The Bulwark Podcast - Ep. 4: The Corruption of Lindsey Graham

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

After the 2018 midterms, Lindsey Graham moved to a new stage of collaboration with Trump. Graham was no longer just protecting him from accountability—he began helping Trump to usurp power. The Bulwark Podcast presents The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, with Will Saletan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself, so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Whether you're navigating workplace stresses,

complex relationships, or family dynamics, therapy is a great tool for facing your fears and finding a way to overcome them. If you're thinking of starting therapy but you're afraid of what you might uncover, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first On November 26th, 2018, Senator Lindsey Graham got a treat. For two years, Graham had been defending President Donald Trump's corruption. Now Graham was getting a well-earned thank you. He was being invited to share the stage with Trump

at a campaign rally. Graham had said a lot of bad things about Trump in 2015 and 2016. That Trump was barbaric, a demagogue, and a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. And all of that was true. But now those unpleasant words were long forgotten. Graham had recanted his criticisms of Trump. In the midterm elections, Graham had campaigned successfully to defeat many of Trump's Democratic enemies in the Senate. And Graham had thrilled the president's followers by excoriating Democrats during the confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh. At the November 26th rally in Tupelo, Mississippi, Trump lambasted illegal immigrants and what he called the Russian witch hunt. He hailed Graham as a star,

and he summoned him to the podium. But this man said some brilliant and beautiful and warm from the heart words that really helped us get a great Supreme Court justice. Senator Lindsey Graham. He's here. Where is he? Come, come here. Come here. He's become my friend, actually. He's become my friend. The crowd cheered and Graham beamed. Graham had finally earned Trump's love. He was earning the love of Trump's voters, too. These were the voters Graham had shunned as haters in 2015. But now they welcomed Graham because he was giving them exactly what they wanted, resentment, wrath, and vilification of Trump's opponents. As Trump polarized America, this enthusiasm from his fan base galvanized Republican allegiance to the president.

Some Republicans in Congress had been with him from the beginning. Others had fallen in line when he captured the nomination or when he became president. And then there were others, worn down by Trump's aggression, who had eventually surrendered to exhaustion or fear. But as Trump's base became the party's base, there was one more reason to give in. Republican politicians who embraced the president would be loved. And the more fiercely these politicians reviled Trump's enemies and defended his abuse of power, the more love they would get. This is The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, presented by The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Will Salatin.

Four days after that rally in Mississippi, Graham spoke at a Republican breakfast in South Carolina. The fight over Kavanaugh, he told the crowd, was just one battle in a great war against Trump's enemies. Every Republican had to stand with the president, said Graham, because any attack on the president was an attack on all conservatives. What Democrats wanted, Graham told the audience, was, quote, to destroy us. As Graham traveled his home state that winter, this was his message to Republicans. In the struggle between Trump and the Democrats, there could be no middle ground. Democrats were vicious and had to be defeated. Here's Graham speaking to a Republican audience in Greenville, South Carolina on February 4th, 2019. What did we learn from Kavanaugh? It's not about Trump. It's about us. They hate us.

So what did that tell me? They want power way too much. There's nothing they won't do when it comes to these kind of issues. In the old days, Graham hadn't talked this way. He had often worked with Democrats on legislation. He still would, but something had changed. Graham had decided, or at least had decided to tell himself, that something about the Kavanaugh fight justified a more adamant allegiance to Trump. Politically, this was the shrewd play. Graham was up for re-election in 2020, and he needed Trump's voters to win his primary.

But that didn't fully explain Graham's behavior. Even after his re-election, Graham never went back to equivocating about Trump. And he wasn't alone. This transformation was happening across the whole Republican Party. In Trump's first two years, many Republicans in Congress had felt obliged to explain or answer for the president's misconduct. Often they had acknowledged inconvenient facts or legal constraints that stood in Trump's way. But over time, fatigue, partisan anger, and political necessity had hardened these Republicans.

