If Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is any indication, the Republican Party is far from purging itself of former President Donald Trump, and may even be emboldened in its praise of the ex-president after he was acquitted on Saturday of inciting an insurrection of the U.S. Capitol.
“We don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of taking back the majority without Donald Trump,” Graham said during a Fox interview on Tuesday night. “If you don’t get that, you’re just not looking. He was a hell of a president on all of the things that conservatives really believe in, it was a consequential presidency.”
The adulation for the former president comes days after the Trump was acquitted by the Senate of a charge that he had incited the mob who stormed the Capitol last month…
Graham conceded on Tuesday that while McConnell was “indispensable” to Trump as far as pushing conservative judges into courts and advancing a major tax cut through a narrow GOP majority, Trump remains “the most dominant figure in the Republican Party.”
“I’m sorry what happened on January 6th. He will get his fair share of blame,” Graham said of Trump in a brief mention of the riot. “But to my Republican colleagues in the Senate, let’s try to work together — realize that without President Trump, we are never going to get back into the majority.”
“And to President Trump, you are going to have to make some changes for you to reach your potential,” Graham said without elaborating on what those changes might include.
Lol. “Trump is a handful.” I guess that’s one way of putting it. Perhaps a dangerous demagogic, violent, white nationalist is more to the point.
Does anyone, especially Trump, listen to this fool? I guess portraying himself as the peacemaker between the rump GOP establishment and Dear Leader makes him “relevant.” Maybe it does. That makes him more pathetic.
And it’s not benign. It has the effect of continuing the normalization of Trump even after his obscene performance in the election aftermath. It’s just politics, Graham says, no big deal. Republicans need Trump so it’s fine. And sure, Trump has to “make some changes” which is hysterical since Trump doesn’t change. Ever. But Graham knows that.
Basically, he’s just out there insisting that Trump’s massive failure of a presidency was actually a huge success because he held the pen that nominated judges chosen by the Federalist Society and signed a tax cut bill passed by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. He literally did nothing else even they can consider positive and the wrecking ball he took to foreign policy and national security along with the grotesque performance with the pandemic make him the worst president in history by any measure. I guess you can call that “consequential” but it isn’t something I’d be proud to embrace.
This reminds me of another of the so-called reasonable mavericks, Dan Crenshaw, R-Tx. He made his reputation as a “normie” Republican when he went on Saturday Night Live to graciously receive an apology from Pete Davidson who had insulted him on the show. We all gave him plaudits for being a decent person since that’s so unusual in today’s GOP. But Crenshaw is yet another of these Lindsey Graham phonies.
Today, Charlie Sykes exposes Crenshaw as the shameless hypocrite he is and Bill Kristol (!) tweeted this:
(No, I have no idea what’s going on with Bill Kristol but … whatever.) Anyway, I don’t think he’s exactly right there. What Crenshaw (and Graham) are doing is is something different than just having it both ways. They are also further normalizing this shameless dissonance into normal political discourse. Crenshaw and Graham aren’t just throwing the red meat to the MAGAs on Newsmax and Parler and then going on CNN and sounding reasonable. They are doing both things in the same media, running the messages together, and mixing the MAGA lunacy with reason in such a way that it starts to meld into mainstream discourse.
Trump mainstreamed MAGA, ofcourse. He was right out in the open. But nobody ever pegged him as some kind of savvy operator who was just doing politics, as Graham is trying to present himself today. Neither did anyone ever think that Trump was a reasonable guy underneath it all who just said some crazy stuff to appease the base as Crenshaw is doing. This is a form of mainstreaming in which keeping the rabid MAGA’s riled up is just smart politics while you reassure the suburban women that you really don’t mean it.
Mitch McConnell has more or less done this all along, of course, in order to get his tax cuts and judges which was all he figured he’d be able to do with Trump. But his recent behavior suggests that he thinks the party needs a dramatic split from the Trumpists to drain the infection and compete in the future. These other guys are trying to finesse the split.
I kind of doubt any of them are going to be successful. It’s still all about Trump. We’ll soon see if he still has that pull on his cult and if he does, these people will all still be at his mercy. If it fades, those who took such a public role in defending him or trying to walk the fine line will not be the ones who profit.