The Bulwark Podcast - Ep. 2: The Corruption of Lindsey Graham

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Within days of the 2016 election, Lindsey Graham began transforming into Trump's chief apologist—in an effort to influence him on national security and foreign policy. But to get Trump to stand up to tyrants overseas, the senator soon found himself willing to compromise on rule of law at home. The Bulwark Podcast presents The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, with Will Saletan. Read The Corruption of Lindsey Graham in PDF or Kindle formats at thebulwark.com/lindseygraham Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm in the book. Call me if you need me, Graham told Trump through the CNN camera. Nope, nope, nope. I'm sure he's very busy trying to put together his team and I'm in the book. Call me if you need me, but don't worry about Lindsey. I'll be here helping where I can. Sucking up to a new president was normal, but sucking up to this president would be very different. Already, Trump had indicated that he would make his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a power broker in the new government. That was the kind of thing kings and dictators did. But Graham, when he was asked about it, chose not to quibble.

I know people are concerned about the business dealings of the Trump family and how it relates to the presidency. That's all fair game, but when it comes to Mr. Kushner, I'm all for him being able to help President Trump in any fashion the president deems appropriate. Any fashion the president deems appropriate. Graham wasn't just endorsing Trump's arrangement with Kushner. He was signaling that Trump could do as he pleased.

This is The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, presented by The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Will Salahan. Lindsey Graham was entering the second stage of his relationship with Donald Trump. It's a relationship that many of Graham's critics regard as a complete sellout. They think Graham cast aside all his previous criticisms of Trump and became Trump's chief apologist for nothing. But that's not true. Graham actually had very strong beliefs,

and he fought for them intensely, including with Trump. The story of Lindsey Graham is not that a United States senator submitted to an authoritarian for nothing. The truth is much more disturbing. The real story is that a senator who did have a backbone and did care about important issues submitted to an authoritarian anyway. You don't have to be an empty suit to become part of this kind of evil. And that is what should truly worry all of us. What Graham cared about most of all was national security and foreign policy. And that particular interest gave Trump enormous leverage over him, because the president had almost total control of those issues. Graham was an internationalist, but Trump was an isolationist. Graham wanted to keep troops

in Syria. He wanted to support NATO and stand up to Russia. Persuading Trump on those issues would be a huge undertaking and a constant struggle. This was one of the most striking things I found when I looked closely at Graham's evolving relationship with Trump. In the moments when Graham was most fiercely defending Trump's abuse of power, he was simultaneously lobbying Trump to adopt, or at least not to abandon, aggressive foreign policies. At times, Graham all but admitted that he viewed this as a transaction. Here's Graham on Meet the Press, a year after Trump became president.

A lot of your friends have been asking me that, going, hey, ask the senator why he's suddenly cozying up to President Trump. What would you say to them? Because he's president of the United States, he's going to make a decision about immigration I've been working on for a decade. He's president of the United States, going to make a decision about North Korea, which is one of the biggest threats to the world at large. He's going to decide whether or not to stay in the Iranian agreement. Graham wanted the United States to stand up to tyrants overseas. And the bitter irony is that

to achieve that, he was willing to compromise the rule of law in our own country. There's also a second irony in this story, and it played an important role in Trump's consolidation of power. Graham was one of many Republican politicians who at first seemed too sensible to give in to Trump. But they did give in, because paradoxically, they fell for Trump's buffoonery. You may have heard it said in a cynical way that American democracy survived Trump's presidency because, unlike successful autocrats in other countries, he was too stupid and too self-absorbed to gain absolute power. That might be true, but Trump's stupidity was actually an asset in seducing leaders of his

party. Graham and many of his colleagues knew Trump was a brute, but they also knew he was an idiot. And that gave them a false sense of security. They thought he was too clumsy to endanger American democracy. The Republican bigwigs who visited the president-elect at Trump Tower after the 2016 election, and later paid their respects to him at the White House, they didn't think they were Trump's pawns. They thought they were manipulating him. And that illusion of control blinded them to way into what he called Trump's orbit. He flattered the incoming president and totally abased himself. Here's Graham on Fox News a week before Trump took office. I know I got 1%. Donald, you beat me like a drum. You're the president. I'm a senator. I want to help you. Let it go. Let's move on. And we're going to make America great again.

