Lindsey Graham is Trump’s most vital friend
Lindsey Graham may be the most misunderstood figure in Donald Trump’s Washington. For the #Resistance, the Republican senator from South Carolina is the lickspittle who abandoned his principles for access to a dangerous populist. For the populists, Mr Graham is an interloper, worming his way into the president’s inner circle and persuading him to keep fighting the endless wars Trump campaigned against.
Neither version, however, quite captures the role that Mr Graham plays in Mr Trump’s chaotic presidency. He is neither a Svengali nor a suck-up. Rather, he is an honest friend, willing to do something few others in Mr Trump’s inner circle will do: Tell him when he is wrong.
That is the Mr Graham that emerges from Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage. In scene after scene, Mr Graham is depicted as the Trump confidante urging him to step back from the ledge. Take Mr Trump’s response to former FBI director Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. As Mr Mueller’s final report makes clear, Mr Trump tried many times to have him fired, but his staff never complied. Mr Graham also pleaded with the president to back off.
Woodward reports that also Mr Graham confronted Mr Trump at the beginning of the Russia investigation, telling him there was only “one thing that would turn me against you, and that is if you actually worked with the Russians.” Mr Trump insisted that he didn’t. “I believe you,” Mr Graham said. Mr Graham then told Mr Trump the truth: Mr Mueller is the only person who can clear you. It appears that Mr Graham’s counsel was effective. Mr Trump didn’t fire Mr Mueller. And although his final report found examples of attempted obstruction of his investigation and contacts between his campaign and Russia, Mr Mueller also stated that he found no evidence of a conspiracy between the president’s campaign and the Russian interference operation.
Mr Graham today leads the Senate’s investigation into the FBI’s probe of Mr Trump and Russia. The president’s opponents dismiss Mr Graham’s efforts as an attempt to curry favour with Mr Trump. They shouldn’t. When Mr Mueller was named special prosecutor in 2017, Mr Graham introduced legislation to prevent the president from firing him. He counselled the president to allow Mr Mueller to finish his work. When Mr Trump pressed him in 2019 to issue a subpoena of former president, Barack Obama, Mr Graham publicly said it was a bad idea, leading Mr Trump to temporarily break contact.
Just as Mr Graham is not the sycophant the left paints him to be, he also defies the warmonger caricature forwarded by populists such as Tucker Carlson of Fox News. Woodward reveals that Mr Graham repeatedly counselled Mr Trump against the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. Mr Graham warned him that Iran would retaliate and that Mr Trump could find himself launching an attack inside Iranian territory, risking a major war. Mr Trump responded, “He deserves it,” noting intelligence reporting that Soleimani was planning major attacks.
Mr Graham also emerged as an honest friend this summer following the police killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd. Privately, Mr Graham worried that Mr Trump’s response to the protests and riots that followed Floyd’s killing was in the style of the infamous segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama. In a series of phone calls in June, Woodward reports, Mr Graham bluntly told the president that if the election were held today, he would lose. He urged the president instead to take a three-pronged approach to his campaign: Issue an executive order on police reform; propose a massive infrastructure bill, and support legislation to protect some 700,000 undocumented young adults who had been brought to the country as children. Mr Trump didn’t take Mr Graham’s advice. That is often the way it goes with Mr Trump. As the tell-all books published in 2020 document, the president believes that he is his own best counsel. Nonetheless, it’s worth asking: Would the republic be in better shape if Mr Graham had chosen to appease Mr Trump’s resistance, and said publicly the kinds of things he told him in private?
I am not sure it would. Mr Trump won the 2016 election. If he were removed from office through a flawed and abusive FBI investigation, millions of Americans would have viewed their votes as nullified. Mr Graham, who campaigned bitterly against Mr Trump during the primaries, understood this too. Had Mr Graham followed the lead of his late friend, John McCain, maybe there would have been one more Republican vote for Mr Trump’s impeachment. But it would not have been enough to remove him from office. Instead, Mr Graham made a choice: He is trying to work with the president we have to persuade him to be the president we need.