Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham has been part of my personal political consciousness since he served as one of the House managers in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. I remember his portion of the prosecution’s presentation more clearly than anyone else’s, not because it was the most legalistic or the most rationally persuasive of the cases for removing Clinton from office, but because it was, in its tone at least, the most relatable common sense argument for upholding standards of deference to truth in leadership which, if shrugged off in that case, he urged, would establish moral precedents for an American future that Graham and, as he posited, every responsible American, would dread to see. It was a realist’s plea: not a moral purity argument or a tiresome bout of “Well, I never!” performative indignation, but a simple plea for trying to maintain some basic expectations of “buck stops here” accountability in government. In short, he argued for the imperative of keeping the United States presidency a realm exclusive to mature adults. 

It is interesting, in the “living in interesting times” sense of interesting, to note that precisely the national calamity of normalized immaturity in government that Graham insisted Bill Clinton’s acquittal would foster did indeed come to pass, at a depth that the Graham of 1999 could not have foreseen; that the post-Clinton president who has realized the full dark promise of this disaster is Donald Trump; that Trump himself has loudly and often touted Clinton as his personal favorite president, and is certainly the one with whom he has had the closest personal relationship; and that Lindsey Graham himself, who back in 2016 loudly warned that Trump’s election would spell catastrophe for America, only to sell out all his oft-stated “principles” by joining Trump’s boot-licking squad in 2017, and then rejecting him after the Trump-incited mob assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, only to turn around and grovel at Trump’s feet yet again when Trump became the easiest path to power once more…put simply, it is interesting that Lindsey Graham transformed himself from the man who warned of an American future devoid of adult rectitude and moral responsibility in the White House, to the old establishment Republican most enthusiastically willing to debase himself publicly for a seat at the table next to the embodiment of that infantile future.

During the aftermath of the 2016 election, when Trump’s firmest rivals and critics were falling like dominoes under the alluring stench of the power lust that defines their lives, I nominated Ted Cruz as the most ignominiously compromised of all, and specifically the most emasculated of all the emasculated sell-outs of those days. For above and beyond all the personal offense of the Trump smear campaign against Cruz during the primaries, there was that infamous moment, that bridge too far, in which Trump attacked Mrs. Cruz’ appearance, posting side-by-side pictures of Melania Trump posing for the camera in one of her whorish modelling photos and Heidi Cruz in an ill-timed candid photograph looking her worst and least photogenic. For Cruz to kneel and kiss the ring of the man who had publicly and unapologetically humiliated his wife just a few months earlier was, for me, the last nail in his coffin as a statesman and a human being, an absolute flip in loyalty from the mother of his children to the man who had maliciously mocked her in front of the world.

Lindsey Graham, with his embarrassingly obsequious fawning over Trump, particularly during this second term — which is to say post-treasonous attack on the constitutional transfer of power, post-sexual assault judgment, post-Epstein files, post-ICE murders, post-summary executions of anonymous foreigners at sea, post-tariff debacle, post-Greenland threats and anti-NATO hostility and pro-Putin agency and public browbeating of Zelensky and on and on and on — has essentially done to his longtime friend John McCain (the loser who got captured, as Trump would have it) what Ted Cruz did to Heidi Cruz. That, at the end of the day, is the measure of the man.

Perhaps Graham thought he was going to get something from all of this beyond the immediate material gains. Whatever that might have been, he did not get it. Instead, he died suddenly in the middle of sucking up pathetically to the worst and most destructive president in U.S. history. That was his final and defining act. The lesson: Never wear the suit you wouldn’t be caught dead in, because you will, inevitably, be caught dead in something.