Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology

[Stormy Daniels]

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?

Clearly I hit a nerve.

Me, MAGA? What a fucking loon you are.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Clearly I hit a nerve.

Me, MAGA? What a fucking loon you are.

MAGA or not, why do you not know the Constitution or the Laws of the country?

Laugh all you like at everything I post, but are you not defending Trump and the Republican Party which is dismissing the Constitution and the laws of the country?

You would need to know the Constitution and those laws to begin with, should you not?

 

[Sixties Fan]

Why should I believe this is anything other than you rambling off opinions and claiming they are based on "research"?

BTW, "Here are the lessons I learned" are words by the author of the article, not mine.
It is in the link.

 

[Stormy Daniels]

BTW, "Here are the lessons I learned" are words by the author of the article, not mine.
It is in the link.

Wait, author? So all you did was copy and paste this?

There's no link, by the way. And your post should be edited because it's a copyright violation.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Wait, author? So all you did was copy and paste this?

There's no link, by the way. And your post should be edited because it's a copyright violation.

The link is in the following posts. There is no way to edit the first post after a short time, or any other post.

The mods would have told me if that was the case.

 

[Stormy Daniels]

The link is in the following posts.

So you expect people to continue reading after your opening post is already a failure.

 

[westwall]

I set out to research the story of Graham’s relationship with Trump because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States. I wanted to see how the poison worked: the corruption, the rationalizations, the vulnerabilities in the system. I wanted to learn how democracies could detect such threats and counteract them.

Here are some of the lessons I learned.

1. Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology. It appears in the form of a demagogue. It’s easy to support him while laughing off the idea that you’re embracing authoritarianism.
2. Celebration of fear is a warning sign. When a demagogue brags about intimidating his enemies, and when voters and politicians flock to him for that reason, look out. Maybe he knows who the real villains are. Or maybe he’s the sort of person who attacks anyone in his way.
3. Authoritarian voters are the underlying threat. In every country, there are people who want a leader to break institutions and rule with an iron fist. These voters form a constituency that can lure politicians to embrace such a leader. At a minimum, they can deter politicians from opposing that leader. And if he loses power, the next authoritarian can exploit the same constituency.
4. Political parties are footholds for authoritarians. An aspiring strongman doesn’t have to gain power all at once. He can start by capturing a party and becoming its flagship candidate. This gives everyone in the party a reason to help him.
5. Politicians are blinded by their arrogance. They think they can manipulate an emerging authoritarian by collaborating with him. They underestimate the extent to which what they see as an alliance—but is really subservience—will corrupt and constrain them.
6. Politicians are misled by personal contact with the authoritarian. He may seem charming or manageable, but that’s because he’s among friends and flatterers. These situations don’t reflect how he’ll treat people who get in his way.
7. Cowardice is enough to empower an authoritarian. He doesn’t need a phalanx of wicked accomplices. He just needs weak-willed politicians and aides who will go along with whatever he does. Every country has plenty of those.
8. Authoritarianism is a trait. Politicians can always find reasons why this or that corrupt act by an authoritarian isn’t prosecutable or impeachable. These excuses gloss over the underlying problem: his personality. If he gets away with one abuse of power, he’ll move on to the next.
9. Democracy becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he wins a nomination or an election, politicians can exalt him as the people’s choice. They can use this mandate to dismiss criticism of his conduct and to reject any attempt to remove him from office.
10. Power becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he’s in office, politicians can tell themselves that by defending him, they’re earning his trust, gaining influence over him, and steering him away from his worst impulses.
11. Rationalization becomes a skill and a habit. The first time you excuse an authoritarian act, it feels like a one-time concession. But each time you bend, you become more flexible. The authoritarian keeps pushing, and you keep adjusting.
12. Ad hoc legal defenses become authoritarianism. Each time the leader abuses his power, apologists claim he has the authority to do so. Over time, as he commits more abuses, these piecemeal assertions of authority add up to a defense of anything the leader chooses to do.
13. Normalization and polarization are enough to create a mass authoritarian movement. People get used to a strong-willed leader, and their partisan reflexes kick in. If the leader is in your party, you may feel an urge to attack anyone who goes after him. You become part of his political army.
14. Exposure of the authoritarian’s crimes galvanizes his base. His supporters turn against the media, the legislature, law enforcement, and any other institution that investigates him. They view his accumulating scandals as more evidence that the true villains are out to get him.
15. Demonization of the opposition paves the way to tyranny. It lowers the moral threshold for supporting the leader. You must defend him, no matter what he does, because his enemies are worse.
16. A party detached from its principles becomes a cult. Once the party begins to shed prior beliefs in deference to a leader, it loses independent standards by which to judge him. The party becomes the man, and dissent from him becomes heresy.
17. Democracy’s culture of compromise is a weakness. Over time, an authoritarian’s will to gain and wield power grinds down politicians who are content to negotiate among competing interests. As he relentlessly imposes his will, they find reasons and ways to accommodate him.
18. Civil servants are easily smeared and purged. Some of them might investigate, expose, or refuse the leader’s corrupt orders, since they weren’t appointed by him or elected on his ticket. But that independence makes them easy to attack as “Deep State” conspirators who are subverting the people’s will.
19. It’s easy to provoke and exploit violence without endorsing it. You just say the election was stolen, and the president’s followers take it from there. Then, after their rampage, you warn that any punishment of him might drive them to violence again.
20. It’s easy to rationalize ethnic or religious persecution. Demagogues tend to use any division in society—ethnic, sexual, religious—as a wedge against their enemies. A skilled politician can excuse this behavior on the grounds that bigotry is only the method, not the motive.

