Influence ran two ways between Trump and Graham — and had disastrous consequences
The late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose funeral services begin Tuesday in Washington, has been praised by his supporters as a man of conviction who never shied away from his belief that America had a duty to project its strength worldwide. Conversely, critics will remember Graham as an ally of President Donald Trump who abandoned his stated principles in order to be closer to the seat of power.
But these accounts miss something vital about the South Carolina lawmaker’s legacy: Graham was an operator who used his carefully cultivated proximity to the president to have a better chance of persuading Trump to adopt his own ultra-hawkish foreign policy goals. Their relationship was a two-way street, one that culminated in Trump’s disastrous decision to launch a war with Iran.
Graham and Trump formed a marriage of convenience based on their distinct but overlapping ideological worldviews
The consequences of the Graham-Trump collaboration were vividly captured in a recent report by The Wall Street Journal based on unreleased footage from a documentary about Graham that was being filmed before he died. In one scene reported on by the Journal, Graham is outright giddy after Trump started the Iran war:
“Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried,” [Graham] tells the crew, laughing loudly just after U.S. strikes on Iran began in February. “How long have we been pushing this?”
He then tells the crew that Trump was equally happy about the war. “I talked to Trump this morning, he’s jacked, he said, ‘Best thing I have ever done.’ He loves blowing stuff up.”
Graham also goes on to boast about how his view prevailed over those of the isolationists in the Trump administration.
“You know, there’s a lot of people inside didn’t [sic] want to do it, so I’ve had my challenges, but President Trump, when he gets into the zone, he listens,” Graham says. He also describes Trump as “a great wartime president.”
The footage, some of which is clipped in the Journal article, is disturbing: Graham is openly joyful about helping to spark a war of aggression. He’s not talking about nearly crying over lives that will be lost, but tears of happiness after getting a war he had lobbied for — or floated as an option — for the better part of two decades.
The clip also distills how Graham and Trump formed a marriage of convenience based on their distinct but overlapping ideological worldviews. Graham, a neoconservative ideologue, believed in preventive warfare against Iran. Meanwhile Trump, a militaristic right-wing nationalist, loves “blowing stuff” up and looks for what he perceives as quick and simple opportunities to demonstrate American power and imperialism. Graham glories in sidelining the parts of Trump’s inner circle who counseled restraint.
It was widely reported this year that Graham played an instrumental role in convincing Trump to attack Iran. In March, Sen. Rand Paul, R- Ky., described Graham’s effort to lobby for Iranian regime change as “the quintessential political maneuvering beyond all political maneuvering” and quipped there should be a law restricting how often they golf together.
This was a relationship that was built over many years. In an interview with The New York Times Magazine published in 2019, Graham said, “I have never been called this much by a president in my life.”
He added, “It’s weird, and it’s flattering, and it creates some opportunity. It also creates some pressure.”
Graham seemed to handle that pressure well, insofar as he was able to maintain immense power in Washington until his last days. And he certainly made the most of the opportunity — he got his war, even if it didn’t go the way he may have expected it to.
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