What a sad and tragic epitaph for a once-wise man: ‘and Staunch Trump Ally.’
I’ve called Lindsey Graham a stand-up guy here before, and I’d really like to have reason to do so again.
The saddest thing, to me, about our senior senator’s sudden death is that I never got to say that about him again.
I had hoped something would happen to return him to good sense — the good sense that he still had just a year before I said that, when he said this:
If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) May 3, 2016
He was absolutely right. “We” — the Republican Party, he meant… was almost completely destroyed. The party of Lincoln — which all my life had frequently produced candidates that were better than those from the opposing party — was no more. The process was complete by 2014. More than that, the America that was founded as a monument to deliberative government lay in pieces in the acrimonious dust. But I’ve addressed that before; back to our subject at hand…
During the 2016 campaign, Graham played the role of the acid-tongued party jester, daring more than anyone to speak the truth about Trump, and do it in a way that got widely quoted. You may recall some of the things he said. Here’s one:
“You know how you make America great again?” Mr. Graham said in a CNN interview in 2015. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”
But that’s not the Lindsey Graham I appreciated most. It’s not why, in 2007, I called him a “stand-up guy.” It wasn’t for being a wiseacre. The world has plenty of those. It was for being an actual wise — and courageous — senator who in the years before American went mad, had distinguished himself for exercising nonpartisan judgment over and over. He was the guy you could depend on most to try to hold back the ill tides that brought about the disastrous things that were poised to destroy our country, from hyperpartisanship to xenophobia.
Of course, as the obituaries are saying, he was — with two of my other favorite senators in that time, John McCain and Joe Lieberman — one of the “Three Amigos,” who believed fervently that the strongest nation in the world was obligated to live up its global role since 1945. That meant standing up for liberal democracy and collective security, no matter how much that ticked off either the kind of Republicans who would embrace Trump’s advocacy of “America First,” or Democrats still deeply traumatized by Vietnam.
I was with him there, but I was just as proud of him for his activities as a gang member. I mean the Gang of 14 and the Gang of 8. (If you don’t remember what those were, click on the links.)
The Gang of 14 was about the way the Congress (and the country) was being torn apart by absurdly fierce, take-no-prisoners, partisan battles over judicial nominations. This had been getting worse and worse every year since about 1973, and the partisan nastiness was spoiling the country’s ability to deal with anything else. Graham was a leading member of the Gang, and the best at articulating its reason for being. He kept saying “elections have consequences,” and he proved that he meant it by backing Democratic nominees (assuming they found them objectively qualified) when there was a Democratic president.
Such an attempt — and in Graham’s own case, a reality — was based in belief in two things that had long been missing in the confirmation process: rationality, and a sense of proportion.
The Gang of 8 was just one instance of the most politically suicidal stand Graham ever took: trying to create a sensible, truly American, and workable immigration system. He did it right at the moment when his party was going into full-xenophobe mode — which of course is what created Trumpism, the rebirth of Know-Nothingism.
But he bravely stood up against the backlash that came his way over the next couple of years. I particularly recall the time when he was booed by the mob attending a South Carolina Republican Party gathering when he stood to speak. He just brushed it off with a surprising insouciance, waiting for those people to shut up so he could go on with his speech.
When was it that Lindsey Graham stopped standing up? When did he become the most lickspittle toady of Donald Trump? Apparently, a lot of people have trouble remembering. The New York Times this morning said, after mentioning Lindsey’s goading of Trump in 2016, “A decade later, though, he was regularly and effusively lauding Mr. Trump.”
Well, that’s true. But that wording makes it sound like a long, slow process over the course of a decade. It most certainly was not. It was sudden, and stunning. Of course, I remembered it slightly inaccurately myself — I thought it happened as soon as the 2016 election was over. It really occurred over the following year.
That quote at the top is from a Dec. 1, 2017 post headlined “Would the real Lindsey Graham please stand up?” But the signs of Lindsey’s crack-up had started earlier in the year. In October, I cited with horror a NYT piece headlined, “As Other Republican Senators Bolt, Lindsey Graham Cozies Up to Trump.” My words for it were, “What a disgusting headline about Lindsey Graham.” But I knew it was true. Here’s how I ended that post:
It’s really a shame to see this. Especially when Lindsey’s best buddy John McCain, as sick as he is, is determined to go down swinging against the guy Graham once quite rightly termed “the world’s biggest jackass.”
Because the thing is, he does know better. And therefore, he owes us better…
Several months earlier, there were signs Graham would be a Republican who would stand up to Trumpism with the same lack of personal regard as he had against isolationism, hyperpartisanship and xenophobia. But that was at an end.
It’s a tragedy for Lindsey Graham, and the country, that he never went back to being the man whom I had admired for very good reasons — before he let Trumpism overwhelm him.
Why did he do it? It’s an inadequate explanation, but the most convincing one to me is simple and personal: Lindsey Graham was a guy who had nothing to fill his life but being a United States senator. He had never married, and had no kids or grandkids. His parents had both died by the time he was 20. There was only his little sister, 11 when he was 20, whom he finished the process of raising. She has always expressed her appreciation to him for that, but she grew up and had her own family. I’m sure he stayed close, but there seems little doubt that the most consuming part of his life in recent decades has been in Washington. And it was certainly consuming. By the end, it seemed to be eating him alive.
Being not only a senator, but one of the most notable and quotable senators in Washington, was a tremendous addiction for a man with his sort of mind. How could he stand going back to S.C. and trying to build a new persona — maybe starting his own private law practice — as he was moving into his 70s? He had to stay in the Senate, or so he seemed to firmly believe.
Anyway, that’s my theory. It could be wrong. After all, he didn’t seem so terrified at losing his seat when he was infuriating so many in his party over immigration and judgeships. But something in him seems to have cracked as he realized that his party was no longer a party of ideas, but a cult with one main rule: Love Trump, or we hate you. He hadn’t seen anything like that before. (Neither had I, in this country.)
So what happens now? An anecdote…
A couple of days ago, a good friend who lives in my neighborhood called me and asked if I’d let him put an Annie Andrews sign in my yard. This was something that I hadn’t thought about, and I hesitated for a second or two, before remembering that this friend was someone who agreed to let me put a Russell Ott sign his yard two years ago. A this point I said “yes.”
I was out at the time, and when I came home, there it was.
This morning, a little before 9 a.m., that same friend called to tell me that Lindsey Graham was dead. He also expressed amazement that I hadn’t heard that, but I hadn’t. I do sleep sometimes.
A few minutes after that call, I went out and took down the “Annie” sign. Not for good, necessarily. I just took it down for two reasons:
- Respect for the dead. I’ve got one of those short flagpoles by my front door — the kind that hangs diagonally from a wall. There’s no way to lower it to half-staff. So I did this instead.
- I was supporting Andrews, even though I knew little about her, because I didn’t know anything bad about her, and since 2017, I have voted for any decent candidate who opposed Graham in a general election. But now, I wasn’t sure about who would be facing whom in the general. Henry McMaster will be appointing a replacement for Lindsey, and then there will be a special Republican primary. So there are variables.
Now, do I think that in this age of Trumpism, I will like either Henry’s appointee, or the winner of that special primary? No, probably not. But maybe the fallen GOP will surprise me with an unknown — somebody I will have to learn about just when I’m doing what I hadn’t really done before that phone call Friday (which is what made me hesitate about the sign) — study Annie Andrews as a candidate.
I need some time — the thing Lindsey didn’t get enough of, in the sense of enough to return to being the man he had been — to figure this out.
Happier times. Now all three amigos are gone.
