How Lindsey Graham Went From Trump Skeptic to Trump Sidekick
“What happened to me?” the senator asks. “Not a damn thing.” Basically Graham is what he has always been, an ends justifies the means GOPER prick. Trump is his means and Graham 'services' Trump periodically, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to gain his ends.
He continued: “This is a fight between the people who are so smart and the rest of us.” Heads bobbed over unfinished plates of function-room meat drowned in barbecue sauce. The continuing debate over the border wall, he went on, was not just over funding for a barrier, in the same way that the brawl over Brett Kavanaugh, whose Supreme Court appointment had been delayed over allegations of sexual assault, was not merely about a judge.
Nothing of late has enhanced the senator’s standing as a Trump loyalist, or disgust with him among former Democratic collaborators, more than his showstopping speech at the September hearing where Christine Blasey Ford, a high school acquaintance of Kavanaugh’s, accused the future justice of sexually assaulting her at a party.
“What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life,” Graham exploded at Senate Democrats, many of whom he had worked with closely for years. Senator Chris Coons, the Delaware Democrat, told me that his longtime colleague is “hysterically funny” and “personally engaging.” But the personal nature of Graham’s outburst at the hearing left him stunned.
“It was unprecedented,” Coons said, adding that he and Graham did not speak for several weeks afterward. “I am still struggling to renew my working relationship with Senator Graham,” he added.
Graham says he has achieved graduating levels of relevance with Trump. “I went from, ‘O.K., he’s president’ to ‘How can I get to be in his orbit?’?”— “orbit” is another favorite Graham word — “to ‘How can I have a say in what’s going to happen today, tomorrow and next week?’?” he told me.
I asked Graham if he considered himself part of the wider Trump orbit or the more select one. “Well, I’m getting into the smaller orbit now,” he said. I asked him who else was in that precinct of the Trump solar system. He mentioned Melania, Ivanka, Jared. “He’s got a bunch of old friends that still have a say, New York types,” Graham said. “But the circle is small.”
Trump is an entertainer and an agitator, which Graham says he can relate to, in a way. “The point with Trump is, he’s in on the joke,” Graham said. I asked Graham if he is in on the joke, too. “Oh, 100 percent, 100 percent.” He laughed. “Oh, people have no idea.” I asked him to explain the joke to me. “If you could go to dinner with us. … ” he said, shaking his head.
At the end of our second interview, in mid-February, I asked Graham if he trusted Trump. Graham’s eyes seemed to bulge for a split second. He sat back in his chair and paused. “That’s a good question,” he told me.
He paused some more. “Do I trust him?” he said at last. “I trust the president to want to be successful,” he said. The president’s mercurialness, he acknowledged, could be a problem. “He will change his mind in a New York minute,” Graham said. “You never know where he’ll be. I mean, I woke up one day, and we’re pulling out of Syria.”
But to this point, he and Trump have been able to work together. “He’s asked me to do some things, and I’ve asked him to do some things in return,” Graham said. Then, as if looking wistfully over his shoulder at his old maverick-sidekick days, he offered, “There’s sort of a Don Quixote aspect to this.” It was an odd thing for a man who was espousing the median Republican-circa-2019 position to say.
“At the intersection of all this theater is that he wants to be a successful president,” Graham said of Trump, “and I want him to be successful under terms that I think are good for the country.” Understood, but unspoken, was that these terms would also be good for Lindsey Graham.
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