They were developing the indifference necessary to protect a tyrant. What these politicians needed was a rationale for this increasingly militant devotion. So they began to convince themselves that the president's enemies were the greater threat. More and more Republicans told one another and came to believe that Democrats would do anything to destroy the country. And that paranoid fantasy gave Republicans

the justification they needed to do anything in Trump's defense. This emerging Republican mentality of all-out war on behalf of the president played a central role in the next phase of Trump's authoritarian escalation. The president was going to seize, by emergency declaration, powers that were constitutionally reserved to Congress. Here's how it happened. On December 11, 2018, Trump summoned Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, respectively, to the White House. He told them that he would shut down the government unless Congress authorized money for a wall on the Mexican border. In fact, Trump said that if Democrats in Congress didn't give him the money, he would order the military to build the wall. The Democrats refused, so Trump did force the government to shut down. And then, on January 4, 2019, he threatened to officially declare a national emergency that would allow him to bypass Congress and unilaterally pay for the wall. Now, before Trump became president,

Graham had opposed this kind of executive overreach. He had pointed out that it was unconstitutional. But now that Trump was president, Graham said it was fine. In a statement, Graham told the president, quote, Democrats will do everything in their power to stop Trump. Mr. President, declare a national emergency now. Build a wall now. Graham told his Democratic colleagues that they had no choice but to surrender to the president. We're going to build a wall one way or the other, he told them. And in an interview with Sean Hannity on January 30th, Graham raised his finger and issued a warning to lawmakers in his own party. He has all the power in the world to do this to my Republican colleagues. Stand behind him. Exactly. It's good for the country. And if you don't, you're going to pay a price.

That warning reflected an ominous turn in Graham's thinking about Trump as an instrument of fear. Back in 2015 and 2016, Graham had recognized Trump's despotic personality as a danger to the United States. Then in 2017 and 2018, Graham had found a good use for the president's bullying, scaring foreign adversaries. Graham had warned those adversaries to comply with Trump's demands or else. But now Graham had moved on from just threatening foreign governments. Now the adversaries Graham wanted to intimidate were his own colleagues, and Trump was his weapon. The wall fight marked a new stage of Graham's collaboration with the president.

Graham was no longer just protecting Trump from accountability. He was helping Trump usurp power. The Constitution prohibits federal spending without congressional authorization. Presidents who served before Trump had on occasion issued emergency declarations, but never to override the will of Congress. Despite this, Graham said Republicans had to stand with Trump against the Democrats because the Democrats, in Graham's words, were trying, quote, to destroy America as we know it. Some Republican senators worried about the implications for constitutional democracy.

What would happen, they asked, if presidents began to commandeer the Treasury routinely, or if they issued declarations of emergency to enact other policies they couldn't pass through Congress? Graham told his colleagues not to fuss about that. Here he is on Hannity's radio show, dismissing their concerns about runaway executive power. So to all my Republican colleagues who worry about the president we're setting for the future and the legal niceties, here's what I would say. It's not what a Democrat may do in the future should drive your thinking. It's whether or not this president is right. Even if the emergency declaration was likely to be found unconstitutional, said Graham, Republicans should still support it, at least for now, because it was politically useful. If the courts were to block Trump's move, Graham argued, it would be, quote, a great issue for 2019 and 2020.

So on February 15th, Trump did it. He declared an emergency to take money for the wall. What was the emergency? Trump claimed falsely that America was under attack. So we're going to be signing today and registering national emergency because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people, and it's unacceptable.

Can we just pause here for a minute to reflect on what was happening at this point? This was the President of the United States, not the President of Russia or Venezuela or Syria. This was our President declaring that our country was under attack. And on that fabricated basis, he was overriding the Constitution and the will of Congress to do as he pleased. 16 states filed suit against Trump's power grab. They asked the third branch of our government, the courts, to step in. Did Graham agree that the judiciary should stop the president from usurping power? Nope,

just the opposite. Graham began to think not about how the courts could protect democracy, but about how Trump could manipulate the courts. In a radio interview on February 22nd, Hugh Hewitt urged Graham to consider expediting the confirmation of Trump's judicial nominees so they would be in place on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals when the lawsuit over Trump's power grab came before that court. And Graham told Hewitt that he and his Republican colleagues in the Senate were already working on that. He said they were, quote, thinking about changing the rules to speed up the confirmation process. Then, two weeks after that interview, Graham explained to Hannity how Trump could argue in court that the president had congressional approval to seize the

money, even though in fact he didn't. To stop Trump, Congress would have to pass a resolution of disapproval. The president would then veto that resolution. If either chamber of Congress failed to muster the two-thirds majority that was necessary to override the veto, the resolution would fail. Graham argued that even though majorities of both chambers of Congress opposed the emergency declaration, the absence of a supermajority against Trump, that is, the absence of a two-thirds majority, meant that Congress was, in effect, giving its consent.

Here's how Graham explained it in the interview. We're not going to get anywhere near 67 votes disapproving the emergency declaration. So he's going to win in both houses of Congress. And when it goes to court, what the president will say, wait a minute, Congress did act. They disapproved the resolution. I vetoed it and the Congress sustained my veto. That's acting. I think he's going to win.