So, everything that the xiden admin is authoritarian.

Good to know.

 

[Sixties Fan]

So you expect people to continue reading after your opening post is already a failure.

Read or do not read, it is up to each person.

What you and others have to deal with is Trump's failure as a person, President and as an American

 

[Stormy Daniels]

What you and others have to deal with is Trump's failure as a person, President and as an American

Pretty sure I am aware of Donald's failures far better than you ever will be.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Pretty sure I am aware of Donald's failures far better than you ever will be.

Right Stormy, since you slept with him, you would.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1

It was a disastrous week for all those who would prefer to live in a multiracial, pluralistic democracy with a functional government able to handle the challenges of modern life.

After some better-than-expected rulings that reignited talk of a “moderate” conservative Court exercising restraint, the reactionary majority left the worst for last. The Supreme Court ended its term with a flurry of decisions that thoroughly undermine the drive towards egalitarian democracy and the ability of the state to tackle the most urgent collective actions problems of the twenty-first century.

The (stupid) legend of the 3-3-3 Court

It’s worth reflecting a little bit on the trajectory of this 6-3 Court. Two years ago, it ended the 2021 term – the first in the current constellation with six rightwing judges, after Amy Coney Barrett had succeeded Ruth Bader Ginsburg in October 2020 – with noticeable restraint: no earth-shaking decisions, no attempts to unravel the “liberal” status quo. Had the fear of the new conservative supermajority on the High Court been overblown?

For most serious observers, the obvious explanation for how the Court conducted itself in 2021 was that the rightwing majority, faced with a riled-up public, acted cautiously for tactical reasons. Remember that the 6-3 constellation was the result of several questionable – to use a wonderfully euphemistic term – actions by Republicans. After the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020, Republicans insisted on putting Amy Coney Barrett on the Court in record time – even though there were less than 40 days between her nomination and the presidential election in early November. This was a remarkable move, considering that Republicans had refused to even hold hearings for Merrick Garland, who president Obama had nominated in March 2016 to succeed Antonin Scalia. Such a far-reaching decision, Mitch McConnell – ever the tribune of the people! – argued at the time, should not be made in an election year and should instead be left to the next president. After blocking the process for almost a year, Republicans ultimately got Trump to the White House, who immediately nominated Neil Gorsuch. But two years later, in the fall of 2020, Republicans were entirely comfortable to ignore their own bad-faith rational for why they sabotaged Barrack Obama’s pick. It must be considered the least surprising development in recent political history In-between Gorsuch and Coney Barrett, they had already insisted on placing Brett Kavanaugh on the Court in 2018: a man credibly accused of sexual assault, which only strengthened the resolve of Republican lawmakers – upstanding Christian patriots and defenders of family values, all of them – to close ranks behind him.

