the Texas lawsuit on December 11, and even after the Electoral College confirmed Biden’s victory on December 14, Graham refusedto say the election was over.
As Trump, Graham, and other Republicans worked to sow unrest, the country’s elders worried. In a 60 Minutes interview on November 15, former President Barack Obama cautioned Americans: “There are strongmen and dictators around the world who think [they] can do anything to stay in power.”
Four days after that interview, Graham ridiculed such comparisons. He assured Fox News viewers that Trump was nothing like a dictator. In the left’s hysterical vocabulary, Graham jeered, “A dictator is a conservative fighting for their cause, standing up for their rights.”
On January 6, 2021, thousands of Americans, heeding the president’s call to rise upagainst a stolen election, descended on the Capitol to fight for his cause.
What You Wish For
THE ATTACK ON THE CAPITOL shook Graham. For four years, he had rationalized and collaborated in everything Trump did: obstructing justice, seizing emergency powers, purging whistleblowers, refusing to accept electoral defeat. But the violence Graham saw that day dismayed him. So did Trump’s failure to call off the mob. The president, in Graham’s mind, had finally gone too far.
According to Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns in This Will Not Pass, Graham phoned White House Counsel Pat Cipollone during the attack. He told Cipollone that if Trump didn’t step up to condemn the violence, “We’ll be asking you for the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.” Under that amendment, Vice President Pence and the cabinet could formally deem Trump “unable to discharge” his duties, thereby replacing him with Pence. Essentially, Graham was telling Cipollone that Trump, in his present state, was unfit to govern the country.
That night, after the mob dispersed, Graham rose in the Senate to call for unity. He finally said what he had failed to say for two months: that the stories of massive voter fraud had been debunked, that Trump’s election challenges had failed in the courts, that the judiciary was the final arbiter, and that Biden was the legitimate president-elect.
“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way,” said Graham. But it was time, he concluded, to certify the vote of the Electoral College. To his colleagues who were still trying to block the certification, he responded: “Count me out. Enough is enough.”
It seemed that Graham was finally breaking with Trump. But that impression was mistaken. In fact, he was plotting Trump’s return to power.
Graham had been thinking about a Trump restoration since the first days after the election. “I would encourage President Trump, if, after all this, he does fall short . . . to consider running again,” the senator told Brian Kilmeade in a radio interview on November 9. “Grover Cleveland won the popular vote, lost the electoral vote in his first term. . . . Grover Cleveland came back. Donald Trump should think about it.”
In a phone call on November 18, Graham advised Trump: “You’re going to be a force in American politics for a long time. And the best way to maintain that power is to wind this thing down in a fashion that gives you a second act, right?” A month later, he toldthe president that for 2024, “You’ve locked down the Republican party nomination if you want it.”
January 6th complicated this plan. Instead of swallowing his grievances and leaving office, Trump had incited violence against Congress. When Graham, hours after the attack, said he hated to see Trump’s term “end this way,” he wasn’t renouncing Trump. He was lamenting the damage that awful day had done to Trump’s reputation and his chances of a political comeback.
At a press conference on the afternoon of January 7, Graham condemned the violence. He also lauded Pence for resisting a pressure campaign, in the days before January 6th, to refuse to count electoral votes. Graham described this pressure campaign in the passive voice so he wouldn’t have to mention that Trump was its perpetrator.
Before the attack, Graham had privately advised Pence that the scheme was unconstitutional. Now the senator made his opposition public. “The things he was asked to do in the name of loyalty were over the top, unconstitutional, illegal,” said Graham.
When a reporter pointed out that the pressure had come from Trump, Graham argued that Trump’s motives were understandable. “The president’s frustrated,” said Graham. “He thought he was cheated. Nobody’s ever going to convince him that he wasn’t.”
This was a remarkable statement.
Graham wasn’t just saying that Trump had been misled. He was saying that Trump was impervious to correction. Like a rapist who refuses to believe that a woman has said “No,” Trump could never accept, regardless of the evidence, that the voters had rejected him. And Trump hadn’t just stewed about his unfounded grievance. He had, as Graham conceded, acted on that grievance by defying the Constitution in an attempt to stay in power.
