Once upon a time, America, albeit for a millisecond, saw South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham strap on a pair and condemn the tyranny of Donald Trump.
On the night of January 6, 2021, hours after a violent mob breached the U.S. Capitol at Trump’s behest, Graham took to the Senate floor to deliver a rebuke of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
“Count me out!” he thundered. “Enough is enough!” he roared. And most of us said, “Was that Lindsey Graham?” Two days later, he spent four hours with Trump and soon after was calling fellow senators to urge them not to impeach.
The rest, they say, is history, and in this case, speculation that Trump knows something about Graham’s history or has something on him that keeps the lapdog South Carolina senator barking on his behalf. That conjecture, of course, is that Trump has a hold on Graham’s voters.
That said, there’s something deeply strange about Graham and his vicious fits of outbursts around the war with Iran that beg the question, “Why are you so angry, Lindsey?”
Since the United States launched military strikes against Iran, the senior senator from South Carolina has been practically giddy, like a boy who fawns over the muscles and ruggedness of his G.I. Joe doll.
Graham has been popping up everywhere, i.e., Fox News, press conferences, television studios, and Sean Hannity’s podcast, radiating a kind of frantic, over-the-top machismo that is rivaling the “warrior ethos” of Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth.
Graham has declared the war the “most significant thing that’s happened in the Mideast in a thousand years.” I guess the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following World War I was just a dust storm?
He called Iran’s leadership “religious Nazis” and compared the conflict to a “21st Century Berlin Wall moment.” Is he comparing Ronald Reagan’s soaring words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” to Trump’s taunting, “Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags?”
He told Fox News the U.S. is going to “make a ton of money” once the Iranian regime falls, because apparently we’re treating the destruction of a nation and the possible humanitarian crisis of displacing 90 million people as a cash cow.
The war costs an estimated $1 billion per day, we’re told. Graham has essentially been touting it as money well spent and a good investment. Sure sounds like America First. To him, it’s better than helping those who lost their health insurance or face sky-high premiums with their bills.
Then, casually, he mentioned he’d be going back to South Carolina to ask constituents to “send their sons and daughters” to the Middle East.
Someone else’s sons and daughters. Never his own, because he doesn’t have any children, and he has absolutely no earthly idea what a horror it is for parents to send their children into a war, especially one that was started for no good reason.
This is Graham’s usual pathetic posturing. He’s a man who has spent decades desperately wanting to be perceived as something he is not. While Hegseth talks tough and aggressively, motor-mouthing lethal force, Graham seems to have found his own real-life G.I. Joe doll to slather over.
But why?
Graham has been in Washington since 1995 and cultivated a reputation as a foreign policy hawk, primarily as the late Senator John McCain’s moderate sidekick. Palling around with the manly McCain, who actually fought, was wounded and imprisoned in a war, made Graham feel like a Beltway tough guy. The man who would ostensibly bomb anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Graham was all about “warrior ethos” before there was such a thing as “warrior ethos.”
The transformation from the occasional voice of Senate moderation to full-throated, whacked-out warmonger was complete somewhere around 2016, and it has only accelerated since. The more Trump screws up, the more Graham “man’s up” for Trump.
What’s revealing isn’t just what Graham says; it’s also how he operates. Reporting from the Wall Street Journal detailed how Graham worked behind the scenes to drag a reluctant Trump into this war.
According to the reporting, he coached Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on how to pitch Trump, specifically how to appeal to him by telling the stable genius how he could “make history.” Graham started lobbying Trump on the golf course shortly after the 2024 election, arguing that obliterating Iran’s nuclear facilities was the president’s “moment to shine.”
The Journal also reported that he coordinated a media campaign with retired General Jack Keane and columnist Marc Thiessen, designing television appearances and op-eds to capture Trump’s attention and make, as reports describe it, the “bait irresistible.”
When it comes to being “irresistible,” Graham apparently hasn’t learned how to do the same in his personal life. But I digress.
Graham also admitted to visiting Israel to meet with intelligence officials, boasting that “they’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” which he then used to strengthen his case to the White House.
Mmm, one wonders how the story of a heroic and conquering Graham, who secret agents confide in with their biggest state secrets, ended up as front-page news in the Wall Street Journal?
Oh, what the wildly insecure, emasculated Lindsey Graham wouldn’t do to feel important and be one of the boys.
Why, Lindsey, do you need this so badly?
The man represents a state with 5.3 million people, a state with real problems: poverty, healthcare access, crumbling infrastructure.
Instead, he’s out playing war-mongering warlord, channeling his inner G.I. Joe on Fox News, asking other people’s children to bleed in the desert while he licks his chapped lips about the investment returns of death and destruction.
It’s all the fantasies of a lonely, double-chinned old man who wants so badly to be treated like a man by hobnobbing with the young, chiseled jaws of military might.
Lindsey Graham wants to be seen as a war hawk because he thinks it makes him look powerful. What it actually makes him look like is someone who has never quite grown up, still playing with his G.I. Joe doll, only this time doing so by putting other people’s precious lives at risk.