Some liberals have started to float crazy conspiracy theories involving Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., somehow being blackmailed into supporting President Trump.
It’s actually hard to make out the specifics about what they’re trying to allege, beyond cryptically suggesting something fishy must be going on.
Earlier Tuesday, in a discussion about Graham’s support for Trump, MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle ended the segment by saying, “it could be that Donald Trump or somebody knows something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham.”
As the Washington Free Beacon’s Paul Crookston notes, this comes a few days after Jon Cooper, chairman of the Democratic Coalition super PAC, tweeted out that Graham could be subject to potential blackmail for “some pretty serious kink.”
But it doesn’t take some sort of wild conspiracy theory to explain why Graham is backing Trump, despite attacking him viciously during the 2016 Republican primary. Everything can be explained by the fact that Graham is running for reelection in 2020 in a state where Trump’s approval rating is 83 percent among Republicans.
Graham knows that he’ll coast to victory in the heavily Republican state in a presidential election year if he’s the GOP nominee, but his traditional reputation among conservatives as a squish who is willing to sell out to cut deals with Democrats would make him potentially vulnerable to a strong primary challenge. Were he aiming for a book deal and a TV gig in 2021, he’d spend the next two years as an anti-Trump Republican. But if he wants to continue to serve as senator, he’s going to have to be seen as a Trump supporter. And his past reputation means that he has to overcompensate by being even more vocally supportive than the typical Republican. And the data suggest that his strategy is working.
A recent Morning Consult report revealed that in the wake of Graham’s impassioned defense of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during last fall’s confirmation fight, his net approval among South Carolina Republicans shot up a whopping 43 points.
But Graham is smart enough to know that the memory of the Kavanaugh fight will fade quickly if he’s seen as soft on immigration during the border wall showdown. Any weakness now will simply remind conservatives of why they hated him for so many years and they’d quickly renew attacks that he’s pro-amnesty. As I noted last week when he urged Trump to declare a national emergency to build a border wall, Graham was simply following in the footsteps of his mentor, the late John McCain, who, facing a primary challenge, cut an ad featuring him walking along the border with an officer and declaring “complete the danged fence.”
Graham is also being savvy in backing Trump most strongly on issues that he can justify as being within the realm of longer-held views — i.e., on confirming conservative judges and insuring a fair process for nominees, and in the case of the wall, protecting national security.
Such is the level of paranoia in the era of Trump that some liberals evidently would rather believe wild conspiracy theories than just recognize that a cynical politician seeking re-election is behaving like a cynical politician.