Graham was describing an incurable authoritarian. But the senator didn’t recoil, as he might have five years earlier. He was now so accustomed to defending Trump that even a coup attempt—by a man who, as Graham acknowledged, would never recognize that the coup attempt was wrong—couldn’t shake the senator’s loyalty. In Graham’s lawyerly mind, Trump’s impenetrable certitude wasn’t an autocratic pathology. It was an excuse.
A reporter asked Graham whether the president was “mentally unwell.” Graham said no, and he blamed Trump’s illegal ideas and false claims about the election on “very bad advisers.” But Graham knew that the root problem was Trump. He knew that Trump had chosen those advisers precisely because they told him what he wanted to hear. The senator would later admit that Trump “would have believed Martians fixed the election if we had told him, because he wanted to believe it.”
Graham wasn’t even confident that Trump would leave office peacefully. At his press conference, he struggled with that question:
In the months after the insurrection, Graham and many other Republicans would try to whitewash what Trump had done and what they had said, both on January 6th and in the weeks leading up to it. But the video of the January 7 press conference stands as a record of what Graham actually believed.
specialto.thebulwark.com
Overturning the Vote
GRAHAM DIDN’T JUST DISPUTE the election’s outcome. He tried to overturn it. On November 13, he phoned Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, and asked whether Raffensperger could discard all mail ballots from counties in which relatively high numbers of voter signatures were thought to be dubious. Raffensperger interpreted this as a corrupt suggestion; Graham later insisted he was just asking questions.Meanwhile, Graham openly pressured Georgia officials to override the state’s results. A week after the call to Raffensperger, Graham claimed on Fox & Friends that fishy signatures should have voided 39,000 ballots in Georgia, “more than enough” to put Trump ahead. “We’re going to fight back in Georgia. We’re going to fight back everywhere,” he vowed.
On December 7, after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp refused to overturn Georgia’s results, Graham responded with a public threat: “if you’re not fighting for Trump now when he needs you the most as a Republican leader in Georgia, people are not going to fight for you when you ask them to get re-elected.”
At no point did Graham endorse violence or explicitly ask state officials to do anything illegal. Despite his incendiary rhetoric and his misleading claims of fraud, he made it clear that he would accept court rulings and would support the peaceful transfer of power. American democracy survived the weeks after the 2020 election in part because Graham and other senior Republicans didn’t cross that line.
But that low standard, paradoxically, allowed Graham and his colleagues to rationalize their complicity in spreading propaganda about election theft. They pretended that their personal scruples—each of them, individually, would stop short of violence or open defiance of the Supreme Court—kept them faithful to democracy and the rule of law.
They were officially against arson, even as they soaked the house in gasoline.
Later, in books and articles about this period, Graham would depict himself as a voice of reason, working behind the scenes to calm the president’s anger. But even in private, he didn’t push Trump to concede. In fact, he encouraged Trump to “keep fighting” in the courts.
At the same time, on TV, Graham fed Trump’s supporters many of the falsehoods and apocalyptic fantasies that would ultimately drive them to insurrection. He didn’t use the word “rigged,” but he repeatedly told Fox News viewers that the electoral system was so stacked against them and so riddled with fraud that Republicans couldn’t prevail. “If we don’t fight back in 2020, we’re never going to win again presidentially,” he charged.
On November 9, Graham told Sean Hannity’s four million viewers that Democratic victories in elections were systematically corrupt. “We need to fight back,” he demanded. “We win because of our ideas. We lose elections because they cheat us.” On December 7, he told Hannity’s audience that Democrats in Georgia had to be stopped before they “steal another election.” On December 9, he suggested that the presidential vote tallies couldn’t be trusted because Trump had “won 19 of 20 bellwether counties that predict 100 percent who’s going to be president.” “How could it be,” Graham asked, that Republicans “grow our numbers in the House, hold the Senate, and Trump loses?”
Even after the Supreme Court dismissed the Texas lawsuit on December 11, and even after the Electoral College confirmed Biden’s victory on December 14, Graham refusedto say the election was over.
