The Epitomizer Bunny
You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell … He’s just generally a loser as a person and a candidate. You can’t nominate a nutjob and lose, and expect it doesn’t have consequences … What I see is a demagogue, somebody that has solutions that will never work, that is playing on people’s prejudices and the dark side of politics. That was Lindsey Graham on Donald Trump before the latter rose to the presidency for the first time. Over the course of the next few years (and several rounds of golf), Lindsey Graham, who died over the weekend, became a MAGA mainstay and one of Trump’s most vocal supporters. There’s a description for a person like that: A Role Model. After realizing that Trump was popular, powerful, and was remaking the GOP, Graham decided to work within the new Trumpian system, doing whatever he could to manipulate, cajole, and nudge the new boss in directions that would advance Graham’s own policies and personal political power. Sound familiar? That’s what we’ve seen from nearly the entire GOP since Trump’s first term, and during his second, they’ve been joined by corporate leaders, executive branch appointees, university heads, media apologists, and many more, all of whom either actively embrace America’s new, wholly transactional, authoritarian-curious era, or who know things are bad right now, but figure they’ll work within the new system for awhile, until things get back to normal, and then they’ll reclaim their ethics and explain they were doing it all for the greater good (if they, and/or the democracy, live long enough to make that argument.) Lindsey Graham wasn’t an outlier in this strategy; he was its ultimate exemplar. He traded in his ethics and his reputation and got a hefty return on the political policies and power he desired. He was soul-selling’s Epitomizer Bunny. He abandoned his core values and moved toward Trumpism, and he just kept going, and going, and going.
+ Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Quintessential Politician of This Era. “In 2015, Graham described Trump as a ‘race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot’ who should ‘go to hell.’ Also as a ‘nutjob.’ When Trump won, Graham understood, as did so many others, that he would have to make some important choices. For a while, he went silent. In the spring of 2016, I saw him at one of those conferences in Europe. He seemed too depressed to speak. But then, like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experienced radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator.”
+ “It’s a slow death. The surrender to despotism doesn’t happen all at once. It advances in stages: a step, a rationalization. Another step, another rationalization. The deeper you go, the more you need to justify. You say what you need to say. You believe what you need to believe. So let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s see who Lindsey Graham was before he drank the poison.” Will Saletan: The Corruption of Lindsey Graham.
