Perhaps no one in American politics has been more exposed in the Trump era as a craven worm than Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Yes, for most of his career in the Senate, Graham was just a warmongering doofus playing second fiddle to another warmongering doofus, John McCain. But in the last four years, he has gone from an anyone-but-Trump conservative whose phone number Trump blasted out to his millions of Twitter followers, to a loyal lapdog who will back anything Trump wants so long as it’s not something truly unacceptable, such as a smaller military presence in the Middle East.
Today, Graham admitted in a press conference that in 2016, he encouraged McCain to hand over the infamous Steele dossier to the FBI. If you can recall way back to last week before the Mueller report was submitted to the Department of Justice, Trump has spent a significant amount of time recently slamming McCain, who is very dead, partially because of this dossier and his decision to hand it over to the FBI. “That’s not the nicest thing to do,” Trump told a crowd of bewildered tank factory workers in Ohio last week, in the middle of an extended riff about all of the times McCain had wronged him.
According to Graham, he told Trump this weekend at Mar-a-Lago that McCain “deserves better” than Trump’s incessant attacks against the guy, who is, as previously noted, dead. And while Graham said that he was “very direct” with Trump about all of this, it’s notable that he did so, you know, after the Mueller report was completed. A true profile in courage.
As if it couldn’t get any worse, there was this whole thing. Per CNN:
On Monday, Graham said: “You know, I don’t care if President Trump likes John McCain or not, I do. I like President Trump. John McCain is one of my closest friends in life, not just in politics, I want President Trump to be successful. He’s been very good to me in the sense he’s let me in his world. And I have some access to the President about things that matter to me and the country and I appreciate that, and I want him to be successful.”
Graham said McCain is “one of his best friends in life.” Graham said Trump asked the South Carolina senator: “He really was your friend?”
“I said, ‘yeah, he really was my friend,’” Graham said.
Just a boy who loves both of his friends and wishes they would stop fighting. (Well, one of them, anyway. Because the other one is dead.)