As Trump, Graham, and other Republicans worked to sow unrest, the country’s elders worried. In a 60 Minutes interview on November 15, former President Barack Obama cautioned Americans: “There are strongmen and dictators around the world who think [they] can do anything to stay in power.”
Four days after that interview, Graham ridiculed such comparisons. He assured Fox News viewers that Trump was nothing like a dictator. In the left’s hysterical vocabulary, Graham jeered, “A dictator is a conservative fighting for their cause, standing up for their rights.”
On January 6, 2021, thousands of Americans, heeding the president’s call to rise upagainst a stolen election, descended on the Capitol to fight for his cause.
What You Wish For
THE ATTACK ON THE CAPITOL shook Graham. For four years, he had rationalized and collaborated in everything Trump did: obstructing justice, seizing emergency powers, purging whistleblowers, refusing to accept electoral defeat. But the violence Graham saw that day dismayed him. So did Trump’s failure to call off the mob. The president, in Graham’s mind, had finally gone too far.According to Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns in This Will Not Pass, Graham phoned White House Counsel Pat Cipollone during the attack. He told Cipollone that if Trump didn’t step up to condemn the violence, “We’ll be asking you for the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.” Under that amendment, Vice President Pence and the cabinet could formally deem Trump “unable to discharge” his duties, thereby replacing him with Pence. Essentially, Graham was telling Cipollone that Trump, in his present state, was unfit to govern the country.
That night, after the mob dispersed, Graham rose in the Senate to call for unity. He finally said what he had failed to say for two months: that the stories of massive voter fraud had been debunked, that Trump’s election challenges had failed in the courts, that the judiciary was the final arbiter, and that Biden was the legitimate president-elect.
“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way,” said Graham. But it was time, he concluded, to certify the vote of the Electoral College. To his colleagues who were still trying to block the certification, he responded: “Count me out. Enough is enough.”
It seemed that Graham was finally breaking with Trump. But that impression was mistaken. In fact, he was plotting Trump’s return to power.
Graham had been thinking about a Trump restoration since the first days after the election. “I would encourage President Trump, if, after all this, he does fall short . . . to consider running again,” the senator told Brian Kilmeade in a radio interview on November 9. “Grover Cleveland won the popular vote, lost the electoral vote in his first term. . . . Grover Cleveland came back. Donald Trump should think about it.”
In a phone call on November 18, Graham advised Trump: “You’re going to be a force in American politics for a long time. And the best way to maintain that power is to wind this thing down in a fashion that gives you a second act, right?” A month later, he toldthe president that for 2024, “You’ve locked down the Republican party nomination if you want it.”
January 6th complicated this plan. Instead of swallowing his grievances and leaving office, Trump had incited violence against Congress. When Graham, hours after the attack, said he hated to see Trump’s term “end this way,” he wasn’t renouncing Trump. He was lamenting the damage that awful day had done to Trump’s reputation and his chances of a political comeback.
At a press conference on the afternoon of January 7, Graham condemned the violence. He also lauded Pence for resisting a pressure campaign, in the days before January 6th, to refuse to count electoral votes. Graham described this pressure campaign in the passive voice so he wouldn’t have to mention that Trump was its perpetrator.
Before the attack, Graham had privately advised Pence that the scheme was unconstitutional. Now the senator made his opposition public. “The things he was asked to do in the name of loyalty were over the top, unconstitutional, illegal,” said Graham.
When a reporter pointed out that the pressure had come from Trump, Graham argued that Trump’s motives were understandable. “The president’s frustrated,” said Graham. “He thought he was cheated. Nobody’s ever going to convince him that he wasn’t.”
This was a remarkable statement.
Graham wasn’t just saying that Trump had been misled. He was saying that Trump was impervious to correction. Like a rapist who refuses to believe that a woman has said “No,” Trump could never accept, regardless of the evidence, that the voters had rejected him. And Trump hadn’t just stewed about his unfounded grievance. He had, as Graham conceded, acted on that grievance by defying the Constitution in an attempt to stay in power.
