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He is one of Trump’s closest allies. But it was not always like this. Here’s Lindsey Graham’s story.
Lindsey Graham supports Trump through thick and thin. It has not always been this way. Photo: Patrick Semansky / AP
If you’ve heard of Lindsey Graham lately, it’s probably at the same time as US President Donald Trump.
When the president’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, were tough on Republican leaders who did not support their father’s allegations of voter fraud, Graham responded quickly. He pledged just over 4.5 million crowns to the demands of the Trump campaign.
Tuesday, Graham’s bad weather. It may seem that his seemingly endless loyalty to Trump has contributed to this.
The senator is said to have interfered with the ongoing vote counting in Georgia. According to Republican leader Ben Raffensperger, who has ultimate responsibility for counting votes in the state, Graham hinted that Raffensperger should try to cast votes. Such an accusation has caused a stir in the United States.
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The man with the soft southern dialect is considered one of the Republican heavyweights. Today he is chairman of the Senate Justice Commission. But the road to the top of the party has been full of surprising twists.
Lindsey Graham dreamed of becoming governor from the beginning. Instead, it was Congress. It has been sitting there since 1992. Photo: Hannah McKay / Pool Reuters / NTB
He dreamed from the beginning of becoming governor
The South Carolina politician will turn 66 next summer. Neither of his parents finished high school. And although Graham announced that he would become governor from the ninth grade, at the time it was mostly a joke. Write this in your autobiography.
He has a law degree and tragedy struck him when he was a student. The mother died first. Soon after, his father also died. Then Graham was left in charge of his 13-year-old sister.
Graham was a lawyer in the Air Force between 1982 and 1988. He also spent a few years in West Germany. In 1992, he won his first election and ended up in the House of Representatives. He remained there until he was elected a senator in 2002. Since then, Graham has served as a senator in South Carolina.
This year he was re-elected for six new years after his toughest election campaign in a long time.
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John McCain, on the left, was a highly respected politician. In 2008, he was the Republican presidential candidate, but lost to Barack Obama. Behind him is Lindsey Graham. The two were close friends. McCain died in August 2018. Photo: Jim Young / Reuters / NTB
McCain’s best friend
In many ways, it is Graham’s political alliances that have defined him as a politician.
Well, Donald Trump. Before, John McCain.
Lindsey Graham has called McCain one of her closest friends. The two formed for many years the backbone of what many considered the more moderate part of the Republican Party.
McCain died of a brain tumor in 2018. He was a war hero and a politician that many Americans respected. But the current president of the country was not among McCain’s supporters.
When asked about McCain’s efforts in the Vietnam War in 2015, Trump commented that he “prefers people who were not captured.” The senator was held captive in Hanoi for five and a half years. Trump also continued his criticism of McCain after the senator’s death.
With such statements about Graham’s best friend, Graham’s loyalty to Trump is surprising.
The situation becomes even stranger if you look at what the senator himself has said about the president.
In Trump’s throat
In 2015, Graham ran for president. Then he called Trump a racist and thought he did not represent Republicans.
Graham withdrew his own candidacy before the first ballot was cast. But he received no criticism from Trump. Before the 2016 election, the senator said Trump was not fit to be president. He was a “cook,” an American term for curling.
Trump also didn’t talk about Graham. In the summer of 2015, Trump called Graham an idiot and shared his cell phone number with the audience at an election rally.
And when Trump, just before the 2016 election, threatened not to accept the result if he lost, Graham came out with criticism.
– If he loses, it will not be because the system is “fixed” but because he failed as a candidate, he wrote on Twitter.
Found common interest in golf
But after Trump’s election victory, Graham turned around. In 2017, he criticized the media for calling Trump a “cook,” a label he had given the president himself. Finally, they started playing golf together.
Now Graham supports the president through thick and thin.
What happened? American journalists have asked that question too.
New York Magazine writes about Graham’s total change and talks in particular about one day in March 2017. Graham was still skeptical of the recent president. But party leaders urged them to have lunch and bury the ax.
They did it. They told jokes. They found that they both loved golf.
“I think Lindsey liked the president a lot more than she thought,” Steve Largent told New York Magazine. He sat in the House of Representatives with Graham from 1994 to 2002.
Since that day, Lindsey Graham has spoken more warmly about Donald Trump.
Lindsey Graham was angry during Senate hearings in 2018. Photo: Tom Williams / AP / NTB
When Graham stole the show
A moment will likely be remembered forever as when Graham seriously entered Trump’s inner circle. During a 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Graham launched a fiery tirade against Democrats.
– You’re trying to ruin this guy’s life! Graham almost growled. The hearings were the least ethical he had seen in politics, he said.
The occasion was the nomination of current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Discussions in the committee had focused mainly on allegations that he had abused a young woman during his studies.
Even before this year’s election, Graham generated controversy over a Supreme Court nomination. Then he was at the forefront of the approval of Trump’s candidate, Amy Coney Barrett, just days before the election. Four years earlier, he had objected to doing the same for Barack Obama’s candidate nine months before Election Day. Justification: The nomination was too close to the election.
Now the acting president is coming out. Graham himself has been in the Senate for at least another six years. For now, it appears that he will continue to link his political future with Trump.
But he has changed his mind before.
