The Bulwark Podcast - Ep. 3: The Corruption of Lindsey Graham

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

After Trump's first year in office, the power shifted in Washington. Republicans went from humoring Trump to fearing him. Lindsey Graham surrendered to Trump, and began demonizing anyone who posed a threat to him. The Bulwark Podcast presents The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, with Will Saletan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On January 11th, 2018, President Donald Trump erupted during a White House meeting on immigration. Trump was angry about proposals to let in more people from Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa. Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here, the president demanded. Republican senators in the room were taken aback. Afterward, when they were asked about Trump's outburst, some of them denied they had heard it. One Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, had actually spoken up against the president's ethnic slur during the meeting. But afterward, Graham refused to tell the press what Trump had said.

Can you tell me what happened in that meeting, in your own words? No, I can tell you this. Why not? Because I want to make sure that I can keep talking to the president. Trump's eruption in that meeting and the scramble by Republicans to cover it up reflected a shift of power in Washington. In Trump's first year as president, congressional Republicans had chosen to excuse and protect him. They thought they were deciding how far to let him go. But by Trump's second year, the dynamic had changed.

Republicans in Congress were no longer humoring Trump. They were afraid of him. This is The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, presented by The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Will Salatin. One reason why authoritarians tend to gain strength, even in some democratic countries, is sheer determination. The authoritarian's will to accumulate power is stronger than the will of his opponents to stop him. Over time, that imbalance grinds down his adversaries and his allies. The aggressor advances, and the compromisers retreat. Graham had seen this happen in other countries. Now it was happening in his country, and he was part of it.

Graham understood that, in theory, Congress was supposed to check the president. In 2016, when Trump and Hillary Clinton were competing for the White House, Graham had talked about the importance of applying what he called congressional breaks to their bad ideas. And early in 2017, during the confirmation debate over Jeff Sessions, Trump's nominee for attorney general, Graham had assured Democrats that Senate Republicans would stand up to Trump. This body is adrift. The country is really divided.

I hope that once this confirmation process is over, that we can get back to doing the business of the American people. And to the extent that Donald Trump becomes the problem, we will push back. It didn't turn out that way. In his first year in power, Trump pushed harder than Congress did. As he crossed one line after another, banning travel from several Muslim countries, firing FBI Director James Comey, pardoning former Sheriff Joe Arpaio and anti-immigrant scofflaw, Republicans in Congress gave way.

Trump gunned the accelerator, and the brakes wore down. Like many other Republicans, Graham liked having a forceful president. He knew that in foreign policy, this was an asset. Here's what Graham told Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017, when Assad was using an airbase in defiance of the United States. And I think he's making a serious mistake, because if you're an adversary of the United States. And I think he's making a serious mistake because if you're an adversary of the United States and you don't worry about what Trump may do on any given day, then you're crazy. A year later, when Trump threatened to rain down fire and fury on North Korea,

Graham declared that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, had, quote, put himself in the crosshairs of Donald Trump. Graham warned Kim, if you play Trump, that's the end of you. But the thing about autocrats and aspiring autocrats, men like Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, and I'm sorry to say Donald Trump, is that they don't just threaten other countries. They threaten their own people. Graham had actually made this point inadvertently when Trump hit China with tariffs in 2018. At a Republican county meeting in South Carolina,

Graham said he had warned China's ambassador to the United States that Trump might punish China the way Trump often punished his domestic opponents. The Chinese ambassador was in my office last week and I have a photo of you know that guy standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square that's what he was looking at so I wanted to let him know where he was at. Nice fella. He said, what's Trump up to? He says, I don't know if I were y'all, I'd work with him or else. So he's got his way of doing business, and it's actually working. I'm telling you, you're playing with the wrong guy with Trump.

I'm telling everybody that will listen, tell the Chinese dude, do not get on the wrong side of this guy. I've been there. Don't do it. Don't do it. Graham thought that was a pretty good story. He meant it as a warning to China. Unfortunately, he didn't recognize it as a warning to America. Why do political elites miss these warning signs? Why do they align themselves, often fatally, with rising authoritarians?

One reason is they think they're special. They think they can protect themselves and manage the authoritarian by building personal relationships with him. They tell themselves he's really a good guy. They tell themselves he's really a good guy. They tell themselves he's their friend. After that explosive meeting on immigration in January 2018, Graham insisted that the president who had behaved badly that day, which happened to be a Thursday, wasn't the real Trump. The real Trump, according to Graham, was what the senator called Tuesday Trump. That was a reference to another White House meeting on immigration, a much friendlier meeting, that Trump had presided over two days earlier.

