The Bulwark Podcast - Ep.7: The Corruption of Lindsey Graham

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

Even with Trump out of the White House, Lindsey Graham says that Trump is the organizing principle of the Republican Party. And everything that the senator once valued—national security, human rights, and the Constitution—plays second fiddle to his loyalty to Trump. This special series, The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, has been presented by The Bulwark Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In late February of 2021, a month after President Donald Trump left office, Senator Lindsey Graham went on Fox News to rally Republicans behind the former president. A few weeks earlier, on January 6th, Trump had incited an attack on the United States Capitol in a failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election. And just a week before Graham's TV interview, Trump had been narrowly acquitted by the Senate in his second impeachment trial. Trump's attempt to overthrow American democracy had not cost him the loyalty of Graham or many others on the right. In fact, Trump was going to be the keynote speaker at the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference. And Graham was all in.

And I've never felt better about President Trump's leading the party than I do right now. He will position himself as the alternative to Joe Biden. He, I think, will make a speech that will unify Republicans on policy that I think he's been working the phones. I was with him all weekend. He wants us to win in 2022 and stay tuned. I think you're going to see over the next couple of months, Donald Trump lead the Republican party on policy and give us the energy we need to take back the House and the Senate, the Democrats are doing their part. If we could get behind president Trump and follow his lead, we will win in 2022. Six days later in his speech to CPAC, Trump conceded nothing.

He repeated that he had actually won the election, and he denounced the judiciary for failing to keep him in power. We have a very sick and corrupt electoral process that must be fixed immediately. This election was rigged, and the Supreme Court and other courts didn't want to do anything about it. Trump demanded restrictions on voting, including the abolition of voting before Election Day. He said the United States should have used its invasion of Iraq to take that country's oil. He derided Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate who had condemned Trump's role in the insurrection. And Trump vowed to purge congressional Republicans who had voted to impeach

or convict him. In particular, he targeted Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the chair of the House Republican Conference. Get rid of them all, Trump told the cheering crowd. He declared war on what he called RINOs, an acronym for Republicans in Name Only. And he suggested that these dissident Republicans who dared to criticize Trump were enemies of the United States. But if Republicans do not stick together, the rhinos that we're surrounded with will destroy the Republican Party and the American worker and will destroy our country itself. This is The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, presented by The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Will Salatin. Trump's declaration of war on dissident Republicans set the stage for his comeback. He didn't control the White House anymore, so he couldn't use that to control the party. But he still had a weapon that had always worked for him. Fear. To regain power, Trump needed to reinforce

an authoritarian mindset within the party. He needed to drive home the idea that any Republican who didn't support Trump was a rhino because Trump was the party. He was well positioned to regain his dominance. In polls, more than 60% of Republicans said the election had been stolen. More than 50% said Trump, not Biden, was the true president. And more than 20% when they were asked about, quote, the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, explicitly said they supported the attack. In Washington, congressional Republicans were divided into three camps. The first camp, which included Graham and most Republican lawmakers, said Trump was not responsible for January 6th. The second group, represented by McConnell, conceded that Trump was responsible, but they didn't want to dwell on it since that might hurt the party politically.

The third and smallest group of Republicans, led by Cheney, rejected Trump as unfit to serve. This wasn't a split between the center and the right. Cheney and McConnell were staunch conservatives. In fact, they agreed with Graham on foreign policy far more than Trump did. And that raised a question. In a fight between Trump and these conservatives, why should Graham side with Trump? This is one of those moments when you have to step back and remember how Graham got himself into this position. Originally, in 2016, Graham had aligned himself with Trump because Trump, despite Graham's efforts to stop him, had secured the Republican nomination for president. Then Graham had extended his alliance with Trump because Trump was president. Graham told himself that he needed to stick with Trump because the alternative to Trump was the Democrats,

and because working with Trump, since he was the president, was the most effective way to strengthen America's role in the world. Now, four years later, none of that was true anymore. In the fight between Trump, McConnell, and Cheney, everything Graham had once valued, national security, human rights, and the Constitution, was pitted against just one thing. Loyalty to Trump. Cheney had announced her judgment of the January 6th attack shortly before she voted to impeach Trump in January. Here's her statement as it was read on CNN. She said the president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United

States of his office and his oath to the Constitution. I will vote to impeach the president. Again, this is... McConnell had announced his position at the Senate trial. He concluded that Trump couldn't be convicted for a technical reason, because he was no longer president. But McConnell left no doubt as to what he thought of Trump. Former President Trump's actions preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty. There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. Trump resolved to punish Cheney and McConnell. Toppling McConnell would be difficult because McConnell, after delivering that rebuke to Trump at his trial, had basically kept his head down. Despite his condemnation of Trump, McConnell promised that if Trump were to win the Republican nomination for president in 2024, McConnell would support him.

