Trump and Lindsey Graham: Washington’s odd couple

Trump, a populist dripping with contempt for the D.C. establishment, broke the ice following the inauguration, months before he and the South Carolina Republican – who is a fixture of that establishment – consummated a working relationship with friendly rounds of golf.

The president reached out to Graham, a 2016 campaign rival he had mocked mercilessly, in a series of his trademark telephone calls that can arrive unexpectedly, at all hours of the day or night. The senator accepted them, despite grave reservations about Trump’s capacity for the presidency and sharp policy differences.

Graham had done his part to encourage the détente in conversations with senior White House advisers, and an alliance developed around a shared love of deal-making and being the center of attention — and the senator’s ability to understand what makes Trump tick.

“We’ve played golf twice; I thoroughly enjoyed it. Once you get to know somebody on the golf course, it’s a totally different experience,” Graham said Tuesday in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “The bottom line is: He feels comfortable talking to me, and I want to keep this relationship.”

“There’ll come times where we just disagree. I said: ‘Me and you will disagree, it’s just inevitable. But where I can help you, I will. When we disagree, I’ll try to be respectful,'” Graham added. “Here’s what I told him. I said for me to help you, it’s got to be an honest relationship, and what I’ll try to do is, if I have a disagreement, do it behind the scenes.”

Trump’s missile strike in Syria in April to punish Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons was a turning point in a relationship that began with suspicion and acrimony and might not have blossomed. The muscular move to assert U.S. influence in the Middle East, in line with Graham’s approach to foreign policy, calmed the senator’s fears that Trump would govern as an isolationist.

It was the beginning of discussions about national security, an issue on which Graham is deeply involved, that have continued. This past weekend while playing golf, Trump complained to Graham about his dissatisfaction with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, sources with knowledge of their conversation said.

“He was expressing frustrations with Tillerson to point of asking [Graham] if he was interested in job,” one source said, on condition of anonymity. This individual added that Graham is a very good golfer, and speculated that the senator’s self-deprecating description of his golf game compared to Trump was probably his way of “stroking” the president’s ego.

Trump and Graham are different creatures from different backgrounds, and come to politics with different worldviews.

The president, 71, is a thrice-married New Yorker with five children. He comes from wealth, and grew richer on his own as a real estate developer before leveraging his notoriety to become a reality television star. Graham, 62, is a lifelong bachelor with no children. From a poor Southern upbringing, he built a life of public service, in the military and in Congress.

Trump, a former Democrat, has minimal fidelity to traditional Republican dogma. He ran a presidential campaign that sought to tear down GOP obedience to free trade, smaller government and internationalism — everything Graham believes in — even though he has so far governed more like a typical Republican.

The president also is in a perpetual conflict with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Graham’s best friend on Capitol Hill and his ideological wingman.

But Graham has put all of that contention aside, as he did with former President Barack Obama and others, to serve his greater priorities: being in the middle of the biggest negotiations and shaping the most consequential policies.

Graham said that that is the sort of thing Trump, the self-styled world’s greatest negotiator, understands and respects.

“He liked Graham-Cassidy, that was sort of a game-changer,” Graham explained, referring to the legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare that he co-sponsored with Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La. “He felt like, of all of the ideas, that one made the most sense to him, and he saw me as a guy trying to come up with ideas.”

The Trump-Graham relationship was icy at the outset, when both were running for president. Trump was usually first in the polls; Graham barely registered an asterisk. Trump never let him hear the end of it, jabbing at the senator’s underdog status, calling him an “idiot” and a “lightweight.”

In one memorable outburst, Trump revealed Graham’s private cellphone number during a campaign rally. Graham ended up producing a campaign video in which he uses a golf club to destroy his then-useless cellphone, the senator’s idea and one his allies call fortuitious, given the frequent phone calls he now trades with the president and their recent golf matches.

“Lindsey always talks about how the president never sleeps and calls him at all hours of the day and night, and jokes all the time about how he hopes the president doesn’t give his new number out again,” said a Republican operative familiar with their relationship, referring to it as one of the “best love-hate relationships in politics.”

Graham is hardly demure. During the campaign, he called Trump the “world’s biggest jackass,” and he has criticized him from time to time, most recently over his controversial response to the white supremacist uprising in Charlottesville, Va. Trump usually responds in kind.

But their rapport has lately been warm. They’ve golfed together twice, and Graham joined Trump on Air Force One for the president’s flight down to South Carolina to raise money for Gov. Henry McMaster. Graham said that his relationship with the president continues to “evolve,” and that he likes the direction it’s headed.

“I rode last night on Marine One. I’ve never been on Marine One — it was beyond cool,” Graham said. “He wanted to share that with me. He really is in awe of the job. I think he’s, ‘I’m president. That’s a big deal.'”