There’s no denying that there were quite a few Republicans who made pretty staggering 180s when it came to their opinion of Donald Trump. Ahead of the 2016 election, many members of the GOP publicly trashed him and some even fought against him, only to tuck tail and fall in line the moment Donald secured the election and took office. And, you best believe, they stayed in line throughout his entire 4-year term — many of them even remain loyal after he lost to President Biden, truly for no good reason at this point.
However, in my opinion, there is no Republican out there to flip their entire opinion and loyalty worse than South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.
As I’m sure you recall, Graham was one of Donald Trump’s biggest critics ahead of the 2016 election, once going so far as to refer to the reality TV wash-up turned presidential candidate as “a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot.” Yet, almost the exact moment that Trump won the election, Graham morphed into a new person in front of our very eyes — one even worse than he was before.
Upon Donald’s inauguration, Graham disintegrated into one of the most pathetic Trump sycophants we had the displeasure of knowing. The man had no shame. So much so that he was quite literally dubbed “Lapdog Lindsey.”
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Even now that Trump has been evicted from the White House, it doesn’t appear as though Lindsey has become any less devoted to the disgraced former guy. And it’s apparently really starting to bug his friends.
A new report from the New York Times reveals that some of Graham’s closest friends are expressing their dismay and disappointment at the high-profile Republican senator’s devout devotion to Donald Trump, after publicly lambasting him not that long ago.
The report does note that Graham has, in fact, had the occasional harsh word or two for Donald Trump over the years, but that it never seems to stick. In the end, Graham always returns to get back in line to serve the shameful ex-president — despite the negative effect his devotion has had not only on his own reputation but on the GOP’s as a whole.
“Mr. Graham’s reaffirmed devotion has come to represent something more remarkable: his party’s headlong march into the far reaches of Trumpism,” the Times report reads. “That the senator is making regular Palm Beach pilgrimages as supplicant to an exiled former president who inspired the Capitol attack and continues to undermine democratic norms underscores how fully his party has departed from the traditional conservative ideologies of politicians like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and Mr. Graham’s close friend John McCain.”
Graha, himself admitted in a recent interview that he is trying to help Trump recoup his image, stating, “What I say to him is, ‘Do you want January the 6th to be your political obituary? Because if you don’t get over it, it’s going to be.'”
Evidently, friends of Graham from both sides of the political fence are sympathetic to the senator’s loyalty to a president who managed to lose the White House and both branches of Congress in his four-year term, but at the same time lament the fact that Graham appears to have a complete disregard for the damage his own reputation is taking.
The ghostwriter of Graham’s autobiography, Mark Salter, said, “Trump is terrible for the country, he’s terrible for the Republican Party and, as far as I’m concerned, he’s terrible for Lindsey.”
Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin says he considers Lindsey a very close friend but warned, “Lindsey is playing high-risk politics. He is pinning the hopes of the Republican Party on a very unstable person.”
The Times report notes that since Trump’s brutal election loss back in November, Graham has appeared to try to play both sides of the field, with the report reading, “In the days following the election, he scrambled to stay on Mr. Trump’s good side, publicly urging him not to concede until he had exhausted all his legal challenges and listening calmly on late-night phone calls as the president raged about a stolen election. He even wrote a $500,000 check to aid Mr. Trump’s legal defense.”
“But privately he was already reaching out to Mr. Biden and counseling Mr. Trump to ramp down his rhetoric. And he steadfastly refused to appear at news conferences with Mr. Trump’s legal team or repeat their false claims — which annoyed the president and infuriated his son Donald Jr., always a Graham skeptic, retweeting stories with a “#whereslindsey” hashtag when he felt the senator was not standing up for his father,” the Times goes on to note.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via screen capture