At the Tuesday meeting, which was conducted in front of C-SPAN cameras, Trump had been on his best behavior. The challenge for Graham was to explain Thursday Trump, the president who had ranted about Africans and Latin Americans, at the second of the two immigration meetings. On CNN, correspondent Dana Bash asked Graham directly whether Trump, in that Thursday meeting, had referred to shithole countries. And Graham gave her a very interesting answer. But he did call those countries shithole countries. You can confirm that. You can keep asking me all day long, and I'm going to tell you the same thing.

Why don't you ask me, is he a racist? That was my next question. Okay, why don't you ask me? Do you think that he is a racist? Absolutely not. Let me tell you what. You could be dark as charcoal and lily white. It doesn't matter as long as you're nice to him. You could be the pope and criticize him. It doesn't matter.

He'll go after the pope. You could be Putin and say nice things, and he'll like you. Here's what I found. He's a street fighter. It's not the color of your skin that matters. It's not the content of your character. It's whether or not you show him respect and like him. And if he feels like you're off script, you don't like him, he punches back. What's interesting about this answer is that Graham was trying to deny a specific accusation against Trump, namely that the president was a racist. But Graham's explanation essentially

acknowledged a much larger pathology. Trump had no principles at all. In Trump's mind, said Graham, it didn't matter whether you were good or evil, whether you were Putin or the Pope. Martin Luther King said you should be judged by the content of your character. But to Donald Trump, character didn't matter. The only thing Trump cared about, according to Graham, was loyalty to Trump. Graham was describing a man completely devoid of morals, a man who cared about nothing but himself. And not just that. The senator was describing a man who would attack anyone who got in his way. In Graham's own words, a street fighter who would punch back and go after anyone who criticized him, including the Pope.

In short, Trump was a ruthless, aggressive, vindictive narcissist. And Graham, incredibly, was presenting that as a defense of the president. How did Graham justify his loyalty to such a dangerous man? How did he explain not just fearing Trump, but admiring him? Part of the answer was self-delusion. In the months after the two immigration meetings, Graham often referred back to Tuesday Trump. He continued to insist that this genial version of Trump was the real thing and that the nastier version, Thursday Trump, was just an aberration. Here's Graham peddling that delusion in an interview with WLTX, a South Carolina TV station. He sounds almost like an abused wife,

clinging to the idea that her husband, in his best moments, is really a good man. The Tuesday Trump was awesome. We're going to do it with security and compassion. The only thing I can tell you is that President Trump's instincts on this issue are good. The president that was on TV Tuesday is the guy I played golf with. He was charming. He was funny. He understood the issues.

He talked to Democrats and Republicans and said, let's see if we can get this done. That's the guy I know, and I hope he comes back. This whole theory about Tuesday Trump made no sense. The Tuesday meeting was the one recorded for TV. It was a lot more plausible that the real Trump was the one who had erupted on Thursday when the cameras were off. But Graham wanted to believe that he could bring out Trump's better nature. As Graham mentioned in that interview with WLTX, he had seen a happier side of Trump on the golf course.

Graham told himself that Trump just needed love, and Graham hoped that by lavishing praise on Tuesday Trump, he could coax the president to behave nicely. That idea was, at best, naive. Golf was exactly the wrong place to evaluate Trump's character. Only the president's friends or sycophants were allowed to play golf with him. On the golf course, Trump was happy because nobody got in his way. In a constitutional democracy, people do get in the president's way. They got in Trump's way, and that infuriated him.

Trump needed more than love. He needed compliance. Sooner or later, if you tried to appease Trump, you would have to choose between him and the rule of law. An authoritarian cares more about power than anything else. So eventually, to stay on his good side, you have to grant him that power. That was the lesson of what Trump had done in 2017 when he tried to derail the Russia investigation by coercing and then firing Comey. First comes the intimate dinner and the request for loyalty. Then comes the request to drop an investigation, exonerate the president, or look the other way. Either you draw a line or you betray your country. Comey chose his country, but Graham didn't. And the

sad thing is, Graham thought he was just making a one-time concession. He thought he was still the same man, but he wasn't. The act of concession changes you. You don't just learn how to bend. You also learn how to tell yourself that you never really bent. Over the next three years, Lindsey Graham would contort himself to defend and excuse Donald Trump again and again and again. On January 25, 2018, just a few days after Graham helped cover up Trump's outburst at the immigration meeting, the New York Times revealed that Trump's efforts to sabotage the Russia investigation had not ended with firing Comey. In June 2017, the president had ordered the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel in charge of the Russia investigation. Trump had eventually relented, but only after McGahn said he would resign rather than carry out the order.

