On Jan. 6, 2021, in the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol in Washington, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump critic turned staunch ally, came full circle when he denounced the attack on the Capitol and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. “Enough is enough,” he said. “To the conservatives who say they believe in the Constitution, now is the time to stand up and be counted.” He said, somewhat wistfully, that he and Trump had “had one hell of a journey. I hate for it to end this way.” But it didn’t end. Not long after, Graham resumed his open support of Trump, and became a key adviser of the 2024 election that returned Trump to office.
After Graham’s sudden death on July 12, he has been described in the press as influential, resilient, a survivor. But Graham doesn’t deserve such circumspection. That fateful decision five years ago to turn on his own principles and cast his whole fortune with Trump greatly bolstered the MAGA movement at a pivotal moment, one that led to a second Trump term that is as lawless as the mob that trashed the Capitol that January day. In choosing self-interest over real leadership, Graham violated his oath to the Constitution he claimed to revere and gravely endangered the whole country. It is still endangered. He is a traitor and deserves to be remembered as such.
Of course he isn’t the only GOP elected official who betrayed us. The entire party eventually did that. But as a senator of the South and a white man, Graham bore a special responsibility to do the right thing. Trumpism is built on racial animus that is rooted in the South and white grievance embodied in the Confederacy’s lost cause. Racial animus framed Trump’s denial that he lost the election in 2020 (people of color cheated and voted illegally), a drumbeat that culminated in the mob attacking the capitol on Jan. 6 — at Trump’s urging — in an attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden ’s win. On that day, MAGA faithful gleefully waved Confederate flags, assaulted Black police and called them niggers. In sacking Washington, they were avenging the Lost Cause at last.
Graham doesn’t deserve such circumspection.
Graham, who represented a state where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, knew what all this was about. He knew that racial animus is an enduring force in American politics that corrodes justice but can always be used to accrue power. At the moment when he needed to stand firm against that corrosion, Graham didn’t. In minimizing Jan. 6, this son of the South officially made racism in plain sight OK, not just on Jan. 6, but from that day forward.
The effects of that choice have been devastating. Graham initiated a moral collapse that has facilitated all the moral collapse that’s happened since, from the federal government’s wholesale abandonment of racial fairness to the breathtaking corruption of the president and his cronies, to the wanton destruction of public institutions that serve and protect all Americans.
It’s all the more galling because Graham, as we all know, was an early, unrestrained critic of Trump. In Trump’s first run for president in 2016, Graham called him a demagogue, a racist, a religious bigot. A close friend of John McCain, he also accused Trump of insulting the values of the military and veterans like himself. Of course, the criticism was partly motivated by politics; Graham was one of the many GOP candidates desperate to knock Trump out of the race. But what he said about him had the benefit of being true. And his disgust, shared by so many Americans, seemed genuine.
The press tends to cast Graham’s flip as part of an individual narrative, one chapter in a testy bromance between Graham and Trump that took them from bitter enemies to golf buddies, with a brief breakup after Jan. 6. But that obscures the bigger truth of that relationship — in choosing Trump, Graham was rejecting the reality of multiracial America. He was siding with white supremacy. His choice helped white supremacy become not a crisis, but just another political decision. No one could actually be responsible for it.
He thought he could have his cake and eat it, too.
Graham’s machinations illuminated another important truth: The real crisis in the country isn’t Trump but all the GOP enabling of Trump that after 2021 congealed quickly into a cult, a cult in which there is no opposition of any kind. At least slavery in its time was debated. It was a moral evil perpetuated for far too long, but it was not a cult.
Trumpism is. And it was officially made so not by the MAGA base but by sitting elected representatives like Graham who knew better, but didn’t care. They all should be impeached or shown the door, as happened when Southern secessionists left or were expelled from Congress in 1861 because they were no longer qualified to serve. Graham disqualified himself too, but he stayed — not just stayed, but prospered. The attempted insurrection failed, but its powerful racist ideology among Republicans triumphed, and reorganized Congress itself. What we’ve really witnessed the last five years is the result of a secession in place, with the secessionists running the whole country this time instead of just its own Confederacy. Lincoln would have been horrified.
The most charitable reading of Graham’s last six years is that he thought he could have his cake and eat it, too — do the wrong thing for democracy but assume his legacy in that democracy, however weakened or distorted, would prevail. He thought he was assuring a legacy, and he was, though it was not the one he imagined. History will not be kind to him.
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