'I just want to reach out and smack him': Lindsey Graham struggles to explain Trump flip-flopping
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham holds a press conference on the subject of the International Criminal Court's decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. November 27, 2024.
During the Republican Party's pre-MAGA era, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) was a close ally of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) and was decidedly hawkish on foreign policy.
McCain remained a scathing critic of President Donald Trump during the final months of his life and considered him a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whereas Graham went from being a major Trump critic in 2016 to becoming a strident defender. Yet Graham often has difficulty reconciling his hawkish foreign policy views with the "America First" isolation Trump often preaches.
The Washington Post's Liz Goodwin describes Graham's struggle to defend Trump's foreign policy in an article published on April 28.
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"Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) once ran a presidential campaign in part on launching a ground war in Syria," Goodwin explains. "He and his best friend in the Senate, the late John McCain, toured the world on congressional trips to argue for more U.S. influence and aid abroad. Now, running for a fifth term in a state that Donald Trump carried by 18 percentage points, the longtime hawk's foreign policy tone has evolved, to put it lightly."
Goodwin cites examples of Graham trying to sound more MAGA — for example, telling attendees at a recent town hall, "Yeah, I think Europe's gone woke, don't y'all?"
South Carolina resident Jane Rabon, a 73-year-old Republican who went to hear Graham at a retirement community, told the Post, "I feel like he just flows with the wind. I really do. Which is not a good thing. Sometimes, I just want to reach out and smack him."
Graham tried to explain his flip-flopping on Trump during an interview with the Post, saying, "I think he has made me reevaluate some of the things I took for granted. That American interventionism has limits. Afghanistan — years and trillions…. He's not Ronald Reagan in terms of style and rhetoric. But he's accomplished something that Reagan had accomplished — people are afraid of him. The power of Trump, I've come to appreciate.”
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Read the full Washington Post article at this link (subscription required).