And as a general rule, McConnell tried to avoid talking about the unpleasantness of January 6th. Cheney, on the other hand, did not keep her head down. She went right at Trump, and that made her a much easier target. Trump's campaign to destroy Cheney unfolded in two stages. The first part was to oust her as chair of the House Republican Conference. The second part was to expel her from Congress altogether by defeating her in a primary in her home state of Wyoming. By late January, Trump was working both angles. Donald Trump Jr. began the attack with a tweet. It's time to get this rhino out of GOP leadership, he wrote.

Trump anointed one of his sycophants, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York, to replace Cheney as chair of the conference. And in Wyoming, Trump's advisors looked for a candidate to run against Cheney in the primary. Cheney directly challenged Trump's authoritarianism. She called on Republicans to define their party by ideals, not by a man. We believe in the rule of law, in limited government, in a strong national defense, she wrote in an op-ed. We Republicans need to stand for genuinely conservative principles and steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic

Trump cult of personality. Trump couldn't smear Cheney as a leftist because on the issues, she was more conservative than he was. So instead, he denounced her as a bloodthirsty military hawk. This warmongering fool wants to stay in the Middle East and Afghanistan for another 19 years, he jeered. Trump also ridiculed her performance in the polls. Liz Cheney is polling so low in Wyoming, he crowed, that she's looking for a way out of her congressional race. These taunts, the endless wars, the sorry poll numbers, were all too familiar to Graham. They were the same jabs Trump had thrown at him in 2015, when Graham was a lonely hawk defending the Constitution against a demagogue, the same demagogue. History, in its cruel, ironic way, had come full circle.

Cheney, a woman of principle, was a reminder of the man Graham had once been. But he wasn't that man anymore. Cheney had evolved in the other direction. She had turned against Trump. At first, she had tolerated his corruption. She had opposed his impeachment in the Ukraine scheme, and she had voted for him in 2020. But January 6th was too much. She recognized that what she had seen in other countries, a tyrant trying to overthrow democracy, was happening in her country. Here's how Cheney described Trump and the threat he posed in an interview with NBC News on May 12th, 2021. And anyone who has provoked an attack on the capital of the United States, no president obviously ever did that before. He did, and he did it in an effort to steal an election, and he continues to try to convince people the election was stolen.

So he must not ever again be anywhere close to the Oval Office. I've worked in countries around the world that don't have peaceful transitions of power, countries that have autocracies, and it can happen very, very quickly. And so from my perspective, there is no question about what the top priority has to be, and that is defending the democracy. In her op-ed, which was published a week before that interview,

Cheney reminded Americans that the danger posed by Trump had not passed. She pointed out that he was still working to delegitimize the political system. Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure, she wrote. The target of Trump's propaganda campaign, she explained, was, quote, confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. Somehow, Graham had lost the ability to see what Cheney was describing. When Graham looked at Trump, he saw a troubled golf buddy, not the thug who had sat in the White House, watching his followers overrun the Capitol. In interviews with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa for their book, Peril,

Graham conceded that Trump had, quote, darkness and personality problems. But he insisted that the former president was, in his words, redeemable. Graham told Woodward and Costa that, quote, the problems created with Trump's personality are easier to fix Graham told Woodward and Costa that, quote, Graham didn't mean an American civil war. The so-called civil war he dreaded was really just a fracture in the Republican Party. That was unacceptable, in Graham's view, because it might help Democrats win the next election. To avoid that risk, Graham advised McConnell to stop antagonizing Trump and start sucking up to him,

as Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, was doing. What I would say to Senator McConnell, I know Trump can be a handful, but he is the most dominant figure in the Republican Party. We don't have a snowball's chance in hell of taking back the majority without Donald Trump. Everybody understood the situation. Trump was holding the party hostage. Graham wanted to pay whatever ransom Trump demanded. And so did McCarthy. But the ransom Trump was demanding, namely expelling