Let's be clear about what Graham was advocating here. This was an authoritarian pact between the executive and a faction of Congress. The president, backed by one-third of one chamber, that's all he needed according to Graham, would seize powers constitutionally reserved to Congress. And the judiciary, having been stacked by the president through expedited judicial confirmations, would stand back and accept it. And that's pretty much what happened. The House and the Senate voted to invalidate the emergency declaration. On March 15th, Trump vetoed their attempt to stop him.

And because enough Republican lawmakers stood with the president, Congress failed to override the veto. Three months after that confrontation, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to proceed with the wall. And which justice gave the president that fifth vote? You guessed it. Brett Kavanaugh. During that fight over the border wall, Robert Mueller, the special counsel, was finishing up his report on the Russia investigation. It had taken Mueller almost two years to complete his work. And during those two years, the Republican Party had changed. Lindsey Graham and his Republican colleagues hadn't just moved their goalposts

to accommodate Trump's various attempts at collusion and obstruction of justice. They had become political zombies marching in lockstep with the president. They were completely unwilling to face unwelcome facts. So when Mueller turned in his report in March of 2019, Graham didn't just fudge the parts he didn't like. He completely lied. Here are just a couple of examples. And the conclusion was firm, without equivocation, that no one on the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians when it came to the 2016 election. Mr. Mueller said there was no evidence of collusion between President Trump or anybody

on his campaign with the Russians, period. That's just complete fiction. Mueller's report actually detailed several channels of attempted collusion. One was the Trump Tower meeting, in which Trump's senior campaign officials had met with Russian emissaries to hear what had been advertised to them in emails explicitly as an offer of campaign help from the Russian government. The report also found that Trump and his aides had tried to coordinate their campaign activities with WikiLeaks dumps of damaging material that had been hacked by the Russians from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. after Trump went on TV and publicly invited Russia to find Clinton's emails, hackers affiliated with the Russian government had tried to do exactly that. And Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had passed internal documents from the Trump campaign

to an associate who was connected to Russian intelligence. Mueller also presented evidence of obstruction of justice. In addition to Trump's coercion of FBI Director James Comey and Trump's various attempts to fire Mueller, the report showed that the president had told White House counsel Don McGahn to give false testimony. And in July 2017, Trump had instructed his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski,

to tell Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, to abort the Mueller investigation. According to Mueller's report, Trump had told Lewandowski, quote, that if Sessions did not meet with Lewandowski, Lewandowski should tell Sessions he was fired. Graham completely lied about all of this. He told the press that according to the report, there was no effort by Trump to impede the Mueller investigation. Graham claimed falsely that Mueller had issued a verdict of no obstruction. And when Graham was asked about Trump's explicit instruction to McGahn to fire Mueller, Graham said he didn't care. Here's Graham being pressed about that episode by Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation.

But that directly contradicts sworn testimony that was in the Mueller report, where Don McGahn said he almost quit. He was so pressured to fire the special counsel. Who do you believe? I think it's just all theater. It doesn't matter. I don't care what he said to Don McGahn. It's what he did. The president never obstructed. It doesn't matter to you that the president is changing a version of the match or perhaps some would say lying. If you're going to look at every president who pops off at a staff and, you know, ask them to do something that's maybe crazy, then we won't have many presidents.

But in terms of the firing, this was Don McGahn, the White House counsel, being pressured to fire the special counsel. But he didn't. I don't care what they talked about. For weeks, Mueller watched Graham and other allies of the president mischaracterize his report. Finally, on May 29th, Mueller watched Graham and other allies of the president mischaracterize his report. Finally, on May 29th, Mueller spoke up. If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so, Mueller testified that in his report,

quote, the president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed. Mueller said it was up to Congress to decide what to do with his report. But when the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed McGahn to testify about Trump's obstruction, Trump defied the subpoena. The president blocked McGahn and other aides from testifying. And what did Graham say about Trump's open defiance of Congress? Graham didn't just condone the defiance. He enthusiastically endorsed it.

He encouraged the president to fight congressional Democrats, quote, tooth and nail. Here's Graham on Fox & Friends explaining why Trump's cover-up wasn't really a cover-up. Now, if he's fighting back against a bunch of crazy people to try and destroy his life, that's not covering anything up. The House Judiciary Committee is trying to retry the Mueller case. Mueller, to me, was the final word. They actually want to go through everything and do it all over again and get a different outcome. You're not covering anything up when you're fighting a bunch of politicians trying to destroy you and your family. It's important to understand here that Graham wasn't just rejecting the House investigation.

