On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published profiles of U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who made a run at the presidency as well in 2016. In our original profile, we talked about his background as a career military reservist and lawyer who is always spoiling for a war that he never seems to give much thought as to the why or how it will be fought, just that we should ABSOLUTELY fight it. Sen. Graham also is prolifically paranoid, worrying about terror threats both foreign and domestic, from roaming gangs after a hurricane that would require the citizenry to be armed with automatic weapons, or that every nation in the Middle East from Iran, to Iraq, to Syria has developed a nuclear weapon. He also justifies the permanent detainment of people at Guantanamo Bay based off the precedent set by internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, which is a pretty dark chapter of American history to use as a guideline, while claiming that Hilary Clinton “got away with murder” during the Benghazi attacks, acting like she was in on the attack on her own friend, Ambassador Chris Stevens. Oh, and speaking of his criticism of Hillary Clinton, he tried criticizing her about her usage of an e-mail server by boasting that he had never written an e-mail (because that’s exactly the sort of tech-savvy guy that should be president). Oh, and he later compared that to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, because e-mails are like getting a blowie from an intern, apparently.
Anyway, during Graham’s run for the presidency in 2016, we covered how he admirably tried defending his amigo, Sen. John McCain’s service record to insults from Donald Trump, and for his trouble, he had his cell phone number given out by Trump, publicly. Sen. Graham’s response was then to release a campaign video of himself destroying his cell phone with several implements (rather than just get his number changed). Graham has frequently been caught lying about facts surrounding 9/11 to shape immigration policy, and through the presidential debates (at least, the “kid’s table” debate he was in because his poll numbers were that awful) continued fear-mongering, using every question about any topic to segue into a discussion of ISIS and declaring, “The world is a battlefield and radical Islam is everywhere.” His response to the terror attacks in Paris, was to insist the United States send 10,000 ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, warning that “there’s a 9/11 coming”. A short time later, though, after Democrats produced some common sense gun legislation, that anyone who is found to be on a terror watch list during a background check should not be allowed to purchase a firearm or explosives (which they could use to carry out a terror attack)… well, Lindsey Graham loves the Second Amendment way more than he hates terrorism, as he voted against it. On two occasions.
Now, here’s the thing about FRED and Lindsey Graham… he’s a lot like his old friend John McCain. By which we mean, he’ll pretend to be far more moderate when he has designs on higher office. Around 2015, we saw that more chill Sen. Graham, who would admist the Republican National Commitee “couldn’t run a one-car funeral” after the clusterf*** of a debate plan they had for 2016. Or the time he was speaking before the Republican Jewish Coalition and flat-out admitted that the conservative obsession with being ultra-pro-life was out of hand, because “If you are going to tell a woman who has been raped she has to carry the child of a rapist, you’re losing most Americans.” Yeah, that happened. And how surreal was it to see Lindsey Graham of all people defend peaceful Muslims from the sort of ideas Donald Trump was putting forth, and saying, “Leave the faith alone, go after the radicals that kill us all.” Who was that man? Where had he been for the past twelve years? He actually compared the options of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz as potential presidential nominees as good of an option as being poisoned or being shot, and by February 2016, he admitted the GOP had gone “bats*** crazy” for voting for Donald Trump, and adding “If you kill Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you.” After Donald Trump started making racist statements towards a federal judge of Mexican descent, Sen. Graham advised his fellow members of the GOP to unendorse him, saying, “if anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it”. Sadly, they didn’t heed his advice, began saying things about Trump like, “No one knows where the bottom is at.” Similarly, we don’t know that there’s a bottom for how low Lindsey will go.
This pattern continued through 2017, as after Donald Trump continually praised Vladimir Putin, Graham remarked, “This election makes me want to move to Canada.” He responded to Donald Trump’s deranged claims about “widespread voter fraud”, telling the public, “I don’t know what he is talking about. If he has evidence, bring it forward. If he doesn’t, he shouldn’t say things like that. He’s gotta realize he’s just not a normal person anymore. He’s not a billionaire TV star — he’s the president of the United States. His words really resonate.” Sen. Graham chided any of his Republican colleagues who might be defending Russia’s hacking of the DNC or their efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections, saying “you are not a patriot” if you celebrate such a thing. He criticized Trump for making a ridiculous claim that President Obama had done “wire-tapps” to his phones, calling on him to apologize or “his credibility will suffer”. On July 9th, 2017, after Donald Trump announced on Twitter that he’s contemplating a joining cyber-security agency WITH Vladimir Putin and Russia, Graham comments, “It’ s not the dumbest idea, but it’s pretty close.” Graham gave a less than subtle hint to Donald Trump about how to respond to white supremacists carrying out a terror attack in Charlottesville, to “do more” and to make sure to “dissuade these groups that he’s their friend”. He defended bother Robert Mueller and A.G. Jeff Sessions from Trump’s attacks on Twitter.
