Lindsey

When I heard that Lindsey Graham had died suddenly of a heart condition just a couple of days after turning 71, I was shocked.  And when Americans who despise Trump and his lapdogs reacted in a cavalier manner toward news of Graham's death, I was not shocked.  In fact, I wasn't even surprised.  Because I was just as nonchalant about the news as well.

 

Lindsey Graham's service as a U.S. Representative and as a U.S. Senator from South Carolina was not anything to celebrate.  In fact, apart from Fritz Hollings, I can't think of one U.S. Senator from South Carolina whose service is anything to celebrate.  He spent the Clinton impeachment hearings trying to look like the reasonable Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.  And to be fair, Lindsey Graham was the only Republican on the committee to vote against an article of impeachment against Bill Clinton, voting no on the second article  that held President Clinton responsible for perjury in a sexual-harassment lawsuit and  explaining that he did so in order to give the President "the legal benefit of the doubt" due to an unclear definition of sexual relations used in that case.  That particular article was one of four voted out of the committee and sent to the full House, and it was one of two that did not pass. But at the same time, Graham sai that pursuing the indictment of President Clinton was the surest way to rid the Presidency of the stain of dishonor bestowed on it.

So why did he get behind Donald Trump?  Especially when, as a presidential candidate in 2016 himself, he dismissed Trump as a racist misogynistic xenophobe?   

Graham was probably the most impressive 2016 Republican presidential candidate, which tells you more about the Republican Party's already-declining standards by 2016 than it does about Graham's credentials.

As a U.S. Senator, he was a nice guy who was able to broker deals with his back-slapping, easy-going attitude, but when it came to achieving greatness in the Senate and being talked about in the same breath as Robert Taft, Lyndon Johnson, or Howard Baker, he preferred to attach himself like a leech to greatness, hanging out with John McCain and Joe Lieberman for a shred of tangential legitimacy.  He abandoned policies he'd supported when it was convenient to be for them as soon as it was more expedient to be against him.  

His zealous capitulation to Trump, though, is what Graham is most likely going to be remembered for.  He wanted to curry favor with Trump to, as the song from Hamilton goes, be in the room where it happens.  Now that he's in purgatory for his transgressions, what happens next in Washington may be the sort of horrible thing that wouldn't have happened if Graham hadn't taken sycophancy to new heights under the Trump regime.