Graham was describing an incurable authoritarian. But the senator didn’t recoil, as he might have five years earlier. He was now so accustomed to defending Trump that even a coup attempt—by a man who, as Graham acknowledged, would never recognize that the coup attempt was wrong—couldn’t shake the senator’s loyalty. In Graham’s lawyerly mind, Trump’s impenetrable certitude wasn’t an autocratic pathology. It was an excuse.
A reporter asked Graham whether the president was “mentally unwell.” Graham said no, and he blamed Trump’s illegal ideas and false claims about the election on “very bad advisers.” But Graham knew that the root problem was Trump. He knew that Trump had chosen those advisers precisely because they told him what he wanted to hear. The senator would later admit that Trump “would have believed Martians fixed the election if we had told him, because he wanted to believe it.”
Graham wasn’t even confident that Trump would leave office peacefully. At his press conference, he struggled with that question:
Graham didn’t mention at the press conference that he had privately threatened to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. But given Trump’s behavior on January 6th, he held out the possibility of using that provision. “I don’t support an effort to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment now,” he said. But “if something else happens, all options would be on the table.”
In the months after the insurrection, Graham and many other Republicans would try to whitewash what Trump had done and what they had said, both on January 6th and in the weeks leading up to it. But the video of the January 7 press conference stands as a record of what Graham actually believed.
- He believed that Trump had tried to remain in power, against the people’s will, through illegal and unconstitutional acts.
- He believed that Trump would never concede, and therefore Trump would never renounce his coup attempt or accept the Biden administration’s legitimacy.
- He believed that Trump might incite further violence and might not agree to leave office.
The Corruption of Lindsey Graham - Insurrection Day
Graham had lost faith in the viability of a Trump-free Republican party. And he had convinced himself that Democratic-led government would be ruinous. Therefore, Republicans had to win the next election. And to win, they had to placate Trump.
specialto.thebulwark.com
Allof this typing and there has to be belief in who you are trying to convince. People who voted for him saw near the whole media and entertainment industries use vile tactics any chance they had to take him down. This from before the 2016 Presidential election. And as we know no, Progs did not steal enough votes. They made sure that was not repeated in 2020.Part 3
Summer of Rage
IN MAY, POLICE OFFICERS IN MINNEAPOLIS killed a black man, George Floyd, in the course of arresting him for allegedly passing a fake $20 bill. The killing—for which one officer was later convicted of murder—was captured on video and broadcast everywhere. Protests and riots erupted in many cities, and Trump responded by threatening to send in troops. “Liberal Governors and Mayors must get MUCH tougher or the Federal Government will step in and do what has to be done,” he tweeted. “And that includes using the unlimited power of our Military.”
Graham endorsed the president’s threat. “I fully support the use of federal forces, if necessary, to restore order,” he wrote. Three weeks later, as some people tore downstatues in protest over police violence and other grievances, Graham condemned these troublemakers as domestic enemies. “We’re at war with them, politically. They want to destroy America as we know it,” Graham told Fox News viewers. “To the listeners out there: You may not believe you’re in a war. But you are, politically. And you need to take sides, and you need to help this president.”
In Washington, Trump and Graham wielded power without remorse. In September, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and Republicans—having already installed two Supreme Court justices during Trump’s term—vowed to ram through a third.
Grabbing the third court seat was, like the pardons, constitutionally permitted. But it was an egregious betrayal. In 2016, Graham and his Republican colleagues had refused to let President Obama fill a vacant Supreme Court seat on the grounds that it was an election year. In 2018, Graham had pledged to apply the same rule to Trump. “If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait till the next election,” Graham promised at the time.
Now Graham abandoned that promise. “The rules have changed,” he declared. Speaking for his Republican colleagues, he vowed, “None of us are going to blink.”
As Election Day approached, Graham made the rounds on conservative radio and TV, raising money by hawking himself as a Trump diehard and scourge of liberals. “They hate my friggin’ guts,” he boasted on Sean Hannity’s radio show on September 17. “Let’s kick their ass.” A week later, on Mark Levin’s show, he bragged, “The liberals hate me for Kavanaugh. They hate me for Trump. . . . I need people listening to your radio show, if you can afford five or ten bucks, go to LindseyGraham.com.”