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett – all three of them hand-picked by the Federalist Society, of course, to insure their impeccable “conservative” credentials, meaning they are reactionaries who can be relied upon to drag the Court significantly to the Right. All three nominated by a president who had lost the popular vote – and after January 6, 2021, by a president who had attempted a self-coup that would have ended democracy and constitutional government in the United States.

So stark, so crass, so bizarre was the discrepancy between the pretensions of democracy and the reality of minority dominance, between the norms of the political process and a reality in which Republicans displayed zero interest in forbearance, between the ideal of nonpartisanship the Court always claims for itself and the reality of a brutal rightwing power grab, that for a while, even the Democratic establishment seemed to agree that something had to change. Court reform, expanding the Court, restricting judicial review… the contours of what, exactly, should be done remained fuzzy. But it was enough to put some pressure on the Court’s conservative majority: A credible threat – and a big part of why the 2021 term ended in restraint. The Right had decided it was better to keep a low profile, avoid attracting more criticism, let the storm pass.

And it totally worked. As the full-on assault on fundamental rights and democracy failed to materialize in 2021, mainstream Court coverage quickly reverted back to its idolizing mean and enthusiastically told the people about the most wondrous, most marvelous of creatures: the 3-3-3 Court. A rightwing supermajority? No! Three “conservatives” (Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch) on the right, three “liberals” (Sotomayor, Kagan, Breyer) on the left – and the most revered figure in American mainstream imagination, the “moderate institutionalist” represented three times (Roberts, Barrett, and Kavanaugh) in the middle. The mythical center was holding after all. It never made any sense, beyond the most superficial layer of pseudo-analysis. But there is a professional machine of Court observers always ready to propagate the legend of the noble, nonpartisan Court, all balls and strikes. The “3-3-3 Court” narrative embodied all the pathologies of the hagiographic mainstream Supreme Court discourse, propelled by journalists whose professional standing depends on access as much as it does on the reputation of the institution which they are supposedly tasked to cover critically, and by legal experts who often have a vested interest not just in making their profession look good in general, but also in building rather than burning bridges to the all-powerful justices on the nation’s highest court.

All that talk about the need for serious reform? It had gotten nowhere – worse than nowhere, actually: it was swallowed up by a presidential commission, established in April 2021 and disbanded eight months later, that predictably produced nothing but a toothless report no one cared about.

But then Dobbs happened, and just like that, the mask had fully slipped, the reactionaries on the Court revealed their true face and stripped roughly half the population of reproductive freedom and the right to bodily self-determination, made them into second-class citizens. And it wasn’t just Dobbs: One year ago, at the end of the 2022 term, the rightwing majority on the Court made it very clear that it wasn’t content with merely allowing Republicans to entrench reactionary rule in red states. The Court also aggressively restricted the ability of blue states to regulate guns, undermined the separation of church and state, and sabotaged the state’s ability to deal with the climate emergency. For anyone not willfully oblivious to what was going in, the decisions of June 2022 made it clear that the 6-3 Court was hellbent on imposing the Right’s vision of what American society should be on the entire country and was relishing in its role as the spearhead of the reactionary counter-mobilization against the drive towards multiracial, pluralistic democracy.