The McGahn episode showed that Trump had persisted in his attempts to obstruct justice, and that he was still lying about it. It confirmed what Graham had said in 2015. Trump was incorrigibly corrupt. But by 2018, Graham had learned how to navigate the corruption. He had defended Trump's firing of Comey, so he could, and would, defend Trump's attempt to fire Mueller. Here's Graham on January 28, 2018, talking to Martha Raddatz on ABC News about the McGahn episode and about Trump's repeated attempts to sabotage the Russia investigation.

I think every president wants to get rid of critics. I have seen no evidence of collusion, so the president's frustrated, no doubt about that. But he did not fire Mr. Mueller. If the report is true, Mr. McGahn did the right thing, and to the president's credit, he listened. I just want to go back to President Trump and Mueller for a moment. The Washington Post reports that a person familiar with the Mueller investigation says they are focusing on a pattern of behavior that President Trump

tried to prevent Attorney General Sessions from recusing himself from the Russia investigation, asked Comey to drop the Flynn investigation before firing him and dictated that misleading statement about Don Jr.'s Trump Tower meeting. Are you seeing a pattern of behavior that's concerning to you? Well, I don't know. I don't know how accurate all this is. The bottom line is that you got a frustrated president. He could have fired Comey for any reason under the sun, except for a corrupt purpose. Was there a corrupt purpose in firing Comey? I don't know. In terms of what he did with the statement, I wasn't on Air Force One. Graham had endless excuses.

I wasn't there. I don't know. Everybody does it. Trump is just frustrated. Trump didn't end up firing Mueller. And Graham told Raddatz that just in case things got out of hand, he and other senators had signed on to a bill that would protect Mueller from being fired. But as it turned out, that bill never passed. It never even came up for a vote. And the failure of that bill is important because it exposed a weakness in the American

constitutional system. Checks and balances don't work if one branch is unwilling to confront the other. Anyone who thought that Trump would stop after he fired Comey, or after he tried to fire Mueller, was sadly mistaken. In April 2018, the Times reported that in December, six months after his first attempt to fire Mueller, Trump had, quote, told advisers in no uncertain terms that Mr. Mueller's investigation had to be shut down. So this was the third time Trump was known to have fired or attempted to fire the person in charge of the Russia investigation. And according to people who worked with Trump, the president was thinking about trying again. Graham, as promised, had signed on to a bill to protect Mueller. But there was a catch. Several of Graham's

Republican colleagues in the Senate worried that the bill would antagonize Trump. One senator warned that telling Trump what he couldn't do would be, quote, poking the bear. Another senator fretted about, quote, picking an unnecessary fight with the president. Graham was worried, too. Years later, he confided that in a private conversation with Trump, the president had gone, quote, apeshit over the bill. So what did Senate Republicans do? They capitulated. On April 17th, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, announced that he wouldn't even let the Senate vote on the bill.

McConnell said there was no point because Trump would veto it. And with that, the constitutional system of checks and balances failed. A bill to prevent authoritarianism was shelved because it would offend the authoritarian. Graham didn't mind. Here's what he told reporters after McConnell's announcement. McConnell has just said in an interview that under no uncertain terms, he is not bringing the Mueller protection bill to the floor. What's your reaction? That's his decision to make. I don't believe Mr. Mueller's in jeopardy being fired. That's my position. I'll leave it up to the majority leader how to run the floor. Graham wasn't saying it was okay to fire Mueller. He was just saying that the Senate didn't really

need to stand up to Trump, that he understood why his colleagues didn't want to pick a fight with the president, and that despite Trump's repeated attempts to fire Mueller, senators could count on the president not to try again. And in case it wasn't clear how thoroughly Graham had surrendered to Trump, on April 19th, just two days after Senate Republicans agreed not to bring the Mueller protection bill to the floor, Graham announced that he would support Trump's re-election as president. Remember, this was barely a year into Trump's term. Trump had just been caught for the third time abusing his office in an attempt to protect himself

from the Russia investigation. And Graham, despite that, was making a commitment to keep Trump in power forizing the president. In 2016, for example, Graham had criticized Trump for openly encouraging Russia to hack Clinton's emails. Trump's invitation to the Russians had been shockingly explicit. Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be next. Yes, sir. At the time, Republicans dismissed Trump's offer as a joke. But in July 2018,