Cheney from leadership, was just the start. Trump wanted to maintain control of the party. Then he wanted to regain control of the country. And he had already demonstrated that he was quite willing to use force. That was what Graham, McCarthy, and other Republicans who wanted to appease Trump refused to acknowledge. To avoid a figurative civil war, they were pushing the country closer to what could become a real civil war. At first, Graham tried to protect Cheney. In early February, when Trump's allies wanted to eject her from her leadership post, Graham defended her. But by the end of the month, he was advising her to, quote, reconcile with Trump. And by May, he was ready to dump her. Cheney's ouster, which was accomplished on May 12,

demonstrated that Trump was still the dominant force in the party and a live threat to the country. His defeat in the election and his failed coup attempt had not finished him. Republicans in Congress were still afraid to resist him, and they were more than willing to get rid of anyone who stood in his way. These collaborators told themselves that they were just doing what their constituents wanted. That was how Graham justified his decision to turn against Cheney. The chair of the House Republican Conference should represent House Republicans, Graham reasoned. And those House Republicans had every right to fire Cheney for dissent. As Graham put it in a tweet, quote, she has taken a position regarding former President

Trump, which is out of the mainstream of the Republican Party. And it wasn't just Republicans in the House who still revered Trump. It was Republican voters. Those voters had chosen Trump, Graham explained. And that was why none of the Republican politicians who spoke at CPAC had dared to criticize the former president. We've got a lot of talented people in the party, Sean. Did you find one person at CPAC criticized Donald Trump? I thought it was amazing that you have so many people wanting to be president on our side,

but not one person would say anything bad about him. That tells you a lot about the strength of President Trump. This case for Trump, as it was articulated by Graham, was quite dangerous in two ways. The first problem was that it was completely unmoored from any beliefs about freedom, the Constitution, the role of government, or America's role in the world. The so-called leaders of the party would do whatever the base of the party wanted. And that flexibility was essential, because what the current base of the party wanted wasn't a principle. It was a man.

The second problem with Graham's argument was that it was circular. Trump had transformed the base of the party by bringing in his followers and driving out his critics. Voters who recognized Trump as a pernicious demagogue were leaving the party, and Republican members of Congress who had opposed him were retiring or being purged. Graham put the point bluntly. The lesson of Cheney's expulsion from leadership, he declared, was that any Republican who defied Trump was defying the party and would have to be pushed out. And to try to erase Donald Trump from the Republican Party is insane. And the people who try to erase him are going to wind up getting erased.

It's impossible for this party to move forward without President Trump being its leader because the people who are conservative have chosen him as their leader. That was why nobody at CPAC had spoken up against Trump. The people who were willing to speak up against Trump weren't at CPAC. They had been erased. Through this circular process of submission, expulsion, and exodus, the Republican Party was remaking itself. Trump was changing the base. The base, in turn, was redefining the Republican mainstream. And the party elite, by purging dissenters, was completing the cycle. That was how the Republican Party, in the name of listening to the people, emptied itself of all commitments but one.

Donald Trump was now, in the words of Lindsey Graham, the organizing principle of the Republican Party. In late May, two weeks after House Republicans expelled Cheney from their leadership, Graham proposed that any idea or principle that was under discussion within the party should be subordinated to Trump. The Reagan Foundation and Institute was launching a speaker series titled A Time for Choosing. Republican leaders who were being invited to speak would be asked to address the question, what should the Republican Party stand for? Graham rejected that question. The defining question within the party, he argued, wasn't about ideas. It was about loyalty to Trump. The question of the conference is a time for choosing. What I would tell the people putting on the conference, the Republicans have already chosen. They've chosen an American first agenda to rally the party around. And if the primary were held tomorrow, President Trump would win if he chose to run going away. So the question

really is, does anybody in the Republican Party doubt that the American First agenda is the way to move forward? And here's the question I have. If President Trump decides to run in 2024 and he wins the party's nomination, will you support him? It's a time for choosing in that regard. Would you support President Trump if he's our nominee? Every Republican needs to be asked that question. Meanwhile, Graham promoted a new conspiracy theory about the 2020 election. He claimed that a so-called deep state science department had helped to defeat Trump by suppressing evidence about COVID-19. Graham argued that a leak from a Chinese lab had caused the pandemic, and that if voters had known about this, Trump might have won.