Backstage, Graham began to build a relationship with Kushner. By March, Graham was lunching with Trump, exchanging jokes and offering advice on Iran and North Korea. Soon their courtship moved on to dinners, long phone calls, and eventually golf. From Graham's point of view, the courtship was working. In foreign policy, Trump became more assertive. But domestically, it was a very different story. Trump was incorrigible. He refused to accept American intelligence findings that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf.

In fact, he claimed, falsely, that millions of people had voted against him illegally. He also falsely accused President Barack Obama of having wiretapped him in Trump Tower. He called the press the enemy of the people, and he reaffirmed his support for torture. Graham knew that all of this was wrong, but he didn't want to antagonize Trump. So he tried to ignore Trump's outrageous statements. When Graham was forced by the press to address those statements,

he pulled his punches. And he began to rationalize some of Trump's twisted ideas. He said the press really was acting like an opposition party. He said it was up to Trump whether to apologize to Obama for his false accusation about wiretapping. And Graham began to make his peace with one of Trump's most pernicious ideas, barring Muslim travelers from the United States. In December 2015, when Trump first proposed that idea, Graham denounced it. Then, in the summer of

2016, Trump modified his language to hide the bigotry. Instead of explicitly banning Muslims, the new version of the ban would apply to, quote, areas of the world where there's a proven history of terrorism. At that time in 2016, Graham wasn't fooled. Trump was still making explicitly anti-Muslim statements, so Graham held firm against the ban. But then Trump won the election. He became president, and he announced that he would implement essentially the same idea, a travel ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

And this time, Graham went along with the idea. He said it was okay because the ban also applied to Christians from those countries, ignoring the fact that Trump, while announcing the ban, had simultaneously promised to make it easier for Christians, not Muslims, to come to the United States. Graham said the courts should butt out and let the president do as he pleased. In fact, this does go to the Supreme Court? Most likely. I think the president has a lot of discretion, as he or she should,

when it comes to entry into the country regarding national security. The whole idea of the Ninth Circuit would second-guess his national security judgment is a non-starter, and I don't think... That was in February. Three months later, on May 9th, Trump crossed another red line. He fired FBI Director James Comey. Trump's firing of Comey was technically legal, but it was also authoritarian.

The FBI had been investigating relationships between the Russian government and the 2016 Trump campaign. Trump had just fired the man in charge of that investigation. It was the kind of thing that happened all the time in authoritarian countries. Now it was happening in the United States. The president was shielding himself from legal accountability. He was directly attacking the rule of law. At first, Trump pretended that the firing had nothing to do with the Russia investigation. He tried to blame it on a recommendation from the Justice Department.

But it turned out that Trump had orchestrated the recommendation as a cover story. On May 11, in an interview with NBC News, Trump blurted out the truth. He made a recommendation. But regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey, knowing there was no good time to do it.

And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election. A few days after that interview, the New York Times revealed that Trump had been trying to corrupt Comey for months and that Comey had documented Trump's pressure security advisor, for lying to the FBI about back-channel phone calls with Russia's ambassador to the United States, in which they talked about lifting American sanctions on Russia. Graham knew all of this was corrupt. If you go back and watch his interviews during this time, you'll see him basically acknowledging that Trump had done everything he was accused of. But by this point, Graham was invested in Trump.

In foreign policy, Graham was getting exactly what he wanted. He didn't want to lose that. So he looked for a way to defend the president. And for Graham, there was an obvious way to help. When he was younger, Graham had worked as a defense attorney in the president. And for Graham, there was an obvious way to help. When he was younger, Graham had worked as a defense attorney in the military. So basically he became, in effect, one of Trump's lawyers. Here's Graham in an interview with CBS News on June 8th, a month after Trump fired Comey. Senator, is it okay for the President of the United States to invite the FBI director for a private dinner, ask him does he want his job, and then say to him,

I need your loyalty? Is that okay to do? No, no, half of what Trump does is not okay. If you're trying to convict him for being a bull in a china shop, crude and rude, you'd win. I mean, you know, no. This is Donald Trump. Doesn't that trouble you? Doesn't that

trouble you? A lot of the stuff troubles me, but it's not a crime. Yeah, the question is not a crime. That was Graham's main talking point. It's not a crime. And this, by the way, was a complete departure from the way Graham had talked about Trump a year or two earlier. In 2015, Graham had focused correctly on Trump's character. He had explained that Trump was fundamentally depraved, and this was really important because Trump's depravity was what drove him to heinous ideas like torture and banning Muslims. But now that Graham was trying to protect Trump and keep him in office, Graham abandoned that focus on character. Instead, he focused on each particular thing Trump had said or done. And he asked only one question. Could these acts by the president

be construed as technically legal? Here's Graham on June 15th, 2017. He's talking to Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio about Trump's pressure on Comey to drop the FBI investigation of Flynn. Kilmeade starts this part of the conversation talking about whether Trump applied similar pressure to other government officials. And they're going to ask him if the president did pull them aside and say, listen, he's

up on the Russian probe. There's nothing there. Well, you know, fine. Ask him, you know, what did he try to influence anyway? The bottom line here is I think the whole thing with Comey and the president was about Mike Flynn. He didn't say stop the Russian investigation. He said, you know, could you go easy on Mike Flynn?