The Rogue Court vs Modern Democracy

America can accept this Supreme Court as legitimate and its rulings as the final word - or it can have true democracy and a functioning state. But not both.

thomaszimmer.substack.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

2023: The dangerous myth of “restraint” an “moderation”

But wait a minute, didn’t the Supreme Court just prove, with its latest round of decisions, that such a critique is unfair and that a much more nuanced assessment is in order? It is certainly the case that the 2023 term brought some unexpectedly good news. Over the past few weeks, the Court pushed back against the attempts by red states to undermine Native American sovereignty and reaffirmed Congress’s right to enact laws designed to protect Native American communities from exploitation (in Haaland v Brackeen); it upheld / restored whatever was left of the Voting Rights Act by holding the line against Alabama’s aggressive racial gerrymandering (in Allen v Milligan); and it rejected the “independent state legislature” theory (in Moore v Harper), a completely bonkers idea that was crucial to Trump’s plans to nullify the 2020 presidential election and would have ended democratic self-government in America. These are all victories for multiracial democracy.

The Court is certainly conducting itself differently than last year. The most plausible explanation is not that the conservatives had an epiphany and have magically discovered their love of egalitarian multiracial pluralism (I mean, seriously, come one now). Some of the rightwing justices are clearly aware of the heightened scrutiny and pressure resulting not just from Dobbs and the rest of the disastrous 2022 decisions, but also from recent revelations about the breath-taking levels of corruption that Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, especially, have displayed with shocking regularity and complete impunity. The Court’s public approval rating is unprecedentedly low, and this has made it vulnerable to attacks. As a result, John Roberts has evidently been able to convince some of the members of Team Reactionary to revert back ever so slightly to his way of staving off egalitarian democracy – by not destroying, but instead using the Court’s aura of nonpartisanship to their advantage.

Even if it is purely performative and tactical in nature, this kind of restraint still has real consequences and effectively slows down the reactionary project of turning the clock back by many decades. It also proves that public pressure works. And it is evidence of real friction among the reactionary justices. That’s why I don’t think “MAGA justices” is necessarily the most adequate description of the current rightwing majority. Don’t get me wrong, “MAGA Court” is still much, much closer than “moderate Court.” But it suggests that all the rightwing justices are tied to Trumpism, when the two most far-right cranks on the Court are Thomas and Alito, which serves as a reminder that this problem didn’t originate with Trump and isn’t confined to MAGA America. I think it’s more helpful to distinguish between two different camps among the rightwing majority: both are strands of the same reactionary political project and are united in their overriding disdain of the leveling impulses of liberalism, but there are certain internal quarrels and conflicts between them. The anti-liberal majority breaks down to two justices, Alito and Thomas, who just want to put democracy to the torch and take a sledgehammer to the modern state every chance they get; and four justices who are more conscious of the repercussions of going scorched earth at all times and would prefer to pursue the reactionary vision for American society from under the cover of the Court’s aura of nonpartisanship. The latter position entails rejecting cases from extremist Trump judges that are so sloppy, lazy, and dumb that they don’t offer anything in terms of plausible deniability to the rightwing majority on the Court – Roberts, in particular, has been adamant that he will not go with arguments that simply make him look like a fool. It entails some of the “conservative” justices going against their own policy preferences at least sometimes – which is exactly what happened with the unexpectedly good decisions in this term.

This fault line within the reactionary camp in many ways mirrors the key conflict that is defining the Right more broadly: between those who want to uphold white Christian elite rule from within the system and the confines of a narrowly restricted version of white patriarchal democracy – and those who want to pursue that goal by openly embracing authoritarian minority rule and militant extremism. Defenders of multiracial, pluralistic democracy are not to be found in either camp.

That has, of course, not been the tenor in mainstream media coverage for most of this term. By putting the “good” decisions out relatively early and leaving the worst ones for last, Roberts was clearly counting on getting some favorable press and defining the narrative before throwing a few more grenades. And that is exactly what happened, as the Court’s disciples in the media are always willing to oblige. The New York Times, for instance, was eager to laude the Court’s “moderate decision” when it rejected the independent state legislature theory – because apparently, the standard for what counts as “moderate” is now “not abolishing democracy right away based on some ludicrous ideas.”

