This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

I will say this about Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican senator who died on Saturday at 71: He had Donald Trump clocked right from the jump. During the 2016 presidential primary, Graham, who spent years carefully curating a reputation in Washington as one of the proverbial Reasonable Republicans, described Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He said he would “rather lose without Donald Trump than try to win with him,” and that a “jackass” like Trump didn’t “represent my party” or “have a clue about anything.” 

“You want to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell,” Graham said in December 2015. On Election Day, he tweeted that he’d voted for a third-party candidate because, he said, he “couldn’t go where Donald Trump wanted to take the USA & GOP.”

Trump’s victory later that night changed Graham’s mind in a hurry. In the years that followed, Graham became one of the president’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders, always willing to hop on the Sunday shows and say whatever was most likely to earn him the shiny bauble of an attaboy Trump tweet. 

Probably his most consequential performance came in September 2018, when the psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her when they were in high school. And for much of the hearing, it felt like Kavanaugh’s nomination really might be on the ropes: Several key Republicans were already waffling, and in the wake of Ford’s gut-wrenching testimony, behind closed doors, they were preparing to accept defeat. Even Trump, who was watching on TV, would later describe Ford as “compelling” and........

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