I used to assume that Lindsey Graham's fulsome Trump toadying must be a result of blackmail. The man who'd gravely warned against electing Donald Trump—famously calling him a "a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot"—had so swiftly and thoroughly slithered into Trump's good graces that only a videotape showing Lindsey and Ted Cruz vigorously snorting lines of Pixy Stix off Princess Luna's sparkly ass at a Brony convention could adequately explain Lindsey's embarrassing genuflections to feral Trumpism.
But after reading this lengthy New York Times profile about Graham's death grip on Trump's increasingly threadbare coattails, I have to agree with ex-GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, who likely got an up-close view of Graham when he served as senior campaign strategist for Lindsey BFF John McCain: "The way to understand him is to look at what's consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers around a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That's Lindsey."
The Times piece delves into Graham's childhood and his "abiding need to be in the room" (as one South Carolina GOP political consultant put it), as well as his compulsion to sidle up to "alpha dog" father figures. He apparently saw Trump as the only game in town, and decided to bend his knee instead of standing up for what's right.
You may feel compelled to read the story, given that there are no biographies of Waylon Smithers or Salacious Crumb available on ThriftBooks that I'm aware of. It all depends on how interested you are in Lindsey Graham's nauseating obsequiousness.
That said, here's the key takeaway: You can't make everyone happy all of the time, and if you choose your new friends poorly, you're bound to lose your good, faithful old friends—such as our current president, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.:
In mid-November, as he was publicly urging Mr. Trump to keep up the election fight, Mr. Graham made a previously unreported phone call to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., to revive a friendship damaged by his call for a special prosecutor to investigate the overseas business dealings of Mr. Biden's son Hunter.
It was short, and not especially sweet, according to three people with direct knowledge of the exchange. Mr. Graham told Mr. Biden that, in attacking Hunter, he had done only the bare minimum to satisfy Trump supporters back home. (A Graham spokesman disputed that account.)
Mr. Biden, who viewed Mr. Graham's statement as an unforgivable attack on his family responded by saying he would work with any Republican, but dismissed the approach as Mr. Graham trying to have it both ways, two people close to the president said.
A few days after that phone call, Biden told The Late Show's Stephen Colbert, "Lindsey's been a personal disappointment because I was a personal friend of his."
"Was." So, sorry, Linds.
Of course, as the story makes clear, Lindsey is still skittering down to Mar-a-Lago at seemingly every opportunity to keep his new favorite shark swimming and, therefore, politically viable.
Graham is also "determined to steer Mr. Trump away from a dangerous obsession with 2020," asking the ocher abomination, "Do you want January the 6th to be your political obituary? Because if you don't get over it, it's going to be."
Ha ha ha ha! Oh, that's hilarious. Lindsey thinks he can stop a locomotive of a Trump obsession just like that? Sorry, Linds. It has to derail first. And if you don't jump off now, you're going in the river with the rest of them. Hopefully you can find a big, bottom-feeding carp to stir up some tasty mud morsels for you. And then your failure will be complete.