Meanwhile, Trump prepared his followers for battle. He claimed that massive election fraud was underway, and he refused to say that he would surrender power if he lost the official vote count. “The Democrats are trying to rig this election, because that’s the only way they’re going to win,” he alleged on September 12. When reporters asked whether he would “accept the results of the election” and commit to a “peaceful transferral of power,” he refused to answer. “There won’t be a transfer,” he said. “There’ll be a continuation.”
On October 7, during the vice presidential debate, moderator Susan Page noted Trump’s ominous statements. She asked Mike Pence: “If Vice President Biden is declared the winner and President Trump refuses to accept a peaceful transfer of power . . . what would you personally do?”
Graham ridiculed the question. Page’s query “about a peaceful transfer of power was the dumbest question in the history of #VPDebates,” he tweeted. “Only in Washington is this an issue.”
Even after multiple threats by Trump to defy the election results, Graham kept feeding the fires of rage. On October 31, at a rally in Conway, South Carolina, the senator bragged that liberals “hate my guts.” He pledged to stand with Trump, and he celebrated the president as America’s bully. “Donald Trump has got everybody you want to be scared, scared,” Graham told the crowd, naming Mexico and China in particular. He joked that he had warned foreign leaders about Trump: “He’s a little crazy. I’d watch what I do, If I were y’all.”
But it wasn’t Mexico or China that Trump was about to attack. It was the United States.
Corruption of Lindsey Graham: The First Impeachment
To the president’s critics, his coercion of Ukraine was confirmation of his unfitness for office. But his supporters saw a pattern of persecution: Trump had faced one investigation after another not because he had broken laws but because his enemies controlled the investigating entities—the...
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Part 3
The Day After
ON JANUARY 8, the day after that press conference, a band of Trump supporters hounded Graham at Reagan National Airport, calling him a “traitor.” This incident later gave rise to a legend, promoted by Trump, that the airport confrontation had chastened Graham and pushed him back into the president’s camp.
But there’s no evidence that Graham had wavered in his intention to put Trump back in the White House. Indeed, soon after the press conference, Graham reassured the president that his remarks on the Senate floor about their journey together—“I hate it to end this way,” “Count me out,” “Enough is enough”—were about giving up on the 2020 election, not about giving up on Trump.
In fact, Graham was so committed to Trump that to shield him from accountability, the senator was willing to use the threat of bloodshed.
On the morning of January 13, as the House moved toward impeaching Trump, Graham tweeted that taking such a step “could invite further violence.” That evening, after the article of impeachment was approved, Graham again warned that a hasty impeachment and Senate trial “could insight [incite] further violence.” On Hannity’s show, Graham repeated three more times that impeachment and prosecution in the Senate would “incite violence”:
Graham wasn’t endorsing violence. He was just stating as a fact that more people would get hurt if Congress pursued a path he didn’t like. He was using the prospect of violence as leverage to protect Trump from the legal consequences of his failed coup. A mob assembled by the president had just attacked Congress. And Graham was suggesting that if Congress didn’t take his advice, something like that would happen again.
Graham’s rebuke to the House—that it should have “met” Trump in a more conciliatory way after he agreed, belatedly, to reject violence—implied that the peaceful transfer of power was no longer an ironclad rule worthy of congressional enforcement. It was an act of grace by the president, for which Congress should have been grateful. And the trade Graham offered—“If you want to end the violence, end impeachment”—was an overt threat.
In all his years of service to Trump, this was the lowest tactic to which Graham had stooped.
On the other hand, Graham worried that Trump couldn’t afford to be perceived as deliberately fomenting or condoning mayhem. That was the charge in the article of impeachment: incitement of insurrection. To beat that rap and clean up Trump’s image, Graham needed to dissociate the president from the people who had attacked the Capitol.
With that in mind, Graham returned to the White House and coached the president through the final days of his term. On TV, the senator peddled a new narrative: Trump had never intended violence, had nothing to do with the perpetrators, and was horrified by what they had done.
In reality, Trump sympathized with the perpetrators and told aides he wanted to pardon them. Graham knew such pardons would be politically disastrous. So he scrambled to head them off.
