Lindsey Graham Makes Desperate Case for Trump as 2024 Bid Sputters
Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign hasn’t exactly been hot out of the gate. His announcement speech, which came on the heels of his slate of high-profile candidates bombing in the midterms, was panned as boring and low-energy. He was widely mocked for releasing an NFT trading card collection a month later. He’d been holed up in Mar-a-Lago before finally holding a pair of rallies last weekend, but he’s spent the days since airing out his paranoia that Ron DeSantis will unseat him and contending with a mountain of legal troubles that, somehow, is still growing. NBC News reported on Tuesday that his campaign is struggling to raise money.
Understandably wary Republicans are taking a wait-and-see approach to endorsing the former president’s bid to reclaim the White House. Lindsey Graham, however, is fully on board. The South Carolina senator appeared with Trump at his first primetime campaign rally on Saturday before breathlessly gushing about him to Sean Hannity on Monday night.
“I am for Donald Trump because I know what I’m going to get,” Graham said. “We need somebody that on Day 1 can get this country back on track, that can secure our border and bring order out of chaos, somebody the Russians and the Chinese fear, somebody that can take the fight to the terrorists.”
“I’m telling your listeners right now that when you hear I like Trump policies but I want someone new: There are no Trump policies without Donald Trump,” he continued.
There was an air of desperation to Graham’s appearance, which was filled with qualifications like, “I know the downside of Trump, but let me tell you about the upside.” He’s clearly aware that voters roundly rejected Trumpism in November, that the optics around his early 2024 campaign aren’t great, and that enthusiasm for the former president and his well-worn grievances is waning. The NBC News report released Tuesday laid out that Trump raised $9.5 million over the final six weeks of 2022, which was somehow less than the amount he raised in the six weeks before his mid-November announcement.
It’s pretty sad for Trump that his best recourse against all of this is to have Graham, his only outspoken 2024 supporter in the Senate, go on Fox News to recite a pre-written bit about how actually, when you think about it, Trump deserves “another shot.” It’s even sadder for Graham, who is still totally at the mercy of a man he once called a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who would destroy America. It tells you all you need to know about the senior senator from South Carolina.