Mueller released evidence indicating that on the same day Trump issued that invitation, Russian intelligence officers had tried for the first time to penetrate through specific channels various email accounts used by the Clinton campaign and Clinton's personal office. Graham said nothing about the new evidence, and when Graham did express opinions about Trump's behavior, it was largely to offer excuses or to express complete disinterest. In 2017, for instance, Graham had talked about examining Trump's finances, possibly through his tax returns. But in 2018, Graham brushed off that idea, calling Trump's returns, quote, the last thing on my mind. When reporters brought up Graham's past criticisms of Trump, the senator disowned them.

He also dismissed similar criticisms from people who had worked with Trump in the White House or in the administration. Many of these people began to admit, privately or anonymously, that Trump preferred dictators and that he showed no regard for democracy. They said the president was, quote, unhinged and off the rails. But Graham said none of this mattered. Listen to this exchange between Graham and Wolf Blitzer on CNN in September 2018. I remember what you said about Donald Trump in 2016. You remember, and I'm paraphrasing, but I think you used the words, he's a kook,

he's unfit for office, he's crazy. You really went after him at the time. What has changed? Well, he won, I lost. So I owe it to him to try to help him where I can, say no when I must. The people of South Carolina expect me to do that. All I can say is that people listen to me about as much as we're going to listen to the New York Times. I said a lot of things, nobody cared. And at the end of the day, he won in states we hadn't won in 30 years. He's a force of nature. He won the White House. He beat me. Everything I said before is in my rearview mirror, I owe it to the people of South Carolina to try to help this man if I can. And I will. Nobody listens. Nobody cared. It's all in my rearview mirror. That's the sound of a man letting go of who he was. And Graham didn't just give up. He also told

Trump directly that from now on, the president could do whatever he wanted. Literally, these are the words Graham spoke to Trump as the senator described them to a Republican dinner audience in South Carolina on August 6th. Here's what I told the president. If you feel good doing it, do it. We're going to get reelected and he's going to win in 2020, not because... What Trump felt like doing was firing people who investigated him or who failed to protect him from investigations. And Graham now found reasons to indulge the president.

He said that as long as Trump hadn't colluded with Russian intelligence services, quote, why he fired Comey doesn't matter because he could fire Comey for the way he looks. Then, two weeks after that Republican dinner in South Carolina, Graham signaled that Trump could go ahead and fire Jeff Sessions, who had failed to comply with Trump's demands to rein in the Russia investigation. Graham told Fox News that the attorney generals served, quote, at the pleasure of the president. Trump was also pressuring Sessions to withhold indictments of other Republicans. On September 3rd, Trump excoriated Sessions for allowing federal prosecutors to bring charges, specifically for insider trading

and stealing campaign funds, against two Republican members of Congress, Duncan Hunter of California and Chris Collins of New York. Trump complained that the indictments could cost his party two seats in the midterm elections. Trump's attack on the indictments was obviously corrupt. But Graham once again excused the president, arguing that Trump was just trying to say that prosecutors shouldn't, quote, interfere with the election. Here's Graham on CNN peddling that excuse to Wolf Blitzer. And I'll read the tweet to you to remind you what the president said. Too long running Obama era investigations of two very popular Republican

congressmen have brought to a well-publicized charge just ahead of the midterms by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job, Jeff. Head of the midterms is the key deal here. And I don't know what the laws of those states are about replacing somebody. But I think the beef of the president was that these were prosecutions brought very close to an election. And there's been a general view not to do that. When Trump finally did fire Sessions, Graham said that was fine. He said Trump's ouster of Sessions couldn't be obstruction of justice because Trump had, quote,

an almost unlimited ability to explain the decline or fall of a democracy, they often look for fatal moments or decisions. But sometimes there's no big moment. There's no big decision. Sometimes it's just inertia. In the fall of 2018, the threat to American democracy was about to escalate because of two factors that, in the course of history, are pretty common. Those two factors were normalization and polarization.