The guy just got fired. And the president likes Mike Flynn. You know, it's inappropriate for him to do that. But there's no belief in my mind he was trying to stop an investigation illegally. I mean, you know, he could fire anybody he wants to fire for any reason. Listen to how hard Graham is straining to excuse Trump. Trump had literally asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn's conversations with the Russians. And what does Graham say about that?

He says Trump wasn't, quote, trying to stop the investigation illegally. The obvious corruption of what Trump did doesn't matter to Graham. The only thing that matters to him is the strict letter of the law. And did you catch that part at the end where Graham says Trump could fire anybody he wants to for any reason? That's the beginning of what would become, over time, Graham's all-out embrace of authoritarianism. One of the things that happens when a political party starts to become authoritarian, or when a whole country starts to become authoritarian, is a rewriting of history. A lot of people who used to be willing to speak the truth about the emerging autocrat before he came to power aren't willing to do that anymore.

They want to erase, or at least clean up, the bad things they used to say about him. And a lot of politicians who previously drew lines of principle and said they would never cross those lines, or said the authoritarian would never cross those lines, they have to adjust their promises when the authoritarian does cross those lines. To borrow a term from sports, what these politicians start to do is move the goalposts. When Donald Trump fired Jim Comey and Lindsey Graham decided to defend Trump anyway, Graham started to move a lot of goalposts. The first thing Graham did was completely rewrite his portrayal of Comey.

Comey certainly had flaws, but anyone who knew him knew that he was almost unfailingly honest. And Graham used to acknowledge that. But as soon as Trump fired Comey, and Graham found out that Comey had written memos about Trump's efforts to corrupt him, Graham turned against Comey and portrayed him as a bitter, lying, partisan hack. That's what you do when you're covering for an authoritarian. Anyone who stands up to the president and tries to expose his crimes has to be attacked and destroyed.

Graham also had a personal standard that he had articulated for the FBI's Russia investigation. Here's how he put it in March of 2017, two months before Comey was fired. We should make sure the FBI, if they are investigating Trump-Russia ties, and I don't have any evidence of them, should be able to do it without hesitation or fear. Without hesitation or fear. Once Comey's memos became public, it was clear that Trump had crossed that line. He had pressured Comey for personal loyalty. He had asked him to drop part of the FBI's investigation. And then, when Comey ignored him

and continued the investigation, Trump had fired the guy. It was obvious that Trump was trying to instill hesitation and fear. So, Graham dropped that standard. He said it was fine that Trump had fired Comey because, technically, Graham pointed out, firing one man wouldn't necessarily stop the investigation. Graham also changed his position on Flynn's phone calls with the Russian ambassador. Originally, Graham had said it was wrong for Flynn to talk to the ambassador about lifting sanctions on Russia, because that message undercut the sanctions,

and it basically rewarded Russia for interfering in our election to install a president who was friendly to Russia. But after it came out that Trump had tried to pressure Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn, Graham changed his tune. He said it was fine for Flynn to talk to the Russians about lifting the sanctions. One of the trickiest things Graham had to rewrite was his definition of collusion. All along, he had said there was no evidence of Trump or the Trump campaign colluding with the Russians.

But then, on July 8, 2017, the New York Times revealed what became known as the Trump Tower meeting. It had taken place on June 9, 2016, in the middle of the presidential campaign. In that meeting, three top officials in Trump's campaign, his son Don Jr., his son-in-law Kushner, and his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, had sat down with a Russian lawyer who was closely connected to the Kremlin. In an email chain to set up the meeting, an intermediary who was working with the Russian side had offered, quote, to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary as, quote,

part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump, unquote. Those were the exact words in the email. And in reply, Don Jr. had written, quote, if it's what you say, I love it. This was open and shut collusion. And Trump had tried to cover it up. On July 31st, 2017, the Washington Post reported that the president, in an attempt to play down the meeting, had personally dictated a misleading public statement that concealed the Russian offer. So what did Graham do when he realized that the Trump campaign had tried to collude with the Russians and that Trump had tried to cover it up, he changed his definition of collusion.