Once the expectedly generous headlines were in, the rightwing majority on the Court showed its true colors yet again. A few weeks back, the Court had already crippled the EPA’s attempts to enforce the Clean Water Act of 1972 (in Sackett v EPA) and opened the door for a return to the kind of disastrous pollution of rivers, lakes, and wetlands that was common before Congress acted half a century ago, but has become unthinkable since. Then, in the term’s final two days on Thursday and Friday, the Court effectively abolished affirmative action in college admissions based on the ridiculously a-historical idea that the 14th amendment has to be applied in a “colorblind” way, completely inverting the amendment’s intent; it granted businesses a constitutional right to discriminate against the lgbtq community, based on an entirely hypothetical case of a bigot being distraught over the idea that she might, potentially, be asked to design a website for a gay couple at some point in the future; and it rejected Biden student loan forgiveness plan by applying the “major questions doctrine” – a blunt tool that serves to nullify whatever action by the administration the reactionaries on the Court don’t like.

The contrast between the decisions that had widely been lauded by the pro-democracy camp and these “mask off” rulings is stark: In the former, the Court basically decided to leave the status quo in place rather than to tear it down – none of these cases advanced the country towards becoming a fairer, more democratic society. In the latter, however, the Court actively turned the clock back dramatically.

The Rogue Court vs Modern Democracy

America can accept this Supreme Court as legitimate and its rulings as the final word - or it can have true democracy and a functioning state. But not both.

thomaszimmer.substack.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 3

Imposing traditional hierarchies on the country

All of these rulings have to be seen in the context of the Right’s larger project to uphold traditional hierarchies of race, wealth/class, gender, and religion.

Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Sackett v EPA reveals where his actual concern lies: He talks a lot about the horrible plight of the “landowner” who supposedly suffers under the yoke of state tyranny. How dare anyone restrict the right of wealthy elites to exploit the land and its resources in whatever fashion they desire! Here is someone really looking out for the core constituency of the Rights oligarchic vision.

The Supreme Court’s decision to dismantle affirmative action perfectly captures how conservatives weaponize the idea of “colorblindness” in order to deliberately obscures the distinction between considering race in order to uphold a racially discriminatory system vs. doing it to dismantle that system. Conservatives want a world that combines racially discriminatory structures in all spheres of life with “race-blind” selection processes (like hiring and admission practices) that pretend those structures don’t exist – and then call the result “meritocracy.” They want to “take race out” of the decision-making processes that determine access to avenues of wealth generation and upward social mobility, but not out of any of the systems that define life in America – a very effective way of keeping the status quo intact. The commitment to affirmative action represents an affirmation of multiracial pluralism and rests on an acknowledgment that the traditional dominance of white men was never the result of meritocratic structures, but of a discriminatory system that needs to be dismantled. As a project of hierarchy maintenance, however, the Right is diametrically opposed to any such acknowledgment – it would shatter the very foundation of the conservative political project: the belief in what is supposedly the natural and/or divinely ordained order of things.

In 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, the Court weaponizes free speech and religious freedom to allow discrimination based on identity. The ruling stands in the long tradition of valuing the freedom of conservative white Christians over that of everyone else – of actually defining their freedom as the power to curtail the freedom of others. It is yet another iteration of the eternal quest to defend this white freedom from the onslaught of equality. In blocking student loan forgiveness, finally, the Court sides yet again with the interests of the old over the needs of the young.

For the Right, these are not distinct questions and rulings. They are all part of the attempt to halt the drive towards egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy – and roll back whatever progress towards that end has been made over the past century.

