Will Saletan is a writer at The Bulwark, and the author of a nine-part case study on Lindsey Graham’s abandonment of his principles, beliefs and oath of office. It is a superb and astonishing piece of work. The documentary evidence of Lindsey Graham’s conduct in office since 2015 is absolutely jaw-dropping. His cravenness is simply stunning and that detail isn’t mitigated by the fact that it is both widely known, and completely unsurprising at this point. The accumulation of details stretches beyond the corruption of a single man. This is a story about disintegration. The disintegration of an idea, ideal and concept of duty. What is crumbling to dust is the very essence of Americanism.
Will Saletan is clear about his purpose upfront. Here is an excerpt from his opening:
Trump turned out to be poison. Over the next five years, he thoroughly corrupted Graham’s party. Republican leaders had time to counteract the poison, but they never did. One reason was that the poison moved slowly. Graham and other Republican politicians lost the ability to see what they were becoming. They rallied around an authoritarian, excused authoritarian acts, and embraced authoritarian ideas.
This is a story about how that happened.
BEFORE WE START, I should tell you what this article isn’t. It isn’t a rant about Graham’s servility or hypocrisy. And it isn’t a profile.
Many other journalists have written about Graham and Trump. Most of them have focused on the personal relationship between the two men. They examine the ways in which Graham’s evolution was distinctive.
I’m not interested in what’s distinctive about Graham. I’m interested in what isn’t. How does his story illuminate what happened to the whole Republican party? How did the poison work?
We need to answer these questions because the authoritarian threat is bigger than one man. Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency destroyed the myth that the United States was immune to despotism. Our institutions and the people who run them are vulnerable. We have to confront these vulnerabilities and learn how to deal with them before our democracy is threatened again.
So why focus on Graham?
First, because he was a central player in the Republican party’s capitulation to Trump. And second, because he talked constantly. He produced an enormous trove of interviews, speeches, press briefings, and social media posts. Through these records, we can see how he changed, week to week and month to month. We can watch the poison work.
It’s a slow death. The surrender to despotism doesn’t happen all at once. It advances in stages: a step, a rationalization. Another step, another rationalization. The deeper you go, the more you need to justify. You say what you need to say. You believe what you need to believe.
So let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s see who Lindsey Graham was before he drank the poison.
Will Saletan more than delivers. Yet, there are two sentences that leave me dissatisfied — through no fault of his:
“Graham and other Republican politicians lost the ability to see what they were becoming.”
“Let’s see who Lindsey Graham was before he drank the poison.”
When I read these lines my first thought was, did they? My second was more personal. I knew the man who existed before Trump — or at least I thought I did. If he was poisoned, am I susceptible?
The real question it makes me ask myself is this: why were so very few people in the Republican Party with voices, power and influence not willing to spend it on America when they knew as evidenced by their own words what the danger was and is? What higher cause, greater purpose could public service be other than defending and strengthening the American Republic? How could they have vandalized their country, and more importantly for many of us, how could many of our friends have done this?