LYING IN STATE

What Lindsey Graham Taught Us About Political Weakness: Wolff

What did Trump’s favorite Senator really believe?

Opinion

Death can be a great PR move. Little more than two weeks ago, Lindsey Graham was a clown and an embarrassment for his abject sucking up to Donald Trump. Two weeks later, he’s a saint. Graham used to talk to me about Trump. He would explain and defend him, on the one hand. But on the other, he’d let you in on how extreme and out of this world he understood Trump to be. This is politics. It was to his benefit to get along with Trump. At the same time, he certainly wanted you to know that he knew Trump was what he was. He was playing both sides. He was hurt by the general narrative that he had become a lackey and wanted you to understand that he was running a much more sophisticated game than that. Was Graham’s flattery and obsequiousness towards Trump, aides wondered, another workaround of an issue Graham had been working around his whole career? The result, for whatever reason, meant that Graham became among Trump’s primary enablers in a Senate that, despite knowing better, has never figured out how to stand up to Trump. The message of Lindsey Graham’s death, then, is a warning about what happens when a man surrenders to his own weakness.

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