This is still the Dobbs Court. It has gone rogue, occasional tactical restraint notwithstanding. The main reason why this Court has lost its legitimacy is not even the way the current majority came to be, it’s not even about all the dirty, cynical Republican machinations that got us here. The Court is illegitimate because of its actions. There is no consistent logic or principle beyond ideologically driven power politics. The idea that those who founded the United States envisioned a super-body composed of unaccountable, all-powerful rulers clad in robes, free to reign entirely outside the structure of institutions that make up the political system, is preposterous. Yes, the constitution insulates the Court from direct democratic control – but that doesn’t mean it can simply turn against democracy itself. The Court isn’t merely protecting the rights of a minority from the tyranny of mob rule; it is spearheading the attempts by a radicalizing minority to install ever more authoritarian forms of minoritarianism in order to secure their status against the will of the majority.

The United States will have to make a decision: It can either continue to respect the legitimacy of this Court and view its decisions as the final word on all matters affecting the polity – or it can have democracy and a functioning state capable of dealing with modern society. But not both.

The Rogue Court vs Modern Democracy

America can accept this Supreme Court as legitimate and its rulings as the final word - or it can have true democracy and a functioning state. But not both.

thomaszimmer.substack.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

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:

1. an understanding of the gravity of Trump’s crimes and the threat Trump posed to the country;
2. an alternative vision of the Republican party—one guided by principles, not by devotion to Trump; or
3. a willingness to lose the next election to the Democrats.

By November 2020, Graham no longer possessed any of these. He had rationalized so much corruption that he was largely desensitized to it. He 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.

Join

---

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.

specialto.thebulwark.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

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.

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]

Part 3

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:

Reporter 1: Do you trust the president not to incite the kind of violence that he promoted yesterday in the next two weeks?
Graham: I’m hoping he won’t. I’m hoping that he will allow [Chief of Staff] Mark Meadows to continue the transition. . . . My hope is that we can move forward in the next 14 days. But this will depend on what the president does. . . .
Reporter 2: Senator, do you believe that the events yesterday disqualify the president from seeking the office again in the future?
Graham: I’m not worried about the next election. I’m worried about getting through the next 14 days.

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.

And yet, despite all of this, Graham intended to restore Trump to power.

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]

Part 4

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”:

These actions, if they continue, will incite more violence. Every time you asked President Trump to calm his people down, to reject violence, to move on, he has done it. Now, how has he been met? I think outrageous misconduct by the Congress itself. . . . What good comes from impeaching President Trump after he’s out of office? . . . It will divide the country. It will incite violence. . . . If you want to end the violence, end impeachment.

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.

At one point, Graham admitted that he was offering arguments “to my Republican colleagues, if you’re looking for a reason to stop this impeachment and to dismiss it as soon as possible.”

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

 

[Sixties Fan]

Chapter Seven: Return of the Orange God-King​

Part 1

ON FEBRUARY 22, 2021, a month after Trump left office—and a week after he was acquitted by the Senate for a second time—Graham went on Fox News to promote the ex-president’s comeback. Trump was going to be the keynote speaker at the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference. “He’s been working the phones. I was with him all weekend,” said Graham. He called Trump “the alternative to Joe Biden” and urged Republicans to “get behind” the former president.

Six days later, in his speech to CPAC, Trump conceded nothing. He repeated that he had won the election, and he denounced the judiciary for failing to keep him in power. “This election was rigged, and the Supreme Court and other courts didn’t want to do anything about it,” he raged. The crowd responded with a chant: You won! You won!

Trump called for the abolition of early voting. He said the United States should have taken Iraq’s oil. He derided Mitch McConnell, who had condemned Trump’s role in the insurrection. And he vowed to purge congressional Republicans who had voted to impeach or convict him. In particular, he targeted Rep. Liz Cheney, the chair of the House Republican Conference.

“Get rid of ’em all,” Trump told the cheering crowd. “The RINOs that we’re surrounded with will destroy the Republican party and the American worker and will destroy our country itself.”

RINO Hunting
​

TRUMP’S DECLARATION OF WAR on RINOs—Republicans in name only—set the stage for the next two years. He could no longer control the party through presidential power. But he still had a weapon: fear.

