One of the oddest, and saddest, cases in the Republican party has been the 180 degree turn made by Lindsey Graham. As few as ten years ago Lindsey was known as a good guy in Washington and especially on Capitol Hill. New interns might joke about Lindsey and get rebuked by the office, “No, we don’t like the way he votes, but Lindsey is a great guy, you will see.
We doubt the “great guy” thing had anything to do with John McCain. When McCain was alive Graham was more of a moderate but Lindsey was a great guy on his own. It took McCain dying to make Lindsey hardcore in his positions, but it took Trump to make him an ass.
Lindsey carried Trump’s water for at least the last three years of Trump’s turn. Lindsey would support Trump’s position on everything but Syria and a few other foreign affairs. But with respect to domestic policy and scandals, Lindsey was right there, helping Trump navigate Washington. Lindsey should be the last person Stephanie Grisham should be blasting in her book. Unless she is blasting everything about the term, even people that helped Trump, which, she must be doing.
She references Lindsey as a “hanger on.”
In the memoir, Grisham lumps the senator in with “hangers-on” who sought to be a part of Trump’s orbit, criticizing Graham for his numerous visits to the former president’s properties in an attempt to score free “goodies…”
“It struck me that he was using Trump to mop up the freebies like there was no tomorrow (seems that he still is). He would show up at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster to play free rounds of golf, stuff his face with free food, and hang out with Trump and his celebrity pals,” Grisham wrote.
Didn’t everybody? Maybe not to Lindsey’s degree, but Lindsey did more for Trump.
“…Of all the various characters and hangers-on in Trump World, Lindsey was one of the weirder ones, and that’s saying something. He seemed almost schizophrenic,” she wrote. “Some days he would be one of Trump’s most vigorous defenders; other days he was a harsh critic. People around the president would tell him that he couldn’t trust Graham, but Trump seemed to like him for whatever reason and I often wondered if he sought Lindsey’s approval,,.”
… Yes, well – Stephanie, the entire administration looked and acted schizophrenic, and so it is not that surprising that Lindsey would seem to be, too.
As for not trusting Lindsey, we suspect that Trump trusted Lindsey 100% when it came to scandals. Trump needed a powerful senator to contain his constant issues, McConnell was the one that might have drifted in positions. But as for Lindsey? It took recognizing the validity of the vote for Lindsey to depart from Trump and that was only to save democracy itself.’