He was inventing justifications for anything Trump did or said. For example, the president, having escaped prosecution, was completely unrepentant about the Trump Tower meeting. In fact, he said that if he were to receive the same pitch again, an offer from Russia or China to provide damaging information about his political opponent, he would listen to that offer again. And Trump ridiculed the idea of reporting it to the FBI. Listen to this exchange with ABC's George Stephanopoulos on June 12th.

This is somebody that said, we have information on your opponent. Oh, let me call the FBI. Give me a break. Life doesn't work that way. The FBI director says that's what should happen. The FBI director is wrong. Your campaign this time around, if foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on an opponent, should they accept it or should they call the FBI? I think maybe you do both. I think you might want to listen. I don't, there's nothing wrong with listening.

If somebody called from a country, Norway, we have information on your opponent. Oh, I think I'd want to hear it. You want that kind of interference in our elections? It's not an interference. They have information. I think I'd take it if I thought... Trump was directly contradicting what Graham had said just two years earlier. In July 2017, Graham, who at that time was still sensible enough to be alarmed by the Trump Tower emails, had read those emails aloud at a Senate hearing. Graham had emphasized that anyone who received such a message, quote, suggesting that a foreign government wants to help you by disparaging your opponent, should call the FBI. But now, two years later, Trump was

openly deriding that rule, and Graham no longer had the courage, or even the independent judgment, to stand up to Trump. Graham had been reduced to a single reflex. Whatever Trump does, find some way to justify it. So when ABC aired that exchange between Trump and Stephanopoulos, Graham issued a new statement in which he argued that rejecting political offers from foreign governments and reporting such offers to the FBI, quote, has not been recent practice. And in a Fox News interview, Graham said it was fine for Trump or anyone else to entertain offers from foreigners. You don't call up the FBI every time somebody talks to you,

said Graham. There are two other episodes from this period that we need to talk about before moving on. They're not about Trump usurping power or burying investigations of himself. They're about his barbarism. They're about his attacks on human rights. Violations of human rights are an all-too-common story under authoritarian regimes. We like to think that these things could never happen in our country, but they can and they have. During Trump's presidency, they began to happen again. And even Lindsey Graham, who just three years earlier had spoken out against Trump's barbarism, began to rationalize the president's moral crimes. To understand how this happened, you have to understand how Graham and other

Republicans understood themselves. They didn't think they were part of an authoritarian movement. They saw themselves as serving a man, not an idea. They thought authoritarianism was a doctrine. If you didn't espouse the doctrine, you certainly couldn't be called an authoritarian. But that isn't how authoritarianism emerges in a democracy. It doesn't appear in the form of an idea. It appears in the form of a man. So Graham and his colleagues didn't think they were doing anything unusual. Trump was just the leader of their party. They were simply following him wherever he went. They thought that was how party politics worked. In some ways, this was less dangerous than an ideological commitment. If Trump were to lose

power, the Republican Party, as long as it wasn't explicitly committed to authoritarianism, might be able to revert to accepting democracy and the rule of law. But in other ways, following a man was more dangerous than following an idea. The party would defend anything Trump did. And he wasn't just a bully. He was a predator, a mercenary, and a racist. On July 14, 2019, as Congress was awaiting Mueller's testimony, Trump lashed out at a group of Democratic Congresswomen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,

Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. Trump was angry because the Congresswomen had compared some migrant detention facilities in the United States to concentration camps. On Twitter, Trump wrote that these women, quote, originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world. Trump said the women had no business, quote, viciously telling the people of the United States how our government is to be run. Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came, he wrote. Now, just to be clear, not one of these Congresswomen was a foreigner. All three were American citizens,

and two of them were native-born Americans. But it wasn't hard to figure out Trump's angle. Two of the women were Muslim. Omar was from Somalia. Tlaib was from a family of Palestinian origin. Ocasio-Cortez, who had been born in the Bronx, was of Puerto Rican ancestry. Three days later, Trump denounced Omar at a rally. The crowd ate it up. They chanted, send her back, send her back. In his speech, Trump basically repeated what he had said in his tweets. So these Congresswomen, their comments are helping to fuel the rise of a dangerous, militant hard left.

But that's okay, because we're going to win this election like nobody's ever seen before. And tonight I have a suggestion for the hate-filled extremists who are constantly trying to tear our country down. They never have anything good to say.

That's why I say, hey, if they don't like it, let them leave. Let them leave. Let them leave. They're always telling us how to run it, how to do this, how to do that. You know what?