To regain power, Trump needed to reestablish the idea that any Republican who didn’t support him was a RINO, because Trump was the party.

He was well positioned for this fight. In polls, more than 60 percent of Republicans said the election had been stolen, more than 50 percent said Trump was “the true president,” and more than 20 percent endorsed the attack on the Capitol.

In Washington, elected Republicans were divided into three camps. The first, which included Graham and most congressional Republicans, refused to hold Trump responsible for January 6th. The second group, represented by McConnell, held Trump responsible but didn’t want to dwell on it, since that might hurt the party politically. The third and smallest group, led by Cheney, rejected Trump as unfit to serve.

This wasn’t a split between the center and the right. Cheney and McConnell were staunch conservatives. In fact, they agreed with Graham on foreign policy far more than Trump did. So why should Graham stay with Trump?

Originally, Graham had aligned himself with Trump because Trump had the Republican nomination for president. Then it was because Trump had the presidency. And because the alternative to Trump was the Democrats. And because working with Trump seemed the most likely way to strengthen America’s role in the world.

But none of that was true anymore. Everything Graham had once claimed to value—constitutionalism, human rights, national security—was now pitted against loyalty to the former president.

The Corruption of Lindsey Graham - Return of the Orange God-King

TRUMP’S DECLARATION OF WAR on RINOs—Republicans in name only—set the stage for the next two years. He could no longer control the party through presidential power. But he still had a weapon: fear.

specialto.thebulwark.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

The Iron Lady
​

CHENEY HAD ANNOUNCED her judgment of the January 6th attack shortly before she voted to impeach Trump. She said he had “summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame.” She pointed out that he “could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

McConnell had announced his position at the Senate trial. He concluded that Trump couldn’t be convicted for a technical reason—because he was no longer president—but that he was guilty of a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” Among other things, said McConnell, “The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”

Trump resolved to punish these two troublemakers. Toppling McConnell would be difficult, in part because he had pledged to support Trump if the former president won the 2024 nomination, and in part because McConnell generally tried to avoid talking about the unpleasantness of January 6th. Cheney, however, was an easier target.

The campaign against Cheney unfolded in two stages. The first step was to oust her as chair of the House Republican Conference. The second was to defeat her in a primary. By late January, Trump was working both angles. “It’s time to get this RINO out of GOP leadership!” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted.

In Wyoming, Trump’s advisers looked for a candidate to run against Cheney. In Washington, Trump anointed one of his sycophants, Rep. Elise Stefanik, to replace heras chair of the conference.

Cheney directly challenged Trump’s authoritarianism. She called on Republicans to define their party by ideals, not by a man. “We believe in the rule of law, in limited government, in a strong national defense,” she asserted. “We Republicans need to stand for genuinely conservative principles, and steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”


Trump couldn’t smear Cheney as a leftist—in every way, she was more traditionally conservative than he was—so instead, he called her a bloodthirsty hawk. “This warmongering fool wants to stay in the Middle East and Afghanistan for another 19 years,” he jeered. He also ridiculed her performance in polls. “Liz Cheney is polling sooo low in Wyoming,” he crowed, “that she is looking for a way out of her Congressional race.”

Graham had heard these taunts before: the endless wars, the sorry poll numbers. They were the same jabs Trump had thrown at him in 2015, when Graham was a lonely hawk defending the Constitution against a demagogue.

Cheney was a reminder of the man Graham had once been.

---

Cheney had tolerated Trump’s corruption in office. She had opposed his first impeachment and had voted for him in 2020. But January 6th was too much. She recognized that what she had seen in other countries—a tyrant trying to overthrow democracy—was happening in her own country.

This wasn’t just a tantrum or a riot. It was “an attack on the Capitol of the United States,” she concluded. “I’ve worked in countries around the world that don’t have peaceful transitions of power, countries that have autocracies,” she warned Americans. “It can happen very, very quickly.”


