By Ben R. Williams
Whether you’re an older person or a neurotic younger person, you’ve probably found yourself thinking about the legacy you’ll leave behind when you’re gone.
Legacies take many different forms. Maybe your legacy is the family you’ve created. Maybe it’s the people you’ve inspired. Maybe it’s the work you’ve done. Maybe you won a hot dog eating contest. Whatever the case, we all leave a legacy, and we all hope it’s a good one.
Unfortunately, this is a column about South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who passed away on July 11.
I’m not here to mock Lindsey Graham’s death or crack jokes about his private life. Instead, I think it’s important to look critically at his legacy, which is arguably much more devastating.
In 2015, after President Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, Graham didn’t mince words.
“He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” Graham said. “He doesn’t represent my party. … I don’t think he has a clue about anything. … You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell. … I’d rather lose without Donald Trump than try to win with him.”
In May of 2016, Graham tweeted, “if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”
Graham didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, voting instead for independent Evan McMullin, saying that he “couldn’t go where Trump wanted to take the USA and GOP.”
But then Trump won the 2016 election, and almost overnight, Graham transformed from someone who hated Trump into the man’s biggest fan. He warned Republicans not to undercut Trump’s initiatives and bemoaned the fact that the press seemed to be making an “endless attempt to label the guy some kind of kook not fit to be President,” which is hilarious because in February of 2016, Graham literally described Trump as “a kook” who was “crazy” and “unfit for office.”
Lindsey Graham was close friends with Arizona Senator John McCain. In 2015, Trump said that McCain wasn’t a war hero just because he was a prisoner of war held for 5 1/2 years in a North Vietnamese prison. “I like people who weren’t captured,” said Trump, a man whose closest brush with military service was eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch.
Trump and McCain feuded for years and Trump spoke terribly of McCain even after McCain’s untimely passing. You know who never took the time to defend McCain from Trump’s attacks? His dearest friend Lindsey Graham.
On January 6th, 2021, the day that a mob of Trump supporters led an attack on the United States Capitol to upend the election results, Graham said Republicans were making a mistake pretending the election was stolen and that after the insurrection at the Capitol, “count me out, enough is enough.”
A couple days later, Graham talked to Trump and immediately fell back in line with the MAGA movement.
This is just the merest sampling of Graham’s history of flip-flopping, and I didn’t even get to his long and storied career as a war hawk.
The point is this: a great many people have been endlessly frustrated with Lindsey Graham for years, and for many, that frustration has turned into mockery following his passing.
The problem is not that Lindsey Graham was some kind of amoral monster without a conscience. The problem is that he seemingly DID have a conscience, but every time it reared its noble head, he managed to beat it back into submission through sheer force of will. If he thought that a principled stance would cost him the tiniest crumb of power, he rejected the principle and kept the power.
And that, unfortunately, is Lindsey Graham’s legacy: a cautionary tale of a man who placed power over basic human decency and died in office, mourned by few, respected by fewer, and soon to be replaced with another interchangeable power-hungry ghoul who will fill his seat and vote the same way without missing a beat, just like Graham did for Sen. Strom Thurmond.
If given the option, I’d much rather take the victory at the hot dog eating contest.
