The Coward Files #08: Lindsey Graham

He produced the most detailed public indictment of Trump on record and then spent eight years proving every word of it true

The setup

Lindsey Graham was born in 1955 in Central, South Carolina, a town small enough that his parents ran the only bar, the only pool hall, and the local liquor store simultaneously. He put himself through the University of South Carolina on ROTC money, went to law school there, entered the Air Force as a JAG officer, and built a legal career prosecuting and defending courts-martial. He came to Congress in 1995 on the Gingrich wave, made his name as one of the House managers in the Clinton impeachment, and won a Senate seat in 2002 that he has held through five elections since. For the first twenty years of his Senate career his defining relationship was with John McCain, whose foreign policy hawkishness and institutional traditionalism Graham absorbed and amplified. He was the junior partner in a friendship that shaped his entire public identity: the man who believed in American alliances, the rule of law, and the Senate as an institution worth protecting from demagogues.

Then McCain died, and Lindsey Graham became someone else.

^{Encyclopædia Britannica}