{"id":589,"date":"2026-07-13T13:40:58","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T13:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=589"},"modified":"2026-07-13T13:40:58","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T13:40:58","slug":"lindsey-graham-chose-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=589","title":{"rendered":"Lindsey Graham Chose Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Although Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly on Saturday at 71, was one of the most odious figures in American public life, he does deserve a partial defense from a strangely pervasive calumny directed against him by liberal critics. In the last decade of his life, Graham underwent a dramatic political transformation. In 2015 and early 2016, Graham became a no-holds-barred foe of Donald Trump, whom he lambasted as \u201ca race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot\u201d who \u201crepresents the worst in America.\u201d But Graham started to warm to Trump once the insurgent candidate won the Republican primary on May 4, 2016. This process accelerated after Trump was elected president in November, when Graham became, against stiff competition, the president\u2019s most obsequious lackey.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more Golf Caddies Just Unionized for the First Time<\/a><\/p>\n

Graham\u2019s metamorphosis was all the more startling because his earlier disdain for Trump sprang logically from his political history. Prior to 2016, Graham was best known as the ultra-hawkish ally of fellow war-happy senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman (their noxious nickname for themselves was the \u201cThree Amigos\u201d), which made him a natural opponent of candidate Trump\u2019s isolationist foreign policy. Further, Graham had a history of bipartisanship, working with Democrats on immigration reform and campaign finance and casting the sole Republican vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan\u2019s Supreme Court nominations. This gave Graham a profile, on domestic matters at least, more mainstream than Trump\u2019s burn-it-down populism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What explains Graham\u2019s quick change of political identity? One theory popular among Resistance Liberals and Never Trump conservatives was that the senator, who was widely rumored to be a closeted gay man, had been blackmailed by Trump, perhaps with kompromat provided by Vladimir Putin. In 2019, for instance MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle\u00a0dropped\u00a0a heavy-breathing hint along this line by suggesting that Trump knows \u201csomething pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham.\u201d<\/p>\n

The blackmail theory was never grounded in evidence and suffered the further disadvantage of making Graham seem like a victim rather than someone making affirmative choices about his life. The actual story of Graham\u2019s ideological conversion is much worse than any conspiracy, because he gave us his principles for the worst of reasons: to stay close to the center of power, stave off MAGA primary challenges, and bring Trump around to Graham\u2019s deeply militarist worldview.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The best account of Graham\u2019s late-life arc is found in a brisk book by William Saletan, a journalist for The Bulwark, titled The Corruption of Lindsey Graham<\/em> (now available on Saletan\u2019s Substack). With forensic care, Saletan traces the step-by-step shifts Graham made while becoming first Trump\u2019s apologist and then a rabid MAGA partisan.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Graham succumbed to Trump because he knew the demagogue spoke for a substantial part of the GOP base, one that the party could not afford to alienate if it wanted to win elections. In a CNN interview in March 2016, Graham estimated that between 35 and 40 per cent of Republicans believe \u201cthe world that they knew growing up is being lost. They feel like the Mexicans are taking their jobs\u2026.There\u2019s a market out there for \u2018Send them all back.\u2019\u201d Trump was successful, he added, because he knew how to \u201cprey on people\u2019s fear.\u201c<\/p>\n

Graham was still a Trump critic at this point, but merely on pragmatic grounds: he feared Trump would lose the election and damage the GOP brand. But once Trump won the Republican nomination, Graham immediately started sending signals that he wanted to get on the MAGA train. On May 6, 2016, Graham admitted to CNN that Trump could prove him wrong by winning the general election against Hillary Clinton. Five days later, Graham had a warm phone conversation with Trump.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Saletan notes, Trump \u201cchatted [Graham up and asked for advice on national security. Graham loved it. This was what the Senator had hoped for. If he couldn\u2019t be president, he wanted to shape the president\u2019s foreign policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking to The New York Times Magazine<\/em> magazine in 2019, Graham admitted, \u201cI went from, \u2018OK, he\u2019s president\u2019 to \u2018How can I get to be in his orbit?\u2019\u201d Graham then boasted that he eventually elbowed his way into an even more desirable spot as part of Trump\u2019s\u00a0 \u201csmaller orbit.\u201d The following year, Graham crowed, \u201cI\u2019ve never had more access to a president than I have with Donald Trump.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more Golf Caddies Just Unionized for the First Time<\/a><\/p>\n

Viewed simply through these transactional terms, the Graham-Trump alliance benefited the Senator. As Saletan notes, \u201cGraham\u2019s bargain\u2014going easy on Trump\u2019s domestic behavior while pressing him on foreign policy\u2014paid off. From Syria to Iran to North Korea, Trump was doing what Graham wanted.\u201d It turned out that Trump\u2019s occasional rhetorical gestures towards a less interventionist foreign policy were merely campaign rhetoric. In practice, Trump could be as belligerent as George W. Bush, a fact that delighted Graham.<\/p>\n

The South Carolina senator was happy as a pig in clover as the sidekick to a global bully. (He could also see that staying on Trump\u2019s good side was essential if he wanted to avoid being ousted by a MAGA supporter in a Senate primary.) When Trump raised the specter of nuclear annihilation against North Korea, warning that he would unleash \u201cfire and fury\u201d Graham was an eager echo chamber. He warned North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un that \u201cif you play Trump, that\u2019s the end of you.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Trump\u2019s faithful lapdog, Graham started to defend the president\u2019s worst actions. As Saletan notes, Graham, descended \u201cto a polarized worldview that made it easier to rationalize devotion to\u201d Trump. In 2019, Graham accused the Democrats of trying to \u201cbasically destroy America as we know it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That same year, Trump ranted that Representative Ilhan Omar, a US citizen, should go back to her native Somalia. Graham offered the disingenuous apologia that Trump was only mad at those who criticized him. According to Graham, \u201cA Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back. If you\u2019re a racist, you want\u00a0everybody\u00a0from Somalia to go back.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2020, Graham dived even deeper into the MAGA swamp. He started echoing Trump\u2019s conspiratorial language about stolen elections. The senator told Fox News in November 2020, \u201cWe lose elections because they cheat us.\u201d Graham became briefly critical of Trump after the president incited a mob to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But as Saletan documents, this break with Trump was both short-lived and tactical: the motive of his criticism seemed geared towards saving Trump\u2019s reputation for a future presidential run.<\/p>\n

Graham might have felt he was justified on pragmatic grounds, but not all his fellow hawks agreed. Liz Cheney was every bit as militarist as Graham, but she, to her credit, realized that no policy victories could justify complicity with Trump\u2019s attacks on the rule of law.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For those who oppose militarism, Graham\u2019s compromises look even worse, since he used his persuasive perch in the Senate to advocate for some of the most horrific policies in recent history: the Iraq war under George W. Bush and the US support for the genocide in Gaza under Biden and Trump.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps more than any other lawmaker of his era, Graham was an emblematic figure. His career illustrates that Trumpism was no anomaly. Rather, Trump\u2019s authoritarianism flourished thanks to the willing alliance of powerful mainstream figures such as Graham, whose main priority was maintaining US imperial dominance of the globe even at the expense of destroying American democracy.<\/p>\n

Read more Today is FDR\u2019s Birthday: Before the 1932 Election, \u2018The Nation\u2019 Was Not Impressed<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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