Pegging Lindsey

Over the course of his three terms representing South Carolina in the Senate, Graham had become predominantly known for two things: extreme hawkishness on foreign policy, following the lead of his close friend and mentor, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, and a bipartisan streak that resulted in high-profile attempts to cut big deals on issues like immigration reform and climate change. A former senior staffer for a Democratic senator who has worked alongside Graham on bipartisan legislation tells me, “Like John McCain, he was a conservative Republican, but it was always worth asking where he was going to be on a particular issue, because he wasn’t completely beholden to party orthodoxy.

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“You’re going to find Lindsey knows a lot of people, but he’s not close to anybody,” [says David Woodard, a political-science professor at Clemson University who ran Graham’s first two campaigns].

Like much of the GOP establishment, Graham had opposed Trump during the 2015 primary, but he spoke out more forcefully than most, and in the general election, he wrote in third-party candidate Evan McMullin. Which has made his subsequent capitulation all the more breathtaking.

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Shortly after Graham’s office requested documents pertaining to the Biden investigation, a 2016 video surfaced in which Graham paid heartfelt tribute to the former vice president, calling him “as good a man as God ever created” and saying, “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person . . . you need to do some self-evaluation.” [...] By that point, though, Graham’s debasement had been so thoroughly realized, the hypocrisy on display barely made an impact.

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Graham, a former trial lawyer, became one of the House managers during Clinton’s Senate trial — essentially, a prosecutor tasked with making the case to the Senators as to why the president should be removed from office. A boyish 43-year-old in an ill-fitting suit, he deployed his mellifluous Southern accent as cannily as the man whose election he was trying to undo. “What’s a high crime?” he asked the chamber. “How about if an important person hurts somebody of low means? It’s not very scholarly, but I think it’s the truth. . . .  It dudn’t even have to be a crime!” Deploying that “dudn’t,” especially, was pure Clinton, and watching the old clip now, Graham looks like he’s auditioning for a regional theater production of Matlock.

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On the House floor, Graham had said that if the Clinton impeachment ended up being “about an extramarital affair with an intern, and that’s it, I will not vote to impeach this president no matter if 82 percent of the people back home want me to, because we will destroy this country.”

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Steve Schmidt, who ran McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, where Graham was a constant presence on the trail, tells me, “We see more examples of this in film and literature, but there are instances of principled men and women laying down their careers in service of what is right. Clearly, that person will never be Lindsey Graham."

  Rolling Stone

Clearly.

"With regard to the cruelty and abuse that was directed at John McCain by Trump, I think Lindsey’s flaccidity in defending him says a lot about his character. Nobody wants to be in a bar fight when they go out on Friday night. But when someone walks up and punches your best friend in the face, you’ve got to do something. Lindsey has demonstrated he’s the guy who runs out the door.”

Probably because he wasn't really a friend to John McCain, any more than he's a friend to Joe Biden.

Graham’s former law partner in South Carolina, Larry Brandt, spoke with comparable bluntness. [...] In 1989, after leaving the service, Graham joined Brandt’s firm, and they remain friends. “Lindsey always told me he wanted to be a politician,” Brandt says, describing his former protégé as a tremendous trial lawyer. “Lindsey comes from common people, and being the plaintiff’s lawyer, he was for the little guy.”

Brandt has voted for Republicans and Democrats, but he loathes Donald Trump, “that 4-F sonofabitch.” Nodding toward the window of the conference room where we’re sitting, he says, “My flag’s at half mast, and it ain’t going up until Trump’s gone.” Over the years, Brandt says he’s always stuck up for Graham back home, where his willingness to compromise has often left him unpopular with constituents, viewed with suspicion as a RINO (Republican in Name Only). But Brandt’s been dismayed by Graham’s shifting stance on the president. “He’s laughed with me and said Trump’s just like a little boy,” Brandt says. “He will agree with me when I say shit about Trump, when it’s me and him in here.” They last spoke over the summer, when Graham called to see if Brandt wanted to get dinner. Brandt was vacationing in Texas, but he told Graham, “I want to talk to you about some things, and I’m gonna tell you now, I’m not with you on a bunch of your issues.” They made plans to meet when Graham was back in August, but Brandt never heard from him.

