For you political junkies, Rolling Stone has a fascinating deep dive into the psyche of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who, while once a staunch defender of Sen. John McCain and a never-Trumper (he even voted for a third-party candidate in the 2016 election), has now reinvented himself to become one of Trump's most despicable and slimy sycophants.
Interviewing a number of Graham's friends and co-workers, Rolling Stone author Mark Binelli uses their quotes to reveal the senator's penchant for deep hypocrisy, as he follows and supports whoever has the most political clout at the moment in order to maintain his elected position.
But the quote of the article goes to former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, who you may remember as running John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, and more recently as a pundit on various cable news shows, and along with Republicans Rick Wilson, John Weaver, and George Conway III wrote the now famous NYT editorial, "We Are Republicans and We Want Trump Defeated." Schmidt's take-down of Graham is more than just a master's class in shade; his summation gets to the heart of Graham's intent, and why he and his groveling cohorts don't deserve to serve the people who elected them. From Rolling Stone:
“People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now,” Schmidt says. “The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”
OUCH, and true. Read the entire article here, it's chock-full of good stuff.
