Part 4
Unconditional Love
GRAHAM’S COMMITMENT TO A SECOND TRUMP TERM, barely a year into Trump’s first, handed the president a blank check. It was one thing to accept, out of respect for democracy, the election of an incipient despot. It was another thing to tell him, as he abused his office to protect himself, that he had his party’s support to remain in power for another seven years.
By this point, Graham routinely spoke of Trump in worshipful terms—“
He’s a force of nature”—and had largely abandoned any interest in scrutinizing him. In 2016, Graham had
criticized Trump for openly
encouraging Russia to
hack Clinton’s emails. But in 2018, when Mueller released
evidence that Russian intelligence officers had tried to
fulfill Trump’s request, Graham said nothing. In 2017, Graham had talked about examining Trump’s finances, possibly through his
tax returns. But in 2018, Graham
brushed off that idea, calling Trump’s returns “the last thing on my mind.”
When reporters brought up Graham’s past criticisms of Trump, the senator disowned them. “I said a lot of things. Nobody cared,” he
shrugged. “Everything I said before is in my rearview mirror.”
Meanwhile, even Trump’s aides began to acknowledge his authoritarianism. His “impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic,” wrote
Miles Taylor, a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security, in a
Times op-ed that was published
anonymously. “In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators.”
In Bob Woodward’s book,
Fear, senior aides called the president “unhinged” and “off the rails.” The book revealed, among other things, that Trump had called Sessions a “
traitor” for failing to control the Russia investigation.
Graham wasn’t interested. “The op-ed and the book won’t matter in 2020,” he
assuredFox News viewers.
On August 6, at a Republican
dinner in Greenville, South Carolina, Graham flaunted his connections to Trump’s family. “I’ve never had more access to a president than I have with Donald Trump,” he told the audience. He described a small dinner gathering he’d had the previous night with Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and three Fox News hosts. And he defended Kushner’s role in the 2016 Trump Tower meeting.
Graham told the crowd in Greenville that Kushner was innocent because once Kushner saw what the Russians had brought, he had asked his assistant to
call him out of the meeting. The Russians had promised dirt on Clinton, but they had failed to deliver it. Kushner, realizing that the conversation was a waste of time, had bugged out. He had failed to report the meeting to the FBI, and he had
omitted it from security-clearance forms that subsequently asked about his contacts with foreign governments.
All of this behavior was consistent with a failed collusion attempt. But by Graham’s definition, failed collusion didn’t count. There was “zero evidence” of collusion, he told the audience.
Graham said he’d had enough of the media going after Trump. “People are pretty tired of it,” he groused. So he told the audience in Greenville that he had a new message for Trump.
“Here’s what I told the president,” he said. “If you feel good doing it, do it.”
What Trump felt like doing was firing people who investigated him or who failed to protect him from investigations. And Graham, who had previously opposed such blatant subversions of justice, now found reasons to indulge them.
In 2017, when Trump fired Comey, Graham had scrambled to invent specific excuses for the termination. But by the spring of 2018, Graham had moved on to an expansive view of presidential power.
On April 10, Graham
declared on Fox News that in the absence of proven collusion—as redefined, narrowly, by Graham—the president had absolute authority to terminate the FBI director. As long as Trump hadn’t colluded with “Russian intelligence services,” Graham
contended, “Why he fired Comey doesn’t matter, because he could fire Comey for the way he looks.”
Four months later—and two weeks after the dinner in Greenville—Graham all but invited Trump to fire Sessions. In July 2017, Graham had
warned, “If Jeff Sessions is fired, there will be holy hell to pay.” But on August 23, 2018, after a year of Trump’s wrath over Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation, Graham surrendered. “For the good of the nation, I think we need an attorney general that has the confidence of the president,” he
concluded. “You serve at the pleasure of the president.”
Trump didn’t just want Sessions to rein in the Russia inquiry. He also wanted him to withhold indictments of other Republicans for insider trading and stealing campaign funds. On September 3, the president
excoriated Sessions for allowing federal prosecutors to bring charges against “two very popular Republican Congressmen”—
Chris Collins of New York and
Duncan Hunter of California, both of whom later
pleaded guilty—thereby depriving the GOP of “two easy wins” in the upcoming midterms.
Trump’s condemnation of the indictments was openly corrupt. But Graham—while conceding that it would be wrong to exempt Republicans from the law—again defended the president. “There’s been a longstanding policy when it comes to prosecuting public officials: Don’t try to interfere with the election,” Graham
argued. That was “the president’s main point,” he insisted.
Sessions didn’t yield to Trump’s pressure. Later that year, Trump
fired him. Graham said the president’s decision was
fine. It couldn’t be obstruction of justice, Graham
explained, because Trump had an “almost unlimited ability to fire the attorney general.”
Through all of this, Graham saw himself as an
institutionalist. But he was gradually undercutting the institutions of constitutional democracy. The arguments he was invoking—that it was good to have a leader who inspired fear, that the president had broad license to fire the people in charge of investigating him, that the chief executive had a mandate for anything he did, and that the only important thing was achieving results—were pillars of authoritarianism.
ON JANUARY 11, 2018, A YEAR INTO his presidency, Trump exploded during a White House meeting on immigration. Trump’s eruption and the scramble to cover it up marked a shift of power in Washington. In Trump's first year as president, congressional Republicans had chosen to excuse and protect him.
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