On January 17, Graham went on Fox News with a prepared message. “There are a lot of people urging the president to pardon folks who participated in defiling the Capitol, the rioters,” he said. Graham explained that it would be wrong to pardon them. Then he appealed to Trump’s self-interest. Pardoning the rioters, he cautioned, “would destroy President Trump.”
That was an odd statement to make if Trump intended to leave office three days later and never return. But Trump did intend to return, and Graham intended to help him. That was why Graham protested, in the same interview, that a conviction in the impeachment trial would “disqualify President Trump from ever holding office again.”
The Trump 2024 campaign was already underway.
How had the United States come to this? How could a senior senator and many of his colleagues defend a president who had used violence in an attempt to stay in power? How could they justify returning such a man to the nation’s highest office?
Political violence was common in other countries, and elites often tolerated it. But America was supposed to be different. How could that kind of tolerance happen here?
One answer is that the senators who held Trump’s fate in their hands were, in many cases, the same senators who sometimes excused and collaborated with strongmen in other countries. They decided to deal with Trump the same way.
Graham, for instance, had made his peace with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He didn’t like Erdoğan’s suppression of dissent or his increasing centralization of power. But he worried that Erdoğan might turn Turkey away from NATO and toward Russia. So Graham decided that the United States should suck it up and “do business with Erdoğan.”
Later, Graham would make a similar calculation in Saudi Arabia. In 2018, after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the brutal murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Graham had vowed never to deal with MBS. But in 2023, Graham flew to Saudi Arabia and met with the crown prince to “enhance the U.S.-Saudi relationship.” In an interview with Al Arabiya, Graham explained his reversal: “The Kingdom has just purchased $37 billion of 787 Boeing Dreamliners made in South Carolina. . . . I got a hard and fast rule: You buy $37 billion of products made in my state, I’m gonna come and say thank you.”
Trump hadn’t ordered the killings of any journalists. But he was a lot like Erdoğan. He had seized emergency powers to override the will of Congress. He had called for jailing his political opponents. And two weeks before the January 6th attack, at a White House meeting, Trump and a circle of loyalists—including the now-pardoned Flynn—had discussed proposals to claim emergency powers again, this time to seize voting machines and, if necessary, use the military to “rerun” the 2020 election.
In the days after Trump’s coup attempt, Graham decided that just as the United States needed Erdoğan, the GOP still needed Trump. “President Trump’s going to be the most important voice in the Republican party for a long time to come,” Graham advised Republican senators on January 17. If those senators were to convict Trump at his impeachment trial, he warned, “it would destroy our party.”
The destruction, in Graham’s mind, would arise from Trump leaving the GOP. On January 19, the Wall Street Journal reported that the president, irked that some Republicans weren’t standing by him, was talking about forming a “Patriot party.” “I hope he doesn’t. I hope he’ll stay the leader of the Republican party,” said Graham.
Over the next two weeks, Graham came up with various arguments against convicting Trump. All of them were phony.
Graham’s real reason—the only stated reason that matched his behavior—was that if Republican senators turned against Trump, Trump would destroy the GOP. “Without his help, we cannot take back the House and the Senate,” Graham advised Republicans on January 20. The senator repeatedly underscored that point, and on February 13, he got his wish: Forty-three of the Senate’s fifty Republicans voted to acquit Trump, blocking his conviction and clearing his path to run for president again.
Preparing Trump for his return would take time. There was a lot of whitewashing to do. A poll taken during and after the impeachment trial showed that 55 percent of Americans believed he shouldn’t be allowed to hold office. He would have to fix that.
“You are the hope, the future of conservatism,” Graham told Trump, speaking to him through the camera during a February 16 appearance on Hannity’s show. “But we’ve got to make some changes to get back the White House in 2024.”
Fortunately, Trump still had a grip on the GOP. In that same poll, 75 percent of Republicans said they wanted him to play a prominent role in the party.
And that, said Graham, was Trump’s path back to power. “You own the Republican party, my friend.”
