The old saying goes, “If you need a friend in Washington, buy a dog.” It seems Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is learning that lesson the hard way when it comes to his friendship with President Joe Biden.
For the apparent sin of not condemning the MAGA movement, Graham has gone from being one of Biden’s best buds in D.C. to being considered a threat to the entire American way of life.
In 2015, when Graham was seeking the presidency, he recounted with tears in his eyes how good of a friend Biden had been to him.
“The bottom line is, if you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, that’s probably your problem,” Graham said. “You got a problem. You need to do some self-evaluation because what’s not to like?”
Graham even went on to say that the then-vice president’s character was second-to-none while commenting on the personal tragedy that Biden has gone through.
“He’s the nicest person I think I’ve ever met in politics,” he added “He is as good a man as God ever created.”
Since Trump was inaugurated in 2017, Graham has been partial to him — even if the two disagreed on certain issues.
It would appear that the friendship Graham waxed poetic about has gone out the window because of that.
The South Carolina senator recently warned that if Biden’s Department of Justice tries “to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement, there literally will be riots in the street.”
“I worry about our country,” he added.
A generous reading of Graham’s statement would be that he was predicting riots — not that he was advocating for them — if the unprecedented action occurred.
Yet that is not how the White House viewed it; Biden’s gang seems to think Graham is part of an extreme faction of Americans coarsening politics and endangering our nation’s very foundation.
On Monday, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about Graham’s comments in light of Biden’s claim that semi-fascism is running amok in the GOP.
“So, um, we have seen MAGA Republicans attack our democracy. We have seen MAGA Republicans take away our rights, make threats of violence — including this weekend,” Jean-Pierre said while gesturing to the reporter who asked the question. “And that is what the president was referring to when you all asked me last week about the semi-fascism comment.”
“And he was clear — not all Republicans. There are some mainstream Republicans — he mentioned the Governor of Maryland Larry Hogan, and talked about him and what he’s been doing and how he called him out of being that mainstream Republican,” she added. “But we have seen these MAGA extreme Republicans making these kind of comments, which is dangerous, and this is what we are talking about when Joe Biden … was making his comments.”
On Thursday, Jean-Pierre doubled down, again saying that Biden considers MAGA Republicans to be a “threat to our democracy, to our freedom, to our rights.”
Karine Jean-Pierre says that people who voted for Donald Trump are “a threat to our democracy, to our freedom, to our rights.” pic.twitter.com/8e2fXP2sD7
— John Cooper (@thejcoop) August 31, 2022
Not only is the White House apparently saying Graham is an extremist, but they are of course saying that Trump voters are as well.
Ultimately, the lesson here isn’t that the South Carolina senator is some MAGA extremist. Of course, he isn’t. He isn’t even MAGA-lite, but that’s for another column.
The lesson is that Biden isn’t the nice guy Graham once thought. In actuality, he’s very much a demagogue who throws anybody under the bus who stands in his way — including his friend and half the nation in the process.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.