However… all good things must come to an end. Just when we thought that perhaps Senator Lindsey Graham might be the last Republican with a conscience… well, we got too close to Graham having to defend his U.S. Senate seat in a GOP Primary in a red state like South Carolina in 2020… and his heel turn came due. And when it arrived, it was pretty f***ing hard to miss. It was in the midst of the hearings to confirm Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh that Graham snapped back hard to the right, digging in on conspiracy theories, and defending an admitted drunk and alleged rapist in a near-spittle-projecting tirade playing out across live cable news broadcasts. He blew off protesters trying to relate their own experiences with sexual assault, coldly telling them, “Go to the cops” rather than stop and listen to them.
Since that day, Graham has been relentlessly partisan, and suckling at the teat of Trump whenever possible, because he’s so loyal to his old friend John McCain that he didn’t even let the body get cold before selling out. He’ll argue against gun control, claiming he needs an AR-15 to “fend off looters during a hurricane”, and spending most of the summer of 2019 lying his ass off about the Trump administration’s concentration camps that hold immigrants, saying “I don’t care if they stay for 400 days” (the legal allowed holding time for undocumented immigrants to be held per the law is 90 days) and for whatever reason, he wanted to make it easier for the Trump administration to keep children locked in cages.
Perhaps the most damning description of Lindsey Graham’s political personality has come from former Republican and former campaign manager for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, Steve Schmidt, who called Graham a “pilot fish”.
”The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers around a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump is the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”
The capitulation continued in 2020, as Graham voted against witnesses being allowed in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, effectively making it a “trial”, and then voted to acquit him only days later, in spite of the mountain of evidence showing that he solicited foreign assistance in the 2020 elections. On the fourth day of the impeachment trial, Sen. Graham told reporters that there should be an investigation of HUNTER BIDEN for HIS dealings in Ukraine, instead.
He was genuinely surprised that calling the incoming president to say, “aw shucks, I didn’t mean it” about all the election fraud lies and attacks on Hunter to appease Trump supporter resulted in Joe Biden telling him to pound sand. And, isn’t it just like the pilot fish to try and attach himself to the most powerful guy?
But back to those election fraud lies… on November 6th, 2020: Three days after the presidential election, Lindsey Graham was on Fox News with Sean Hannity and was open to the suggestion that Pennsylvania’s state legislators should ignore the will of the people and just declare Donald Trump the winner of the state’s electoral votes, even though Biden won by over 80,000 votes. On November 9th, 2020: Six days after the presidential election, Graham went back on Fox News to spread further lies about election fraud with Maria Bartiromo, claiming “a lot of shenanigans” happened. Ten days after the election, on November 13th, 2020: Sen. Graham believed his own bulls*** enough to call Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to try to convince him to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential vote there, which ends up putting him under investigation for soliciting a crime.
And therein is where he very much f***ed up. More on that in a minute.
On January 6th, Lindsey Graham was chuffed enough that he called the White House and told them he and several colleagues would be pressing for invoking the 25th Amendment if Donald Trump did not condemn the attackers on the Capitol, and the next day, Graham spoke after the failed coup attempt carried out by domestic terrorists loyal to Donald Trump fizzled out, defended the election results and certification of the electoral college vote, and called for a massive investigative effort to make sure those responsible were all found, prosecuted and held responsible….
Graham is, above all things, a craven little s***. He flipped on everything he said in his Jan. 7th speech and started backpedaling within days of these words leaving his mouth. He was on Twitter arguing against any attempts to impeach Donald Trump for inciting his followers to attack the Capitol and attempt to hang Vice President Mike Pence in a violent coup attempt. By January 17th, 2021, he was trying to lay blame it on Nancy Pelosi for having inadequate security set up around the Capitol (Pelosi of course gets no say into how much of a force the Capitol Police have present). Graham , frothing with rage, was on Fox news in February, threatening Democrats that if they called any witnesses in a second impeachment trial, it will be “opening a Pandora’s box” and he would call witnesses they wouldn’t like as well. Days after he voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial, Graham said the quiet part out loud and told Sean Hannity that “the Republican Party doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell without Donald Trump” in the mid-term elections. He was even willing to give Trump praise on command, immediately giving him a metaphorical tongue bath when asked to assess his golf skills for reporters when Trump dialed him up mid-interview to prove that point.
