Lindsey Graham just admitted Trump has no principles
Lindsey Graham just admitted Donald Trump has no principles.
And neither does he.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, the Republican senator from South Carolina confirmed what I wrote in a previous post.
If you find it disturbing that I actually agree with Lindsey Graham on something, believe me, you’re not alone. Under normal circumstances, so would I. But in this case, it’s gratifying to see the Trumpist senator actually admit to something most Republicans won’t let pass their lips:
Here’s what he told Vanity Fair:
“No, I don’t think he’s racist. Here’s what I think. You can be black as coal and if you like him, he likes you. You can be albino and if he doesn’t like you, he doesn’t like you. He’s about him. If you like him, he probably likes you. But I don’t think he hates people because of the color of their skin. I think he reacts to people as to how they react to him” (my emphasis).
In this one paragraph, Graham admits the scariest thing about Trump. “If you like him, he likes you.” That applies to everyone from Vladimir Putin to (sometimes) Kim Jong Un to the whack jobs at QAnon who believe Trump is secretly battling a global cult of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and cannibals. Trump said he didn’t know much about them, “other than they like me very much, which I appreciate.”
It’s not too much of a stretch to think that, if Hitler were alive and praising him, Trump would be a bigger fan of appeasement than Neville Chamberlain ever dreamed of being.
The plain truth is this: Trump has no principles. He’s not immoral, he’s amoral. A political mercenary, if you will.
All the president’s men
The Republican Party now mirrors his outlook and approach. It’s abandoned many of its core principles, and didn’t even adopt a new platform at its convention this year. Graham, who prior to Trump’s election had a reputation as one of the more principled lawmakers on Capitol Hill, adopted the Trumpist approach, too.
If someone claims to like Trump, Trump will like him. Even if that someone is Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, dictators who know how to play on people’s weaknesses. And Trump wears his weakness for needing approval on his sleeve. He’s said he needs “leverage” to make a good deal, and it’s no mystery why: He’d make a terrible poker player.
People don’t fold, metaphorically speaking, because Trump is good at bluffing. It’s because he’s got so much leverage (his money, lawyers, political true believers) that he doesn’t need to. When it comes to foreign affairs, he can’t call on any of that leverage, so of course he finds it impossible to make “a good deal.” Putin, Kim, et al. aren’t scared of him.
Ukraine was, because he used U.S. military might as his leverage.
Graham’s cowardice
But back to Lindsey Graham, who revealed that his reputation as a person of principle was all just smoke and mirrors in a Washington Post story last year. In that story, he revealed that his goal wasn’t to fight for his principles, but to remain “relevant.” It wasn’t to stand up for what he believed in, but to be re-elected: “If you don’t want to get re-elected, you’re in the wrong business.”
He reiterated those priorities in the Vanity Fair story. After Trump won in 2016, he said, he “made a conscious decision. He won. I lost. Now I can do one of two things. I can take my ball and go hide in the corner. Or I can represent my state. He won my state.”
Two major points can be gleaned from this.
First, Graham is reiterating one of Trump’s 12 core principles, which I detail in my book Political Psychosis: Just win. It doesn’t matter what you’re fighting for, only that you come out on top. At all costs.
Second, Graham truly believes there are only two choices: Irrelevance or a brown-nosing, boot-licking buy in. Brown apparently never heard of (or doesn’t agree with) the concept of standing up for yourself when you’re in the minority. He probably has no clue what got into the heads of people like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis — people who stood up for their ideals even though they weren’t in power.
Does he think these people were irrelevant? Most would disagree.
Hollow conscience
The results of Graham’s “conscious decision” can be seen in his 180-degree turnabout: Having once said his party had “gone batshit crazy” for embracing Trump, he, too embraced him.
If you’ve taken logic, you know that if A=B and B=C, then A=C. So, if embracing Trump is batshit crazy when other Republicans do it, that makes you batshit crazy if you do it, too.
Do I think Lindsey Graham is batshit crazy? Actually, I don’t. I just think he’s an amoral person who cares only about winning, just like his political sugar daddy. In the Vanity Fair piece, he calls Joe Biden one of the most decent people he’s ever met. He says Biden is “a one-of-a-kind guy” and “a good guy,” phrases he doesn’t use in describing Trump.
Twenty years ago, the GOP cast itself as all about character. Now it’s the exact opposite. Graham may like Biden’s character, but that doesn’t mean a hill of beans to him when it comes to deciding whom he’ll support.
Graham’s answer to that question: “I am going to be with Trump because I think policy matters.”
(A)morality (dis)play
Let me get this straight, Sen. Graham: You’re following a political mercenary who’s “about him,” not about policy, because policy matters? You’ve got to be kidding, right?
But he’s not.
The weirdest thing of all about Graham is that he seems unwilling to let go of the image he has of himself as someone of principle. He protests that he still believes in climate change and comprehensive immigration reform, almost like that racist around the corner who protests too much that “I have a lot of friends who are Black.”
Because even if he does believe in those things, he won’t fight for them if Trump pulls on his leash. He may pay them lip service, quietly, in a magazine article, as a kind of timid apology. But he won’t get up and shout them from the rooftops, because that would be political suicide. It would be far too much like John Lewis and Martin Luther King.
The Vanity Fair headline points to Graham’s opinion of the QAnon conspiracy embraced by Trump.
Graham calls QAnon “crazy stuff” that’s “inspiring people to violence.”
But if Trump wins a second term and continues to laud QAnon members as patriots, don’t be surprised to hear Graham change his tune. In the article, he also calls QAnon “batshit crazy.”
Hmmm. Where have I heard that phrase before?