Lindsey Graham’s Legacy? It’s About One Thing Only, and It Isn’t Good

He alone had the moral authority within the Republican Party to try to stop Donald Trump, especially after January 6. He chose not to. That’s what we must remember today.

It’s hard to remember it now, now that Donald Trump’s dominance over a supine and gutless Republican Party has extended for more than a decade and still shows few signs of abating, but when he first entered politics, Trump did encounter some opposition within the GOP. After all, he had 15 opponents for the Republican nomination for president. One of those, then-Texas Governor Rick Perry, gave a tough speech in Washington about a month after Trump descended his escalator that included the following words and phrases: “barking carnival act”; “cancer on conservatism”; “toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense”; “the modern-day incarnation of the know-nothing movement.”

John McCain, then in the twilight of his career but still a commanding voice in the party, said that Trump had “fired up the crazies” with the way he spoke about immigrants. This led to Trump’s infamous attack on McCain at an Iowa candidate forum when he said McCain was no hero: “I like people who weren’t captured.”

This comment in turn invited criticism from some who’d been mostly silent to that point, including the current secretary of state (“it’s not just absurd, it’s offensive, it’s ridiculous,” said Marco Rubio). But no one hit Trump harder than McCain’s great pal Lindsey Graham. The South Carolina senator, who died over the weekend at age 71 of “a brief and sudden” illness, went on CBS This Morning on July 21 and said: “I don’t care if he drops out. Stay in the race, just stop being a jackass … I’m looking for him to be a responsible member of the 16-person primary and stop saying stuff like this. The world is falling apart. We’re becoming Greece. The........

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