The Day After
ON JANUARY 8, the day after that press conference, a band of Trump supporters hounded Graham at Reagan National Airport, calling him a “traitor.” This incident later gave rise to a legend, promoted by Trump, that the airport confrontation had chastened Graham and pushed him back into the president’s camp.But there’s no evidence that Graham had wavered in his intention to put Trump back in the White House. Indeed, soon after the press conference, Graham reassured the president that his remarks on the Senate floor about their journey together—“I hate it to end this way,” “Count me out,” “Enough is enough”—were about giving up on the 2020 election, not about giving up on Trump.
In fact, Graham was so committed to Trump that to shield him from accountability, the senator was willing to use the threat of bloodshed.
On the morning of January 13, as the House moved toward impeaching Trump, Graham tweeted that taking such a step “could invite further violence.” That evening, after the article of impeachment was approved, Graham again warned that a hasty impeachment and Senate trial “could insight [incite] further violence.” On Hannity’s show, Graham repeated three more times that impeachment and prosecution in the Senate would “incite violence”:
Graham wasn’t endorsing violence. He was just stating as a fact that more people would get hurt if Congress pursued a path he didn’t like. He was using the prospect of violence as leverage to protect Trump from the legal consequences of his failed coup. A mob assembled by the president had just attacked Congress. And Graham was suggesting that if Congress didn’t take his advice, something like that would happen again.
Graham’s rebuke to the House—that it should have “met” Trump in a more conciliatory way after he agreed, belatedly, to reject violence—implied that the peaceful transfer of power was no longer an ironclad rule worthy of congressional enforcement. It was an act of grace by the president, for which Congress should have been grateful. And the trade Graham offered—“If you want to end the violence, end impeachment”—was an overt threat.
In all his years of service to Trump, this was the lowest tactic to which Graham had stooped.
On the other hand, Graham worried that Trump couldn’t afford to be perceived as deliberately fomenting or condoning mayhem. That was the charge in the article of impeachment: incitement of insurrection. To beat that rap and clean up Trump’s image, Graham needed to dissociate the president from the people who had attacked the Capitol.
With that in mind, Graham returned to the White House and coached the president through the final days of his term. On TV, the senator peddled a new narrative: Trump had never intended violence, had nothing to do with the perpetrators, and was horrified by what they had done.
In reality, Trump sympathized with the perpetrators and told aides he wanted to pardon them. Graham knew such pardons would be politically disastrous. So he scrambled to head them off.
On January 17, Graham went on Fox News with a prepared message. “There are a lot of people urging the president to pardon folks who participated in defiling the Capitol, the rioters,” he said. Graham explained that it would be wrong to pardon them. Then he appealed to Trump’s self-interest. Pardoning the rioters, he cautioned, “would destroy President Trump.”
That was an odd statement to make if Trump intended to leave office three days later and never return. But Trump did intend to return, and Graham intended to help him. That was why Graham protested, in the same interview, that a conviction in the impeachment trial would “disqualify President Trump from ever holding office again.”
The Trump 2024 campaign was already underway.
How had the United States come to this? How could a senior senator and many of his colleagues defend a president who had used violence in an attempt to stay in power? How could they justify returning such a man to the nation’s highest office?
Political violence was common in other countries, and elites often tolerated it. But America was supposed to be different. How could that kind of tolerance happen here?
One answer is that the senators who held Trump’s fate in their hands were, in many cases, the same senators who sometimes excused and collaborated with strongmen in other countries. They decided to deal with Trump the same way.
Graham, for instance, had made his peace with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He didn’t like Erdoğan’s suppression of dissent or his increasing centralization of power. But he worried that Erdoğan might turn Turkey away from NATO and toward Russia. So Graham decided that the United States should suck it up and “do business with Erdoğan.”
Later, Graham would make a similar calculation in Saudi Arabia. In 2018, after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the brutal murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Graham had vowed never to deal with MBS. But in 2023, Graham flew to Saudi Arabia and met with the crown prince to “enhance the U.S.-Saudi relationship.” In an interview with Al Arabiya, Graham explained his reversal: “The Kingdom has just purchased $37 billion of 787 Boeing Dreamliners made in South Carolina. . . . I got a hard and fast rule: You buy $37 billion of products made in my state, I’m gonna come and say thank you.”
