Lindsey vs. Liz: Why He Sold Out and She Didn't

The divergent paths of Graham and Cheney show how Trump has corrupted the GOP.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

ON MONDAY, AT A CAMPAIGN EVENT for Kamala Harris in Wisconsin, Charlie Sykes asked Liz Cheney an important question. Sykes, my friend and former colleague at The Bulwark, brought up this past Sunday’s Meet the Press, in which Sen. Lindsey Graham chastised Cheney and other conservatives for supporting Harris. He challenged Cheney to respond.

“Well, don’t listen to Lindsey Graham, number one,” Cheney replied. “It’s good life advice.”

Harris, who was sitting next to Cheney, laughed. It was a good line.

But Cheney’s full rebuttal to Graham, which she offered to Sykes, went much deeper. In her answer and in remarks she made at two other events for Harris that day, Cheney illustrated three big differences between herself and Graham. These differences explain, to a large extent, why Republicans like Cheney turned against Donald Trump, while Republicans like Graham didn’t.

1. Character

Trump routinely says or does things that show he’s malicious and dangerous. Sometimes Graham disowns these acts or statements. But he never disowns Trump.

On Meet the Press, for example, Kristin Welker played a recent clip of Trump calling January 6th “a day of love.” Graham, in response, condemned the people who broke into the Capitol that day. But he insisted that Trump was basically right, because “most people” who attended Trump’s rally before the violence began “didn’t attack the Capitol. They came out of love of the country.”

Welker also asked about a statement by retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that Trump is “a fascist to the core.” But Graham wasn’t interested in talking about Trump’s core. He rejected Milley’s judgment—“I don’t fear Donald Trump,” he scoffed—and dismissed Milley as “the man who oversaw 20 years of training of the Afghan-Iraqi [sic] army that folded like a cheap suit.”

Graham belittled the whole topic of Trump’s character. He complained that Democrats were “trying to disqualify” Trump by focusing on his personality. The senator dismissed this as a “game” and suggested that Trump’s words didn’t matter. “We’re winning and going to win,” he boasted, “not because of what Donald Trump’s saying, but because of what they’ve [Democrats] done for four years.”

Cheney takes a very different view. She understands that Trump’s vile words and acts reflect an underlying moral sickness, which will continue to generate destructive behavior. Responding to Sykes’s question about Graham, she said of Trump:

When you look at the cruelty that’s involved in someone who watches an attack on the United States Capitol, an attack conducted by people in his name, and refuses for over three hours to tell the mob to leave . . . that’s depravity.

And that depravity, she explained, “is the same cruelty that we see when [Trump] lies about the federal government’s disaster response, when he puts people’s lives at risk” after the recent hurricanes. A bad man will keep doing bad things.

2. Democracy

Graham says America should promote democracy and stand up to authoritarians abroad. But he refuses to acknowledge or condemn the rise of authoritarianism in the United States.

On Meet the Press, Welker played a clip of Trump from a Fox News town hall last week. In the clip, Trump warned Americans of an “enemy from within” that’s “very dangerous” and “more difficult” than Russia or China. The only example Trump gave was former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “The Pelosis, these people, they’re so sick, and they’re so evil.”

Trump’s accusation was classic authoritarian propaganda. But instead of rejecting the propaganda, Graham parroted it. “We do have enemies within,” Graham told Welker. “The Democratic agenda, I think it will change America fundamentally that they want to pack the [Supreme] Court . . . They want to eliminate the Electoral College. . . . They want to make D.C. and Puerto Rico states. So, yeah, I think their agenda’s really radical.”

Later in the interview, Welker quoted a firsthand account from Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, who said last year that Trump “was always telling me that we need to use the F.B.I. and I.R.S. to go after people—it was constant and obsessive.”

Kelly’s account illustrated Trump’s authoritarianism. But Graham refused to listen. “These are Democratic talking points,” the senator told Welker, raising his voice and trying to drown her out as she noted that the report came from Kelly. (Since then, Kelly has gone further in describing the threat Trump poses.)

Cheney, unlike Graham, acknowledges that authoritarianism can come to America. And she understands that in the form of Trump, it already has.

“I’ve spent a lot of time working, before I was elected to Congress, in countries around the world that weren’t free,” Cheney told Sykes, responding to his question about Graham. She said those experiences taught her “how fragile democracy can be.”

Earlier in the day, appearing with Harris at a forum in Pennsylvania (which was moderated by Sarah Longwell, The Bulwark’s publisher), Cheney warned that the American republic was at stake in 2024. “As Americans, we can become accustomed to thinking, ‘Well, we don’t have to worry about that here,’” she observed. “But I tell you again, as someone who has seen firsthand how quickly it can happen, that that is what’s on the ballot.”

3. Conservatism

Trump has abandoned or turned against many of the principles and policies that once defined the GOP. In most cases, Graham has ditched the principles and gone with Trump.

Like other Republican senators, Graham used to support free trade, for example. But earlier this month, Trump bragged that Graham had acceded to his demand for huge tariffs. He said Graham had privately assured him, “You got my vote.”

On Meet the Press, Graham said Republicans should vote for Trump because if Harris were to win, “I fear four more years of holding Ukraine back.” Graham’s statement was preposterous: Trump has repeatedly made it clear during this campaign that he blames Ukraine for Russia’s invasion and that he’ll cut off the support for Ukraine that’s preventing Russia from swallowing its neighbor. Graham is ignoring Trump’s betrayal and falsely attributing it to Harris.

Cheney, presented with the same choice between Trump and long-standing conservative values, has chosen to defend those values and reject Trump. She told Sykes:

When people that I know in the Republican party tell me they might be considering voting for Trump from a national security perspective, I ask them: Go look at his national security policies. Please go look at them. Because what he is proposing in terms of withdrawing from NATO, welcoming Vladimir Putin to attack our NATO allies, praising—he praises Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, and President Xi of China and Putin of Russia. . . . He praises them for their cruelty, for their tyranny.

At the forum in Pennsylvania, she added:

The most conservative of all conservative principles is being faithful to the Constitution. And you have to choose in this race between someone who has been faithful to the Constitution, who will be faithful, and Donald Trump, who—it’s not just us predicting how he will act. We watched what he did after the last election. We watched what he did on January 6th.

Graham claims to be mystified by these objections. On Meet the Press, he asked indignantly: “To every Republican supporting [Harris], what the hell are you doing? You’re supporting the most radical nominee in the history of American politics. . . . You’re trying to convince me that Donald Trump’s rhetoric is the danger to this country?”

Maybe Graham doesn’t understand, as Cheney does, that Trump’s pathologies go deeper than rhetoric. Maybe he doesn’t understand that from the standpoint of Reaganite conservatism, Trump is in many ways the more radical candidate. Maybe he doesn’t understand how serious the danger to this country is.

Or maybe he understands all of this, and—like the rest of today’s Republican elite—he chooses to ignore it or lie about it.

That’s what Cheney won’t do.