Essentially, since Trump couldn't find evidence that he had been cheated in the counting of ballots, Graham was suggesting that Trump had been cheated before ballots were cast. On June 18th, Graham spoke in Florida at a conference of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. He claimed that on his first visit to Trump in the White House in 2017, he had told the president, I think God has put you here. Graham also told the crowd that there had been, quote, a lot of shenanigans in the 2020 election. A month later, in July, Graham declared that the contest for the Republican presidential nomination,

which was supposed to remain open for another three years, was already basically over. Well, he owns the Republican Party. It's his nomination. We have a lot of talented people in the Republican Party, but I can tell you this. This is the party of Donald Trump. If you think otherwise, you're in for a rude awakening. By the fall of 2021, Graham was ready to go after McConnell. Trump was angry at McConnell for cooperating with Democrats on raising the national debt ceiling. Graham entered the fight on Trump's side, and he issued a warning. If McConnell failed to appease Trump, Graham would vote to oust McConnell

as the Republican leader in the Senate. But here's the question. Can Senator McConnell effectively work with the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump? I'm not going to vote for anybody that can't have a working relationship with President Trump to be a team, to come up with an American first agenda, to show the difference between us and liberal Democrats, prosecute the case for Trump policies, and I'm not going to vote for anybody for leader of the Senate as a Republican unless they can prove to me that they can advocate an American first agenda and have a working relationship with President Trump, because if you can't do that, you will fail. This is another one of those moments when you have to step back and remember how Graham

got to this point. In 2015 and 2016, Graham had tried his best to stop Trump from becoming the Republican presidential nominee. Then, after Trump won the nomination, and later won the election, Graham decided to support and defend him. Remember, at that time, Graham had reasoned that he should serve the new president for two reasons. First, because Trump held the nation's most powerful office

and would be making policy decisions that Graham wanted to influence. And second, Graham claimed that he owed Trump his allegiance because Trump had a mandate from the people. Now, four years later, Trump had lost his mandate and his office. McConnell, conversely, had been overwhelmingly re-elected to the Senate and to his post as Republican leader. If Graham truly revered democracy, he would advise Trump to make peace with McConnell. Instead, Graham demanded that McConnell make peace with Trump. Now that the principle of respecting democracy no longer justified submission to Trump, Graham discarded the principle.

Graham didn't revere the will of the people. He revered the will of Trump. Graham told his Republican colleagues that by staying in Trump's orbit, he was tempering the former president's behavior. Backstage, Graham told the same story to reporters who were writing books about this period. But as Graham continued to flatter and appease Trump, Trump didn't back away from his attacks on the rule of law. He became more aggressive.

On January 29, 2022, at a rally in Texas, Trump offered to pardon his militant supporters who had been convicted of crimes on January 6. If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6th. If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6th fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly. The next day, Trump proudly defended his unsuccessful scheme to veto the election results of 2020. In a written statement, Trump claimed that Vice President Mike Pence could have, and should have, quote, overturned the election unilaterally. Trump condemned a bill in Congress that would prohibit such an authoritarian move by any future vice president.

A week after Trump's comments about pardons and overturning the election, the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution of censure. It wasn't a censure of Trump. It was a censure of Cheney and another House Republican, Adam Kinzinger, for working with Democrats on a committee to investigate January 6th. The resolution declared that the RNC would, quote, immediately cease any and all support of Cheney and Kinzinger. The RNC agreed with Trump that the people who were under investigation for their roles on January 6th, or in various plots to overturn the election, were the true victims. The resolution defended these people as, quote, ordinary citizens engaged

in legitimate political discourse. McConnell spoke out against this bizarre resolution, but Graham defended it. Graham said the RNC was standing up, rightly, for the people who had gone to Trump's rally on January 6th. Graham said these people were just, quote, exercising their constitutional rights. During the summer of 2022, the House January 6th Committee, in a series of public hearings, exposed Trump's conspiracies to overturn the 2020 election.

