Lindsey Graham, International Beta Man of Relevance
Can we talk about Lindsey Graham for a moment? Before we do, I want to offer full disclosure. As some of you probably know, I became friendly with John McCain and the entire McCain family after writing a book with Meghan McCain. I once shared a dinner with Meghan, John, and Lindsey at an upscale DC restaurant whose name I don’t remember. I found him to be likable and funny (and obviously gay, which I only mention because he’s never copped to it and I think that matters a lot when your political party is also the party of persecuting people based on their sexuality and gender expression).
McCain, of course, was Graham’s best buddy. They were an inseparable duo, with Graham playing Robin to McCain’s Batman. During the 2016 campaign, after it became clear Trump would be the nominee and possible future president, Graham backtracked on his previous statements regarding Trump. He famously wrote on Twitter in May of that year, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.”
By the time of the first Trump inauguration, however, Graham had wheedled himself into Trump’s good graces. I have no insight as to the McCain family’s feelings about Graham during those days (and if I did, I wouldn’t share them) but it could not have been easy for them to see their close family friend buddying up to the draft-dodger who repeatedly insulted their dying patriarch.
In 2021, a New York Times profile of Graham by Glenn Thrush, Jo Becker, and Danny Hakim entitled, Tap Dancing with Trump: Lindsey Graham’s Quest for Relevance, chronicled the story of Graham’s dalliances with, as the article puts it, “men he calls ‘alpha dogs,’ men more powerful than himself – disparate, even antagonistic figures like Mr. Trump and Mr. McCain.”
The profile painted a faintly damning portrait of the senior senator from the great state of South Carolina serving as a lackey for the powerful for no reason greater than, as the title suggests, “relevance.”
That desire to be relevant has been on full display during the Trump era, as Graham hustled down to Mar-A-Lago at every opportunity to golf and cavort with Trump during the twice-impeached president’s brief stint in exile. Graham, apparently, considers himself something of a Trump whisperer. His fulsome praise for the man he once called a “race-baiting, xenophobic bigot” rings hollow to all except, apparently, Trump himself.
Occasionally, as he did this weekend, Graham will briefly fall out of lockstep with the president. On CNN, he told the interviewer “I have always said that, I think, when you pardon people who attack police officers, you’re sending the wrong signal to the people at large,” adding later on NBC’s Meet the Press that he feared the blanket pardons and clemencies offered to the January 6th insurrectionists might lead to more violence.
Lest you mistake this light criticism for anything more substantive, he equated Trump’s pardoning of those convicted of storming the Capitol with Biden’s granting preemptive pardons to family members. I also didn’t like that Biden did so, but understood why he felt compelled to offer the pardons; because the President-elect had sworn retribution. To equate what Biden did with what Trump did is a further insult to the Capitol Police officers injured during the January 6th Insurrection.
During that same NBC interview, Graham defended Trump’s decision to fire over a dozen Inspector Generals without providing them 30 days notice, as the law requires. Graham agreed that Trump broke the law, but only “technically.”
“I’m not losing a whole lot of sleep [over it],” he added.
How does one only “technically” break the law? And why does Graham remain unruffled about an actual case of law-breaking, but does not step up to defend his former friend Joe Biden against attacks on his family when there is no evidence of law-breaking connected to the former president?
Why not simply say, “The President can fire Inspectors General, but he must do so according to the law.”?
When does the law matter and when does it not? I have never thought of our jurisprudence as voluntary, to be applied only when convenient. Granted, I have broken the law myself many times: shoplifting, running red lights and various other vehicular infractions, but I have always done so with the full knowledge that getting caught would have consequences.
Moreover, I have always been aware that the powerful are able to game the system in ways that we mere mortals cannot. Naively, though, I guess I still clung to the belief that those we elect to serve the nation in our highest political offices would go out of their way to faithfully execute the laws of the country, you know, in accordance with their oath. And if they didn’t, if they abused the law, that they too would suffer consequences.
As a boy, the words “Richard Nixon” forever rang in my ears as a cautionary tale of what would happen to an American president who broke his oath. Of course, the lesson I should have learned was that Ford pardoned Nixon. That pardon, and all that has come since, should have negated whatever morality lesson I thought the Nixon tale contained. Trump obviously took the lesson. So, apparently, did Lindsey Graham.
As long as small men wish to be relevant, we will be saddled with the contemptible and the corrupt. There is no lie Trump can tell that men like Lindsey Graham will not fail to spin into gold. Not for money, not for fame. But simply to be, as Aaron Burr once rapped, in the room where it happens.
Maybe this is why people like you and me don’t run for office. It’s not that we don’t want to effect change. It’s that the compromises people have to make to win office in this country, and once won, to hold onto power, are so enormous that they have shrunk the souls of many better people than ourselves. Or, worse, the compromises so warp a person’s values that the politicians end up believing their own golden lies.
Such, I think, is the case with Lindsey Graham. The irony is that his quest for relevance will leave a man who could have been great as an historical afterthought. If he had stood on the ground of the principles he used to say he held, we could be hailing him as the man who stopped the man he once said would destroy his party. Now, he’s destroying the country.
But Lindsey gets to be in the room where it happens.
Which raises the important question – maybe the most important question of our political moment – what is the price of opposition versus the price of appeasement?
You and I know where we stand. No price is too high to oppose the morally indefensible. But that’s also why you and I will never be in a position to make things better from the inside. Our voices must always be raised because our whispers will never be heard. Maybe, for men like Graham, Rubio, and all the other Republicans who should know better, the cost of doing business is lower than the cost of being outside the room where it happens. The problem, though, is that the bargain-hunting doesn’t stop at their office doors. When the people most able to stand in the way instead play handmaiden to the birth of bad policy, it doesn’t just cheapen them. It cheapens the whole nation.
As someone who has done hard time, Graham's whole, "It's technically a crime, but I'm not losing sleep over it" is a garbage mentality. Lindsay Graham can piss up a rope, he's a spineless, gutless, scum-sucking sycophantic half-man. I'm being kind.
Fromtheyardtothearthouse.substack.com
I could never understand why a guy like Graham- a lonely closeted old gay white guy- has spent his entire political career licking the proverbial asses of bigoted, homophobic Republicans who would otherwise have him thrown in jail on the basis of his sexual orientation. What a pathetic example of self-loathing. His mommy and his daddy and his church must’ve fucked him up big time.