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One day, before Trump was elected, Graham visited Brandt at his office. [...] “He said, ‘Eighty-five percent of the people in Washington, elected officials and bureaucrats, would sell their mothers to keep their jobs.’ That’s a direct quote.” Two Christmases ago, Brandt ran into Graham at a restaurant in Seneca and reminded him of what he’d said. “He, of course, made a joke out of it,” Brandt says. “But Lindsey, in my opinion, has sold his mother to keep his job.”

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The building where Graham grew up still stands at 217 Main St. in Central, South Carolina [...] . I say “building” and not “house” because it’s not a house, but the last in a row of low brick storefronts, mostly empty today, running alongside a set of train tracks. [...] Graham’s father, F.J., owned a bar called the Sanitary Cafe. The family lived in back, crowded into a single room, using the same restroom as the customers and a metal wash basin, with water heated on the stove, for bathing. Woodard, Graham’s former campaign consultant, who also worked on races for Trey Gowdy and Jim DeMint, tells me that when Graham’s relatives stopped by campaign headquarters, “It was like, have you seen the movie Deliverance?”

Graham helped run the family liquor store (the Sanitary Cafe having been sold) after both of his parents died in quick succession while he was still in college in the 1970s. One of the more revealing passages in Graham’s anodyne 2015 campaign autobiography, My Story, comes when he discovers his aptitude for trials in law school. “Conducting a trial,” he writes, “is like staging a play, and you’re the writer, director, and principal actor. I was born to do it.” [...] Filtered through this lens, Graham’s talent for sophistry in the defense of Trump makes a kind of sense, purely on the level of craft. Politics, like commanding attention in a courtroom, is performance.

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There’s little disagreement about what has been Graham’s pivotal performance of the Trump era: the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, when Graham startled spectators with an uncharacteristic, snarling eruption at his Democratic colleagues (complete with the sort of dramatic business described by Graham in his book, including literal finger-wagging and a climactic shuffling of papers).

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Sincere or not, the moment had its desired effect. Trump loved the show, and Graham received credit for turning the tide of the hearing in Republicans’ favor.

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Will Folks, the political blogger in South Carolina, describes Graham’s Kavanaugh defense as both “all playacting” and “the crowning moment of his latest ideological reorientation.” Prior to the hearing, Folks tells me, “not only do I think Graham would have had a serious primary challenger, but he would have lost. I wrote an article in 2017 called ‘Dead Senator Walking.’ The polling was that bad. They would not piss on him if he was on fire, as the expression goes down here. There was a visceral hatred for the man.”

Which has now transferred to the rest of us.

And Graham understood, more than ever, what his political survival depended upon. Though he ultimately answered to the voters back home, he served at the pleasure of the president.

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"He’s not an intellectual or an ideologue, he’s not going to write a book on the conservative mantle. But he will have a sense of when the tide is changing before anyone else in the room. He can read people — voters, but also colleagues — better than almost anyone I’ve seen.”

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[A] Post article [...] described Graham’s Air Force tour as “terrific fun for a young bachelor swinging his way through Paris and Rome.” Graham himself, jokingly declining to discuss his “exploits,” added, “I was very heterosexual, that’s all you need to know.”

And the reason he needed people to know that is because he has been routinely rumored to be gay.