When an authoritarian rises to power in a democratic country, it can be a shock. But over time, the shock wears off. As the new leader tramples previous norms and rules, people get used to it. That's part of what happened to Graham and his colleagues in Trump's first year. They got used to the president's behavior. It began to feel normal. Normalization is corrosive. It numbs you to the ongoing crimes committed by the authoritarian.

You stop noticing what's happening, or you no longer care, or you get used to defending the leader's abuses, as Graham did. But the second stage of this political illness is more serious. Once the authoritarian's allies have normalized his behavior, they rally around him, just as they would rally around any other leader of their party. And they attack his opponents, just as they would if he were a normal president. This changes the nature and the consequences of their collaboration. By treating any criticism of the president as an attack on the party, and by savaging anyone who gets in the president's way,

the president's political allies become, in effect, soldiers for authoritarianism. They don't just protect the leader, they clear his path as he abuses and expands his power. This is a big part of what happened to Lindsey Graham in the second year of Trump's presidency. He joined other Republican loyalists in swarming anyone who posed a threat to the president. In April, the Republican National Committee launched a coordinated attack on Comey.

Graham joined in the smear campaign, claiming that Comey had conspired to go easy on Clinton and had then tried to take down Trump. He's no longer the former director of the FBI, said Graham. He's a political operative. Then, as other people who had worked with Trump began to tell stories similar to Comey's, Graham turned on them, too. He said the FBI and the Justice Department were, quote, out to get Trump.

Graham accused those agencies of plotting to oust the president, and he vowed to target them in the coming year. Here's Graham talking about senior officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice in a Fox News interview on September 23rd, 2018. But there's a bureaucratic coup against President Trump being discovered here. Before the election, the people in question tried to taint the election, tip it to Clinton's favor. After the election, they're trying to undermine the president. Graham's rhetoric about the president's domestic enemies was getting more and more incendiary. And four days after that interview, Graham exploded at a Senate confirmation hearing

for Trump's latest Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. In a four-minute rant, Graham savaged his Democratic colleagues. He accused them of sandbagging Kavanaugh with an accusation of sexual assault. Boy, y'all want power. God, I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see through this sham.

To my Republican colleagues, if you vote no, you're legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics. You want this seat? I hope you never get it. Graham's eruption shocked his colleagues. Nothing in the hearing or in Graham's prior relationship with Kavanaugh seemed to explain the intensity of his rage. But Graham had been building toward this moment for months, demonizing anyone who posed a threat to Trump. Graham needed to hate the Democrats, and now he did. Those four minutes pushed Graham over the edge.

It wasn't the speech that changed him. It was the response to the speech. In a phone call, Trump congratulated Graham. Wow, remind me not to make you mad, Trump told him. Sean Hannity told Graham it was, quote, your finest moment ever. Republican audiences suddenly adored Graham. In South Carolina, his approval rating soared. Graham reveled in his newfound fame.

He began to tell stories about his four minutes of fury. I was the voice of millions of Americans, he said. He told Republican crowds, I hope I spoke for you. In the past, Graham had described Democrats as misguided but well-meaning. Now, he condemned them as malicious. The Democratic Party is organized around what they hate, he told one Republican audience in October.

They will do anything to get their way, he told another. They've got to be punished, he said. In TV interviews, Graham declared himself a changed man. All I can say is that this is going to the streets at the ballot box. I'm going to, I've never campaigned against a colleague in my life. That's about to change. Over the next month, Graham traveled from state to state, exhorting voters to purge Democratic senators and, quote, kick their ass at the ballot box. And it worked. Four Democratic senators lost their seats.

Republicans increased their majority in the Senate. Graham was about to become chairman of the Judiciary Committee. But in the House, it was a different story. Democrats picked up 41 seats, gaining control of the chamber. For the first time in his presidency, Trump was going to face real resistance. And Graham was determined to face real resistance. And Graham was determined to break that resistance. He was ready to go to war for Donald Trump. Coming up next time on The Corruption of Lindsey Graham,

Trump attacks the ethnic ancestry of three members of Congress, and Graham defends him. Isn't it racist, though, to say, send her back? No, I don't think it's racist to say. Was it racist to say, love it or leave it? I don't think a Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back. 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.