One day it’s all sun and sycophantic fun on one of the president’s fancy golf courses, where you’re telling yourself that to marvel at his putts and swoon over his swing are small prices for influence and will pay off in the end.
The next you’re in the middle of a surreal feud among your fellow Republicans about whether he used “s***hole” or “s***house” to describe poor countries of dark-skinned people, and you look like a sellout and fool for having thought and said better about him.
That’s the story of Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Its moral couldn’t be clearer. There’s no honor or wisdom in cozying up to Donald Trump.
Maybe more than any other figure on Capitol Hill, Graham personifies his party’s spastic, incoherent response to Trump across time and its humiliating, fatally misguided surrender.
He denounced Trump before he befriended and defended him. He graduated from the unpleasant experience of being Trump’s punching bag to the unprincipled one of being his enabler. Like the majority of his Republican colleagues in Congress, he reckoned that he could somehow get more than he was giving up, which included his dignity. He reckoned wrong.