The hearings showed that Trump had tried to coerce the Justice Department to declare the election corrupt. He had pressured state officials to, quote, find enough votes to keep him in power. He had told his militant supporters to march on the Capitol, knowing that many of them were armed. Then, for hours, he had sat in the White House, watching on TV, as the mob attacked Congress. Again and again, Trump had rebuffed entreaties to tell the mob

to go home. None of this moved Graham. On June 9th, as the hearings opened, Graham said there was no point in airing the evidence, because the hearings were just another political attack on Trump. This hearing's about trying to blame President Trump in a fashion to change the outcome of the midterms. If they were doing well as a party, they would be talking about their successes, not about January 6th. This is the most transparent effort I've seen since I've been in politics to change the subject from failed policies to something every American's made up their mind about. Later, after dozens of witnesses had testified about Trump's crimes, Graham dismissed the committee as, quote, a sham one-chamber tribunal. He portrayed the hearings as a partisan hit job,

even though, in fact, nearly all the witnesses were Republicans. This investigation would make the Soviet Union cringe, said Graham. Everybody on the committee has one goal. They want to get Trump. In August, six weeks after the committee documented Trump's role in the attack on the Capitol, Graham, for the second time, warned that any attempt to hold Trump accountable for his conduct might lead to violence by his supporters. When Trump left the White House in January 2021, two weeks after his coup attempt, he took hundreds of classified documents, apparently in violation of the law, to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

For a year and a half, despite being repeatedly asked to return all the documents, Trump failed to do so. In fact, according to a subsequent indictment, Trump deliberately obstructed the government's attempts to recover the documents. So, on August 8, 2022, while Trump was away, the FBI searched his estate. He asserted falsely that the estate was under siege, raided, and occupied by agents who, according to Trump, might have planted the documents. Graham joined Trump in smearing the FBI. He said the search was part of, quote, an endless effort to destroy Donald Trump. Then Graham went further. On August 28th, in an interview on Fox News with former Congressman Trey Gowdy, Graham warned against any attempt to prosecute the former president. the Clinton debacle, which you presided over and did a hell of a good job, there'll be riots in

the streets. And if they try to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement, they literally will be riots in the street. I worry about our country. Graham wasn't endorsing riots, but for the second time in two years, he was raising the prospect of violence to deter any legal action against Trump. In effect, Graham was exploiting the threat of more bloodshed, which, after the January 6th attack, was all too plausible. And Graham was laundering that threat into a high-minded rationale about keeping the peace. Without any explicit or implicit coordination, Graham had formed a symbiotic relationship

with Trump's most dangerous followers. They supplied the prospect of violence, and Graham used that prospect to intimidate public officials who might try to hold Trump accountable. As the midterm elections approached, Graham dialed up his rage. I want every liberal to be miserable come election night, he said. By now, Graham had become almost a clone of the man he had once condemned. Listen to Graham talking about Trump seven years earlier on September 8th, 2015. Beating on immigrants is like the oldest game in the book.

Donald Trump's world, you know, the illegal immigrant is going to rape your wife and steal your job. Over time, that doesn't work. Now listen to Graham on November 2nd, 2022. You know, democracy is not under attack. Our way of life is under attack, democracy's not under attack. Our way of life is under attack. Your family's under attack. We're being vetted by illegal immigrants. Graham also adopted Trump's tactic of misleading the public about election results.

After the polls closed on November 8, Graham suggested that if Republicans were to lose, the vote counts couldn't be trusted. Then he asserted, based on incomplete returns, that Republicans had won two key races in Arizona and Nevada. In a conference call, Graham claimed that if the election returns showed the Republican nominee losing in Nevada, quote, it's a lie. On November 15th, a week after the midterms, Trump announced that he would run to reclaim the presidency. In a speech, he said he would adopt China's policy of immediate one-day

trials followed by execution for anyone charged with selling drugs. Trump also pledged that in the name of public safety, he would send the National Guard into American cities, even if the elected leaders of those cities didn't want him to. Graham gave the speech a rave review. Then, on December 3rd, Trump called for the termination of constitutional rules that prevented him from seizing power. This was not an offhand remark. It was a written statement. Trump claimed that Twitter and other big tech companies had conspired with Democrats to defeat him in 2020, and therefore he should be immediately reinstated as president, or

at a minimum, the election should be redone. In the statement, Trump literally wrote, When reporters asked Graham about Trump's statement, Graham conceded that it was inappropriate, but he said it did not disqualify Trump from serving as president again. Graham complained that Trump's enemies were always trying to, quote, bend the rules to get Trump. On January 28, 2023, Trump came to South Carolina to announce his campaign leadership team in the state. Graham stood proudly beside him on the stage. Trump repeated that the 2020 election had been stolen, and he denounced law enforcement for prosecuting the insurrectionists of January 6.