If they don't love it, tell them to leave it. Graham, like other elected Republicans, didn't really want to defend such obvious ethnic demagoguery. But he did want to defend Trump. So Graham pretended that the president's attacks on the three congresswomen were not, in fact, bigoted. He said that Trump had good reason to, quote, go after the congresswomen because, in Graham's words, they're running our country down. When Democrats complained about Trump's remarks, Graham dismissed their objections.

If you're a Republican, he scoffed, no matter what you say, you'll be called a racist. On July 18th, reporters pressed Graham about Trump's statements and about that chant at his rally. Graham replied that the Congresswomen had it coming to them. And in Trump's defense, Graham tried to define racism in a way that excluded what Trump had said and what the crowd at his rally had chanted. Graham suggested that explicit attacks on a person's ancestry, including calls to leave the country, were not racist as long as the targeted person was a member of the political opposition. 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. If you're a racist, you want everybody from Somalia to go back because they're black or they're Muslim. That's not what this is about to me. What this is about to me is that these four congressmen in their own way have been incredibly provocative. It's really important to pause here and think about what had just happened. We like to think that America can't revert to the explicit, legally sanctioned racism of its past. We like to think there's something special about our country, and that the kind of

ethnic persecution that often happens under authoritarian regimes can't happen here. But what you just heard was a United States senator in 2019 inventing an excuse to cross that line. And this wasn't some dyed-in-the-wool segregationist. Remember, in 2015, Graham had explicitly called out Trump as a race-baiting bigot. Now, just four years later, with a revised vocabulary and a clear conscience, Graham was rationalizing race baiting. He was saying that it was completely understandable and not bigoted to target Americans based on their ancestry if they were guilty of, quote, not embracing Trump. That's how fast America, today's America, can go back to the evil of its past. Soon after that episode, Graham found a way to accommodate one of Trump's proposed war crimes, using the United States military to loot other countries. In October 2019, Trump said he would

pull American forces out of Syria. He framed this as a business decision. The U.S. is always the sucker on NATO, on trade, on everything, the president complained. He protested that America's Kurdish allies in Syria, quote, were paid massive amounts of money and that housing ISIS fighters in American prisons was a tremendous cost. On Twitter, Trump made it clear that his whole foreign policy was about self-interest. He wrote in all caps, We will fight where it is to our benefit. Now, this wasn't how Graham thought about foreign policy.

Graham vehemently opposed the pullout from Syria. But he understood that by benefit, Trump meant money. And Graham also understood that Trump had been talking for years about taking oil from Middle Eastern countries. So Graham decided to persuade Trump that keeping troops in Syria could pay off in the form of oil revenue. On October 14th, Graham and retired Army General Jack Keane showed Trump a map of the Syrian region where American forces were deployed. Graham and Keane pointed out the oil fields. A week later, in a lunch with the president, Graham followed up, stressing the importance of controlling the oil.

This was a cynical backstage lobbying campaign. And it worked. Trump agreed to keep troops in Syria. To Graham, keeping American forces in Syria wasn't about the money. It was about standing with the Kurds and thwarting ISIS and Iran. But to please Trump, Graham endorsed what he had condemned in 2015 and 2016. Using the military to expropriate foreign oil. Here's Graham on Fox News, sucking up to Trump and outlining the new business arrangement.

President Trump is thinking outside the box. I was so impressed with his thinking about the oil. Not only are we going to deny the oil fields falling into Iranian hands, I believe we're on the verge of a joint venture between us and the Syrian Democratic Forces who helped destroy ISIS and keep them destroyed to modernize the oil fields and make sure they get the revenue, not the Iranians, not Assad, and it can help pay for our small commitment in the future. A week later, at a White House briefing, a reporter asked Graham, Graham replied that the Syrian government didn't control the oil fields.

The American-backed rebels did. And in another interview on Fox, Graham boasted that the joint oil drilling venture between the rebels and the United States could be lucrative for both partners. There were $45 million a month being pumped currently. I think with some American help, we can double or triple the oil revenues, share it with the Syrian Democratic Forces who fought so bravely the Kurds to destroy ISIS. It will be good for them and their families and their communities. It can help pay for our footprint. Graham was getting exactly what he had bargained for.

In exchange for defending and facilitating Trump's corruption, he was helping to shape America's role in the world. But morally, that deal was getting more and more expensive. And it seemed as though there was no price Graham wouldn't pay. Coming up next time on The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, the senator declares war on Trump's domestic enemies. They want to turn us into a socialist nation. They want to destroy the family unit as we know it. And I tell you what, to the listeners out there, you may not believe you're in a war, but you are politically, and you need to take sides, and you need to help this president. 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.