Trump hadn’t ordered the killings of any journalists. But he was a lot like Erdoğan. He had seized emergency powers to override the will of Congress. He had called for jailing his political opponents. And two weeks before the January 6th attack, at a White House meeting, Trump and a circle of loyalists—including the now-pardoned Flynn—had discussed proposals to claim emergency powers again, this time to seize voting machines and, if necessary, use the military to “rerun” the 2020 election.
In the days after Trump’s coup attempt, Graham decided that just as the United States needed Erdoğan, the GOP still needed Trump. “President Trump’s going to be the most important voice in the Republican party for a long time to come,” Graham advised Republican senators on January 17. If those senators were to convict Trump at his impeachment trial, he warned, “it would destroy our party.”
The destruction, in Graham’s mind, would arise from Trump leaving the GOP. On January 19, the Wall Street Journal reported that the president, irked that some Republicans weren’t standing by him, was talking about forming a “Patriot party.” “I hope he doesn’t. I hope he’ll stay the leader of the Republican party,” said Graham.
Over the next two weeks, Graham came up with various arguments against convicting Trump. All of them were phony.
- Graham said it was cruel and pointless to impeach Trump, since Trump was leaving office and returning to private life. But Graham knew it was neither cruel nor pointless, since Graham was plotting to bring Trump back to power.
- Graham complained that the House had impeached Trump without calling witnesses. Yet Graham also warned Democrats not to call witnesses in the Senate.
- Graham claimed that Trump’s incitement of the January 6th attack wasn’t serious enough to warrant impeachment. But Graham applied no such standards to other presidents: He had led the impeachment of President Bill Clinton for covering up an affair, and he would later demand Biden’s impeachment for failing to stop illegal immigration.
Graham’s real reason—the only stated reason that matched his behavior—was that if Republican senators turned against Trump, Trump would destroy the GOP. “Without his help, we cannot take back the House and the Senate,” Graham advised Republicans on January 20. The senator repeatedly underscored that point, and on February 13, he got his wish: Forty-three of the Senate’s fifty Republicans voted to acquit Trump, blocking his conviction and clearing his path to run for president again.
Preparing Trump for his return would take time. There was a lot of whitewashing to do. A poll taken during and after the impeachment trial showed that 55 percent of Americans believed he shouldn’t be allowed to hold office. He would have to fix that.
“You are the hope, the future of conservatism,” Graham told Trump, speaking to him through the camera during a February 16 appearance on Hannity’s show. “But we’ve got to make some changes to get back the White House in 2024.”
Fortunately, Trump still had a grip on the GOP. In that same poll, 75 percent of Republicans said they wanted him to play a prominent role in the party.
And that, said Graham, was Trump’s path back to power. “You own the Republican party, my friend.”
The Corruption of Lindsey Graham - Insurrection Day
Graham had lost faith in the viability of a Trump-free Republican party. And he had convinced himself that Democratic-led government would be ruinous. Therefore, Republicans had to win the next election. And to win, they had to placate Trump.
specialto.thebulwark.com
The Corruption of Lindsey Graham - Insurrection Day
Graham had lost faith in the viability of a Trump-free Republican party. And he had convinced himself that Democratic-led government would be ruinous. Therefore, Republicans had to win the next election. And to win, they had to placate Trump.
specialto.thebulwark.com
Sixties Fan
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Do you know who Will Saletan is? Have you bothered to research about him?
Is anything that Graham said as posted by Saletan not true?
Is anything that Saleatan reports as happening not factual, did not happen?
When you do have something to really counter what he reported, then come back and discuss it.
Sixties Fan
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Stormy Daniels
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Why should I believe this is anything other than you rambling off opinions and claiming they are based on "research"?
Sixties Fan
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Because you are lazy?
Because you are MAGA and you are going to stay that way?
Because MAGA does not read, research or do anything else but listen to what Trump and others say and believe 1000 % based on their voices and their words, and how they say it?
Why should anyone like you bother to know anything which would help you understand the Constitution and the Laws of the country you live in?
Total waste of your time, eh?