And the threat hadn’t passed. She pointed out that the demagogue who had attempted the January 6th coup was still working to “delegitimize” the political system. “Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work—confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law,” she wrote.

Somehow, Graham had lost the ability to see these truths. He saw a troubled golf buddy, not the thug who had sat in the White House, patiently watching his followers overrun the Capitol. In interviews with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa for Peril, Graham conceded that Trump had “darkness” and “personality problems.” But he insisted that the former president was “redeemable.” He told the authors that “the problems created with Trump’s personality are easier to fix than if the party blew completely up and we had a civil war.”

Graham didn’t mean an American civil war, the kind of nation-rending conflict he had rhetorically promoted in 2020. The “civil war” he dreaded was just a fracture in the GOP. A Republican split over Trump was unacceptable, in Graham’s view, because it might help Democrats win the next election.

To avoid that risk, Graham urged McConnell to stop antagonizing Trump and start sucking up to him, as Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, was doing. “We don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of taking back the majority without Donald Trump,” Graham pleaded.

Everybody understood the situation: Trump was holding the party hostage. Graham and McCarthy were eager to pay the ransom. But the ransom Trump demanded—Cheney’s head—was just the start. He wanted to maintain control of the party. He wanted to regain control of the country. And he had already shown that he was willing to use force.

That was what Graham, McCarthy, and the other advocates of appeasement refused to acknowledge. To avert a figurative civil war, they were risking a literal civil war.

---

At first, Graham tried to protect Cheney. In early February, when Trump’s allies sought to eject her from her leadership post, the senator defended her. But by late February, he was advising her to “reconcile” with Trump. And by May, he was ready to dump her.

Cheney’s ouster, which was accomplished on May 12, showed that Trump was still a live threat. His electoral defeat, his failed coup attempt, his departure from office—none of it had finished him. Congressional Republicans were unwilling to resist him. And they were willing to get rid of anyone who stood in his way.

These collaborators told themselves they were just doing what their constituents wanted. That was how Graham rationalized his decision to turn against Cheney. The conference chair should represent House Republicans, he reasoned, and those Republicans had every right to fire Cheney for dissent. “She has taken a position regarding former President Trump which is out of the mainstream of the Republican party,” he explained.

It wasn’t just House Republicans who still loved Trump. It was Republican voters. “The people who are conservative have chosen him as their leader,” said Graham. “The people have chosen him. Not the pundits.”

CPAC illustrated the point. “Not one person” at that conference was willing to criticize Trump, Graham observed. That “tells you a lot about the strength of President Trump.” The takeaway, Graham concluded, was simple: “This is his party.”


Graham’s argument was notable in two respects. First, it was unmoored from any beliefs about freedom, the Constitution, the role of government, or America’s role in the world. The party’s putative leaders would do whatever the current base of the party wanted. This flexibility was essential, because what the current base wanted wasn’t a principle. It was a man.

Second, the argument was circular. Trump had transformed the base by bringing in his followers and driving out his critics. Voters who saw him as a dangerous demagogue were leaving the party. Republican members of Congress who opposed him were retiring or being purged.

Graham put the point bluntly. The lesson of Cheney’s expulsion from leadership, he warned, was that “people who try to erase him [Trump] are going to wind up getting erased.”

That was why nobody at CPAC had spoken up against Trump. The people who were willing to speak up against him weren’t at CPAC. They had been erased.

Through this process, the GOP was remaking itself. Trump was changing the base. The base, in turn, was redefining the Republican “mainstream.” And the party elite, by purging dissenters, was completing the cycle.

That was how the Republican party, in the name of listening to “the people,” emptied itself of all commitments but one. As Graham put it: “Donald Trump is the organizing principle, America First, to the Republican party.”

The Corruption of Lindsey Graham - Return of the Orange God-King

TRUMP’S DECLARATION OF WAR on RINOs—Republicans in name only—set the stage for the next two years. He could no longer control the party through presidential power. But he still had a weapon: fear.

specialto.thebulwark.com