Syndicated columnist Jamie Stiehm: Lindsey Graham just won't give up on Trump
By Jamie Stiehm
Mark the moment in time, the day the jam of justice broke for former President Donald Trump at last in court, where he was arraigned for criminal charges.
Who says April is the cruelest month?
That word "criminal" - cherish it, while others rage and weep, like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican who gleefully participated in President Bill Clinton's persecution over a perfectly legal affair that involved no hush money or constitutional offense.
For Graham, hypocrisy is nothing new. Some Republican senators are secretly pleased - hello, Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell - but Graham is making the loudest noise over Trump's indictment. The reason why is worth knowing.
Trump, the nefarious New Yorker who lied, cheated and stole his way to the presidency, stoking flames of anger against Blacks and women, is a desperate man.
Trump knows, with peasant cunning, this is the end of the glory road. He knows other cases are coming for him. The Justice Department and the state of Georgia aren't far behind.
Inciting an armed mob against the government, refusing to surrender top-secret files and trying to pressure state officials to change the outcome in a presidential election isn't small fry.
Then there's possible tax fraud and a civil rape trial.
Ironically, Trump seems to realize the gravity of his jeopardy more than some pundits and friends, who fret that Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has brought the weakest case against Trump to the light of day.
What this historic indictment may do is intensify Trump's already-ardent support from one faction of the electorate. But Trump is not going to win any new voters this way. And he lost the 2020 election by a margin of 7 million votes. He lost the popular vote in 2016.
Graham, in a defiant Fox News interview, declared, "This is going to destroy America. We're going to fight back at the ballot box ... How does this end? Trump wins in court and he wins the (2024) election."
Dream on, Lindsey. Consider the source: South Carolina consistently produces the bad apples of American politics. Segregationist Strom Thurmond and John Calhoun were senators from the Palmetto State. Calhoun defended antebellum slavery forcefully and developed the concepts of secession, states' rights and nullification, the legal justifications for the Civil War, which he didn't live to see.
When I began covering Capitol Hill, the seething hatred for President Clinton among House Speaker Newt Gingrich's Republican ranks was striking. It was personal. Mean-spirited as they come, the younger Graham relished his place on the House Judiciary Committee when impeachment proceedings were launched. The cudgel beat on and crossed to the more sensible Senate, which acquitted Clinton.
Graham's loyalty to Trump is like his kinship with the late strong-minded Sen. John McCain of Arizona. He played McCain's Sancho Panza on the Hill. When McCain died, Trump filled that void in his heart.
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