But Trump had learned something from his time as president. What he had learned was that civil servants, government employees dedicated to the United States, not to him, had gotten in his way. In a second term, he would get rid of them. We're going to find the deep state actors who have burrowed into government, fire them and escort them from federal buildings and it'll go very quickly. When Trump finished his speech, Graham shook his hand and congratulated him.

Two days later, in an interview with Sean Hannity, Graham, who had said in 2016 that Republicans should nominate anyone but Trump, now proclaimed that only Trump could save America. Only Trump had, quote, scare the crap out of Mexico, said Graham. Only Trump had frightened America's allies in Europe. Graham sounded like a propagandist for an aspiring dictator. Only Trump could, quote, bring order out of chaos, he declared. And three times in the interview, Graham repeated, quote, there are no Trump policies without the man, Donald Trump. On the campaign trail, Trump delivered a stark message. If he were to regain power, he would resume the despotic ambitions of his first term. And he would go further.

There would be no apology for his coup attempt. Trump declared that the January 6th insurrectionists were the country's true patriots. He demanded the release of many who had been criminally charged or convicted. He said the members of the House January 6th Committee should be prosecuted for treason. Trump also claimed autocratic powers. He ruled out any attempt to hold him legally accountable for January 6th. As president, I have complete and total immunity, he said. He dismissed legal constraints on his authority to send the National Guard into cities. And in a speech to CPAC on March 4th, Trump promised to avenge his followers and to rule with an iron fist. In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today, I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed,

I am your retribution. I am your retribution. Not that it happened. Not that it happened. In foreign policy, Trump said he would use troops and military aid to extract wealth from other countries. Can't keep spending hundreds of billions of dollars protecting people that don't even like us. Now, you know, in business, if you did that, what you do is you put up the money and then you say, but listen, we own half your country in case you win. You know, you take a piece of the upside,

we get nothing. In fact, the opposite. We put up the money, and then after it's finished, assuming it's successful, let's say it's successful, they don't want to even talk to us. Nope, you have nothing to do with us. Get out of here! You have nothing. No, no. In business, you put up money. Seed money.

Call it whatever you want. You end up owning the country by the time it's over. In 2015, Graham had rejected these ideas, the lawlessness, the despotism, the demands for war crimes, as a menace to America and the world. But now, Graham saw only the advantages of having a strongman in power. At a press conference on April 5th, when a reporter asked Graham why Trump should be president again, especially after January 6th, Graham bragged that Trump had frightened other countries and could frighten them again. I had a front row seat to his presidency, said Graham, recalling the good old days. I was there.

Sometimes I wonder whether the Lindsey Graham of 2015 is still there, hidden somewhere inside the Lindsey Graham of today. Does he know somewhere in his mind that he lost his way? Is it possible to reach through his layers of self-deception and connect even briefly with the man he used to be? I never got the chance to try because he declined to be interviewed for this story. But one of Graham's former colleagues did get that chance. A few months ago, on March 20th, Graham sat down with Al Franken, the former Democratic senator from Minnesota, on The Daily Show. It was almost exactly seven years to the day after Graham had first joked on The Daily Show about whether Trump was poison. Franken asked Graham whether Trump had lost the 2020 election.

Graham conceded that he had. Franken mentioned Trump's corrupt pardons. He reminded Graham that Trump had been told repeatedly by advisers prior to January 6th that he had lost the election. Franken asked Graham how he could support the restoration of a president who, quote, allowed us to go through this violent insurrection. Graham didn't defend the lies, the pardons, or the insurrection. He just ignored those points. He argued that Trump had done what Graham wanted, quote, on the things that I care the most about, national security. And Graham posed his own question to Franken, premised on the crimes that liberals attributed to Trump and here's the question for you and

maybe others Trump's trying to come back I think he's got a better than good chance of winning the primary and a 50-50 chance of being president again And you got to ask yourself, now this is what we all came here for. So you got to ask yourself, how can that be? After seven years of defending and abetting Donald Trump, seven years of reducing the Republican Party to a vehicle for one man's power? Lindsey Graham thought that question should be addressed to somebody else. 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 Kuiper, and to Charlie Sykes.