Graham’s lifelong bachelorhood has been a subject of unsubstantiated speculation, and homophobic baiting, for years. During the Clinton impeachment, anonymous callers left messages at his office threatening to out him. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did an impression of Graham as a mincing Scarlett O’Hara. In 2002, when Graham decided to run for Senate — the arch segregationist Strom Thurmond finally announced his retirement at age 99 — Dick Harpootlian, the chair of the state Democratic Party, said Graham was a little too “light in the loafers” to fill Thurmond’s shoes. “I know it’s really gonna upset a lot of gay men . . . but I ain’t available. I ain’t gay. Sorry,” Graham told The New York Times Magazine in 2010.

The rumors are only relevant insofar as Graham’s record on gay rights, which, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ civil-rights organization, has been largely atrocious.

Not atypical of gay politicians who haven't come out of the closet.

Woodard points out that Thurmond had an illegitimate black daughter he’d kept secret until his death. “There’s always this feeling that what you see in a South Carolina politician is not what you get, that there’s something in the closet,” he says. But Woodard doesn’t believe Graham is gay. “I kept his daily schedule, and if I wasn’t with him, I knew who was,” Woodard says.

Doesn't mean he's not gay, no matter who he was with, but really, the only reason it could possibly matter is if he's voting to keep the LGBTQ community oppressed.

Part of Graham’s skill at consensus building came down to his personal charm. “Everyone likes having him around,” Schmidt acknowledges. “He’s a genuinely funny guy.” After Trump’s election, according to Bob Woodward’s Fear, then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus urged Graham to broach a rapport with the new president, telling him, “You’re a lot of fun. He needs fun people around him.”

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[Graham subsequently told Trump,] “You’re a dealmaker. These leaders in Congress don’t know how to do something as simple as buying a house. . . .  There are not five people on Capitol Hill I’d let buy me a car. I’d let you buy me a car.”

Perhaps early on, Graham thought he could work Trump with flattery. The new president must have certainly made a tempting target for anyone skilled at manipulation. If you could stomach sucking up to the guy, ignore all but the very worst of his racism, bullying, and vulgarity, and then whisper your own policy preferences in his ear, details of which he would have zero interest in, other than how they might represent a “win” for him — well, maybe his cult of personality could be used to advance sensible conservative goals. That would be the charitable reading of what I’ll call the Paul Ryan Approach, an approach Graham, who’d ] never stopped hammering Trump during the campaign, quickly adopted. [...] Graham also told [Steve[Bannon “that America First is bullshit. This is all bullshit.”

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“When Senator Graham really began courting the president — golfing all the time with him, saying flattering things on cable news — it felt like he wanted to be the attorney general, or there was some other play there,” the Democratic Senate staffer says. “Initially we thought, ‘Well, if he ingratiates himself to the president, it helps us on immigration.’ Then there was a turn. He got much Trumpier. He became a blind defender of the president’s policies, no matter what, his fingers in his ears, ‘I’m not interested in the facts, just here to support the president.’ Which is where he is today."

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[Graham's] likely general-election opponent next year, Jaime Harrison, is a charismatic former chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party. I met Harrison as he was making a campaign appearance in Rock Hill, handing out meals at a mobile food bank. Graham, Harrison tells me, “has not had a town hall in South Carolina in well over two years. But you can find him on Fox News or golfing with the president every other day. That’s not helping the people here.” Pointing to a Graham quote about wanting to be “relevant,” Harrison says, “Relevance for him is that news reporters gaggle around him when he’s walking down the corridors; it’s going on Sean Hannity or flying on Air Force One. Relevance for the people of South Carolina is none of that.”

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When I ask Woodard what motivates Graham to stay in politics after all these years, he says, “I’ve thought about that,” and pauses before continuing. “He’s alone. It’s not like he has a family, a child. His time, when he’s away from the spotlight, I think is a lonely time. He’s more comfortable in the spotlight where he’s Senator Lindsey Graham, talking about things he knows a lot about. I thought he wouldn’t run in 2020. And then he did the Kavanaugh thing, and he’s the Trump buddy. If Trump wins a second term, he might wind up in the Cabinet, maybe Secretary of Defense?"

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“People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now,” Schmidt says. “The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.