With few notable exceptions—Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the drunk gremlin inside Louie Gohmert who controls his mind and wakes him up when he’s about to drown in shallow bowls of SpaghettiOs—congressional Republicans all know damned well that Donald Trump is a dangerous liar.
Yet for some reason, or combination of reasons—cowardice, blackmail, lust for power, free omelets—South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has been a Trump super-sycophant. But it’s unlikely that Graham’s 2016 assessments of Trump—including “I think he's a kook; I think he's crazy; I think he's unfit for office”—ever really changed. What changed was Lindsey’s semi-gelatinous backbone, which miraculously—and almost overnight—transformed into a thin slurry of dead spinal tissue.
As if we needed more evidence that Sen. Graham is slouching toward fascism with his eyes wide open, there’s new reporting about his true feelings toward Adderall Hitler.
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In their upcoming book The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021, authors Peter Baker and Susan Glasser recall how they met with Mr Graham outside a Washington DC steakhouse less than 48 hours after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry into whether Mr Trump had extorted the president of Ukraine in a now-infamous July 2019 phone call. The Independent obtained a copy ahead of its 20 September publication date.
Standing on the sidewalk on 19th Street in Northwest Washington, Mr Graham bragged about his access to Mr Trump and told the husband-and-wife author duo about Mr Trump’s boasts regarding his closeness with evangelical pastors who’d met with him the day before. He said Mr Trump had told him: “Those f***ing Christians love me.”
“Those fucking Christians love me” is one of the Trumpiest quotes I’ve ever read, honestly. I’m sure he uttered that without the barest whiff of irony.
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Of course, Graham, who voted against convicting Trump in our fugazi führer’s first impeachment trial, nevertheless admitted to the authors that he knew who Trump really was:
“He’s a lying motherf***er,” Mr Graham said, adding the caveat that Mr Trump was also “a lot of fun to hang out with.”
Well, if he’s fun to hang out with, I guess that makes everything he’s done—from blackmailing foreign heads of state to inciting an insurrection to stashing highly classified government documents in random TrapperKeepers in his basement—totally excusable. “Gang, meet Vladimir. He’s committing mass genocide as we speak, but check it out, he brought Pocky!” But Graham didn’t lean on delicious Japanese cookie sticks to justify his defense of Trump. What he actually used as justification for his loyalty is far worse: MAGA devotion to the GOP leader. “[Trump] could kill 50 people on our side and it wouldn’t matter,” he said.
I used to think that if this nation were ever faced with a credible fascistic threat, both major parties—and the mainstream media—would move heaven and Earth to excise the cancer. Instead, they’re leveraging this clear and present danger to Western democracy in order to marginally increase their political influence and sell more books.
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Might have been nice of Baker and Glasser to expose this bit of Graham duplicity years ago, before he helped normalize Goofball Satan and his ongoing quest to turn America into a fascist Cracker Barrel. But hey, if this country is going to irrevocably transform itself into a dystopian hellscape anyway, might as well make a few bucks off it and save it for the book, right?
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