Just… we’re going to start with a timeline for what’s left:
- February 25th, 2021: Sen. Graham argues with the CEO of Costco about why he would pay his employees more than the current minimum wage of $7.25 and seems generally baffled about why paying employees an actual livable wage would instill loyalty and productivity from them.
- March 6th, 2021: Lindsey Graham votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he can’t be bothered to care if people need financial assistance during a pandemic.
- March 28th, 2021: Graham goes on Fox News with Chris Wallace, and begins claiming gangs would come to his house last while looting during a natural disaster because they would know he owns an AR-15.
- April 25th, 2021: Lindsey Graham claims there is no problem with systematic racism in the United States, arguing that it’s not there because Kamala Harris is currently the vice-president.
- May 7th, 2021: Sen. Graham goes on Fox News (again) to throw Congresswoman Liz Cheney under the bus for failing to adequately support Donald Trump after he incited a mob to attack their workplace.
- June 9th, 2021: Graham goes on Fox News to try to spread the conspiracy theory that Covid-19 was deliberately released by China after being created in a lab, and that if that’s the case, it would somehow remove all blame from Donald Trump for his terrible Covid-19 response over the last year of his presidency.
- July 16th, 2021: Lindsey Graham puts out one of the dumbest posts on Twitter of the month, claiming that he was willing to “go to war” in defense of… Chik-Fil-A.
- July 27th, 2021: Sen. Graham goes on Fox News and claims that crime rates were down because gun control was not as strict, and ownership had gone up. Former Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele fact-checked him, pointing out the murder rate in South Carolina had gone up 25% in the past year.
- August 10th, 2021: Lindsey Graham votes against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
- October 5th, 2021: Sen. Graham meets with Republicans back home in South Carolina, and after encouraging them to get the Covid-19 vaccine, is raucously booed.
- December 14th, 2021: Graham votes against raising the debt ceiling, jeopardizing the United States’ credit rating.
- January 6th, 2022: President Biden makes remarks on the anniversary of January 6th about the lives lost that day, and Lindsey Graham dares to respond by claiming Biden was “politicizing” the violence of that day.
- February 2nd, 2022: At one of Donald Trump’s hate rallies, he floats the idea of pardoning all of the attackers from January 6th, a move that Graham responds with an understatement by calling it “inappropriate”. Trump then gets on social media to rail against Graham, and declares that he’s a “RINO”. Y’know, for not being willing to defend open sedition and an attack by domestic terrorists to go without consequences.
- February 28th, 2022: Sen. Graham votes against the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have established a right to physicians to perform abortions to save their patients’ lives.
- March 4th, 2022: Lindsey Graham starts opening calling for someone, anyone, in Russia to assassinate Vladimir Putin, who yes, while an evil bastard, YOU DON’T CALL FOR THE ASSASSINATION OF FOREIGN LEADERS.
- March 30th, 2022: Graham votes against putting the extremely qualified nominee, Judge Kentanji Brown-Jackson, onto the Supreme Court. This after he spent her confirmation hearings berating her and interrupting her answers to questions with more questions (seemingly just looking for “revenge” for how the Kavanaugh hearings went).
- May 26th, 2022: Sen. Graham votes against the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, because at this point, domestic terror is a policy plank of authoritarian Republicans.
- August 8th, 2022: Sen. Graham is reprimanded by the Senate for directly impugning a colleague, Sen. Maggie Hassan, calling her “deceitful” and “dishonest” during debate.
Due to Lindsey Graham winning re-election in 2020, we had thought he would remain in office theoretically until at least 2026. But then again, he’s currently getting raked over the coals for having interfered with Georgia’s counting of votes in the 2020 election, and while he was trying to pretend his phone calls to pressure officials to declare Trump won Georgia were in his official duties as a Senator, the judge in the case ain’t having that nonsense, and made him honor a subpoena.
We don’t know how exactly this plot thread from the 2020 election gets tied up, but if it trips up Graham enough to put him in jail, we’d be elated.