Trump lit fuse turning Graham to MAGA ally

Senator became a reliable cheerleader

By: Charles Stile
Political Stile
USA Today Network

..... During a tour of South Carolina with Christ Christie;s doomed campaign for president in July 2015, I decide dot take a break from his schedule and get a glimpse of the emerging front-runner, Donald Trump.
..... The unpredictable and unfiltered Trump visited a retirement center to Bluffton that was populated by mostly White and well-heeled retirees - including a large number from New Jersey.
..... But I witnessed more that the vintage, shoot-the-lip trump.
..... He went on to commit one of the most memorable data breaches in U.S. history.
..... Days earlier, south Carolina's popular Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, lambasted Trump as a "jackass" for discrediting the Vietnam War record of Senator John McCain - the 2008 Republican presidential nominee and a close friend of Graham's
..... Trump didn't come to Graham's home turf to campaign so much as to punch back.
..... He told the crowd hat Graham had been "begging" him for help to get on "Fox & Friends," popular with Republicans base voters.
..... Trump reluctantly agreed and took his cell phone number.
..... "I wrote the number down," Trump said, and with a reality-TV showman's flair, he polled out a card from the pocket of the blazer.
..... "I don't know if it's the right number. Let's try it, 202 ..."
..... The crowd roared. And to make sure it wasn't a stunt, national reporters' called to the number were sent to Graham's voice mail. It was real.
..... Trump's irreverent antics won the day and, it would turn out, didn't harm him a bit in south Carolina.
..... He had changed the discussion from public outage over his trashing of McCain to Graham's bowing and scraping for access to a television show.
..... As I sat in the back row, near television camera wires, I thought the unserious Trump was simply winging it out of spite, knowing full well that he would never have a real chance of winning the Republican nomination the next year. [2016] The polls at the time listing him as the 2016 front-runner would fade. I thought, when the race took shape months later in Iowa and New Hampshire.
..... This was just another installment in the Trump Show.
..... I didn't know at the time - and neither did the wily Graham, who died Saturday [07/11/2026] at the age of 71 - that this was the beginning of a revolt.
..... The crowd's mocking laughter wasn't directed personally at Graham as much as it was responding to Trump's audacity.
..... By attacking Graham, Trump was trashing the Washington, DC, establishment, which had been perceived as smug, self-aggrandizing and detached from the needs of ordinary folks.
..... "They weren't cheering because Lindsey was being poked," said Scott Huffmon, a veteran South Carolina pollster at Winthrop University.
..... "They were cheering because the people they thought looked down on them were being torn down."
..... soon, graham would begin his long, sad journey of self-abasement, from never-Trump truth teller to Trump toady and (mostly) reliable defender. After Trump won in 2016, the two began their rapprochement at lunch and on the golf course, and soon Graham was on national television declaring himself a member of Team Trump.
..... "I said everything. I said he was a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot," Graham said in a mea culpa on "Face the Nation" after trump;s 2016 victory.
..... "I ran out of adjectives. well, the American people spoke.
..... "They rejected my analysis, and he is now my president."
..... Notably, Graham didn't disavow his analysis, and much of it turned out to be an accurate indicator of what we have witnessed as a nation in Trump's second term. the aggressive deportation dragnet of mostly long-settled and non-violent migrants is effectively a nationwide purge of people of color.
..... The Delaney Hall detention center in Newark. [NJ] less than 10 miles from the Stature of Liberty, looks like a grim gulag tucked behind concertina wire from the former Soviet empire.
..... Graham became a reliable Trump cheerleader, defending his U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, amid sexual assault allegations. He was crucial in shepherding the "Big, Beautiful Bill" of historic tax cuts through the Senate without Democratic votes.
..... And he was pivotal in helping Trump deliver a conservative judiciary.
..... To Huffmon, who tracked Graham's career for decades, the shift reflected Graham's skill as a political survivor, who always found a way to place himself in "the room where the big decisions are made."
..... "He always known which way the political winds blow and has a unique ability to hoist his sail to catch that wind," the pollster said.

A decade on, Trump still holds Republicans hostage

..... So that moment of political theater in Bluffton was another milepost in the Republican Party's steady capitulation to its base's anger that would culminate in Trump's election 16 months later.
..... Graham was part of a small faction of Republicans who saw Trump as an incompetent and dangerous buffoon and said so publicly - before he then got on the bandwagon.
..... christen, by they way, was on Team Trump at that time, hoping to land a top post, maybe even as vice president, until Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, kicked him off the bandwagon.
..... Yet Graham's transformation became a symbol of a party that fell in line with Trump's and his MAGA fury.
..... He may have been a loud convert, but there are plenty who simply have done it quietly, toeing the line while Trump steadily erodes he nation's democratic traditions and values.
..... As I sat in the back of the room in Bluffton and waited for the event to start, I looked behind me and peeked through a curtain.
..... There was Trump, rocking slightly on his foot. We made eye contact for a second.
..... He gave me a polite nod and then peered at the stage. It seemed to me that he couldn't wait for the show to begin.

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