Lindsey Graham's Last Dance
Suddenly, Donald Trump lost his loyal and most compromised soldier, leaving many of us wondering just what Trump knew about "Grahamnesty" that made him contort himself so completely?
He spent a career auditioning for power. When his conscience died in 2018, he simply auditioned for a new director.
Nobody is composing an ode to Lindsey Graham this week, and if some brave soul tries, somebody should confiscate the pen, snap it in half, and salt the earth where the lyre stood. What we owe him is not a eulogy. It is an autopsy, without much hope of finding anything inside, because the man was, before he was anything else, an act. A very long-running theatrical equivalent of a dinner-theater Hamlet who forgot the soliloquies but kept the tights, surviving season after season only because nobody in the front row wanted to be the first to boo a man who might cry.
He played the good son who raised his orphaned sister without complaint. He played the earnest young lawyer, then the Air Force JAG officer, then the senator with the twang and the twinkle, the one who could make you laugh in a Senate hearing room, which is its own small magic trick and the only real talent he had…