He said it wasn't really collusion unless it directly involved, quote, Russian intelligence services. And he dismissed the Russian emissaries who had come to Trump Tower as, quote, these kind of weird Russians. But the interaction in Trump Tower with these kind of weird Russians, you know, talking about, yeah, quote, these kind of weird Russians. But the interaction in Trump Tower with these kind of weird Russians, you know, talking about, yeah, great, summer would be

better. I haven't seen anything come from that. But here's what I have seen. I've seen absolutely no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign, any Russian intelligence service. I have seen... Let's be honest. Lindsey Graham was never going to admit that anyone in the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians, no matter what happened, up to and including an email from Don Jr. accepting an offer literally on behalf of the Russian government and its support for Mr. Trump. Graham was going to find some way to move the goalposts, and Graham was never going to admit that he was doing this. Part of moving your goalposts to serve an authoritarian is that you erase the old goalposts. You pretend they were never there. The biggest thing Lindsey Graham had to erase when he decided to become Donald Trump's best buddy

was all the bad things he had said about Trump in 2015 and early 2016. Remember, in those days, Graham hadn't just criticized Trump's behavior or Trump's ideas. He had indicted the man's character. He had explained why Trump was fundamentally dangerous. Now that Graham was trying to charm, appease, and protect Trump, that indictment was an embarrassment. Graham needed to make it go away. Graham couldn't exactly erase his words, but there was another way to expunge them. He could argue that voters, by electing Trump, had rejected and discredited Graham's criticisms of Trump. In other words, the authoritarian, Trump, had been cleansed by democracy itself. Graham had begun to form this idea in 2016.

Now he fully embraced it. At a Senate hearing on March 20, 2017, two weeks after his first lunch with the president, Graham joked that if he had known Trump was going to be president, he never would have criticized him. And if you believe this has been a great plan to get a Trump nominee under court, then you had to believe Trump was going to win to begin with. I didn't believe that. Obviously, I didn't believe that, saying all the things I said. Followed closely by Ben.

But apparently, what I said didn't matter, and that's okay with me. The American people chose Donald Trump, and here's what I can say about him. That's a United States senator declaring, and happily accepting, that what he had said about Trump in 2015 and 2016 didn't matter. Here's Graham several months later, in December 2017, disowning his most famous line about Trump. Yeah, I said everything. I said he was a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot. I ran out of adjectives. Well, the American people spoke. They rejected my analysis, and he is now my president. I worked with President Obama. A race-baiting religious bigot.

Graham had been absolutely right about Trump. And now, two years later, Graham was renouncing all of that. He was writing it off as just a bunch of adjectives thrown out during a political campaign. But Graham couldn't change the fact that this was who Trump was. Toward the end of 2017, nearly a year into his presidency, Trump was still talking and acting like a race-baiting religious bigot. He was retweeting anti-Muslim videos. He was still disputing President Obama's birth certificate.

But now, when Graham was asked on CNN about this ongoing behavior, he blamed the media. There are these multiple reports coming out about what he is talking about in private again, about the Access Hollywood tape, and about the debunked conspiracy about where President Obama's birthplace, the fact that he's going back there right now in the midst of everything you and I have discussed, does that concern you at this point? You know, what concerns me about the American press is this endless,

endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook, not fit to be president. He did win, by the way. You know what's crazy about that answer from Graham? The words he used there, kook, not fit to be president, those were Graham's own words. Those were the words he had used in early 2016, describing Trump. Here's the audio from Fox News. I'm not going to try to get into the mind of

Donald Trump because I don't think there's a whole lot of space there. I think he's a kook. I think he's crazy. I think he's unfit for office. That's how fully Lindsey Graham had transformed himself in just a year and a half. He no longer recognized his own words. Coming up next time on The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, Senate Republicans realize they're no longer just humoring Trump. They're afraid of him. And Graham completely surrenders. Here's what I told the president. If you feel good doing it, do it. The corruption of Lindsey Graham was reported and written by me, Will Salatin. Katie Cooper is the producer, with audio engineering, editing, and sound design by Jason Brown.

Thank you to my editors, Jonathan V. Last and Adam Kuyper, and to Charlie Sykes.