SEVENTY-TWO
“Your problem is too much drama,” Lindsey Graham told Trump in another one of their endless and now routine phone calls later in the summer. “Too much volatility. You could, if you choose to, fix your problem easier than Biden.
“You keep saying the election was rigged and you were cheated. You lost a close election.
“You fucked your presidency up.”
Trump abruptly hung up the phone.
About a day later, he called Graham back.
“Listen, I don’t blame you,” Graham said. “I would have hung up, too!”
It was tough medicine, but Graham reminded Trump he was on his side, his friend forever. He was trying to rehabilitate him. But if Trump came back with a recalibrated pitch and approach, who knew what could happen?
Trump responded by saying his supporters loved his personality. “I’ll lose my base,” if I change. They expect me to fight, to be disruptive. It was built in. This was not a fuck up. The election was stolen.
The night of Tuesday, June 22, Trump and Graham had another long phone conversation.
Graham wanted to shift Trump’s focus to Biden. He said Biden’s policies were disastrous and provided an opening for Republicans.
But Trump had failed to define Biden in the presidential campaign and had let Biden define himself. Now Biden was defining himself again.
“You can prosecute the case against Biden better than anybody,” Graham said. “But you can’t do that and complain about losing at the same time. The media is not your friend. They’re going to take the throwaway line you give in a speech about 2020, and that just wipes out all the other things you say about how Biden is driving the country in the wrong direction.
“If we come back in 2022 and recapture the House and take back the Senate, you’ll get your fair share of credit. If we fail to take back the House and the Senate in 2022, Trumpism, I think, will die. January 6 will be your obituary.
“If we don’t win in 2022, we’re screwed.”
In the House, the Republicans were only down five seats. But House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a job managing the unmanageable. So many factions. Graham had been in the House for eight years before moving to the Senate in 2003 and knew them well. “You’ve got the Republican Study Groups. You’ve got the moderates. The House is just a constant shit show.”
Graham believed Trump would not have won the 2016 Republican presidential nomination without his hardline stance on immigration. Americans wanted more control of their borders. Trump understood that. He had made the issue work for the GOP and win over those voters who did not identify with the Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell school of Republican politics. Biden, who wants to expand and simplify the legal immigration process, was already facing GOP salvos for the latest surge of migration from Central America.
On economics and government spending, Graham believed people instinctively understand that everything can’t be free all the time. People were being incentivized not to work. Inflation is the enemy of the middle class.
“An out-of-control border,” Graham said, summarizing his position. “A crime wave and increased prices of gas and food could lead to a Republican blowout in 2022.”
“Do you think it could be that big?” Trump asked.
“Yes,” Graham said.
But Trump then said again that he got cheated in the election. “You know, I won Georgia,” he said.
“No,” Graham said, “I missed that one. I missed that story.”
“They purged 100,000 people from the rolls,” Trump said.
“Mr. President,” Graham said, “with all due respect, that doesn’t mean you won Georgia.” Some 67,000 Georgia residents had been dropped from the voting rolls because they had filled out change-of-address forms, and 34,000 had been eliminated because election mail sent to their homes had been returned. “There’s nothing that’s going to happen that will give you Georgia or Arizona. Period.” Nothing that will give you any other state.
“The allegations you’re making about the election don’t hold water,” Graham said. A few minor ballot problems, that was it, not anywhere close to something that could change the outcome in any state. He reminded Trump that he and his staff had checked. “There weren’t 60,000 people in Georgia that voted under 18 or 8,000 felons that voted in Arizona from prison. That’s not true.”
Trump persisted. He was cheated.
“You agree with me that you’ve got a chance to come back,” Graham said, again shifting his approach.
“Yes.”
“Let’s focus on that. Mr. President, the greatest comeback in American history is possible. You’ve been written off as dead because of January the 6th. The conventional wisdom is that the Republican Party, under your leadership, has collapsed. If you, as the party leader, could lead us to a 2022 victory and you came back to take the White House, it would be the biggest comeback in American history.
“I don’t pretend to know the mood of the country,” Graham said, “but I do know the mood of the Republican primary voter in South Carolina. Rock solid Trump.” But it would not last forever.
“Mr. President, there’s a growing group of people who wonder if you’ve been too damaged to win again. And these are pretty much Trump people. You’ve got to prove to them that you can change.”
Trump was entertaining a parade of authors of Trump books at Mar-a-Lago for interviews, even multiple interviews.
“They’re going to write a shitty book about me,” Trump said.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Graham agreed.
“But I thought there will maybe be one line in the book that’d make it less shitty.”
“I’m with you,” Graham said. “Why not?”
“I’m talking to everybody.”
It seemed to Graham that Trump had opened the door to everyone but the Uber driver.
“At least I get to tell my side of the story,” Trump said. He appeared to love the interviews.
“If you don’t think you did a good job, why should anybody else think you did a good job?” Graham asked.
“I think I did a good job.”
“Go tell people why. Go defend your presidency. Do you think your presidency’s worth protecting?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, go defend it.
“I enjoyed your presidency. It wore me out. I turned gray during the last three years.”
Trump played the media successfully about half the time and the other half, “he’s just his own worst enemy,” Graham concluded. Dealing with Trump was like being near the sun. You could really get burned. For Republicans like himself, the question was: “How close do you want to get to the sun without melting?”
“I think he’s redeemable. I think he’s got magic and I think he’s got darkness. I’ve said that a thousand times.
“His desire to be successful and to be seen as being successful is my best hope. He wants to be remembered as a good president.”
When Trump would say he thought he was a good president, Graham once said, “You’re right, you were. But you lost.”
“I got cheated.”
But before any comeback was possible, it was essential for Trump to purge himself of January 6, Graham believed.
“January 6th was a horrible day in American history. It was 1968 all over again. Every day you woke up, you thought, what could happen? What’s going to happen next? You had Bobby Kennedy killed. You had Dr. King killed. You had riots in the streets. You had a Democratic convention that was in complete chaos. We made it then. We’ll make it now.”
Graham told Trump to please stop excusing the behavior of the Capitol rioters.
But Trump would not stop.
“They were peaceful people. These were great people,” he said in a July 11 interview with Fox News. “The love, the love in the air, I have never seen anything like it.
“You have people with no guns that walked down. And frankly, the doors were open and the police, in many cases, you know, they have—they have hundreds of hours of tape. They ought to release the tape to see what really happened.” Yet more than 100 police officers had been injured during the riot.
Graham did not want to hear this. By the summer, federal prosecutors had charged more than 500 people in the riot.
“How you doing, boss?” Brad Parscale said to Trump in a phone call in early July.
Though Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, had been all but banished from his circle a year earlier after the Tulsa rally debacle, he was now back in. Trump often went from hot to cold to hot with advisers.
“Sir, are you going to run?”
“I’m thinking about it,” Trump said. He sounded restless. Impatient. He leaned into the idea. “I’m really strongly thinking about running.”
“Well, that’s all I need to hear,” Parscale said.
“We’ve got to keep doing this, Brad.” He wondered aloud if Biden was suffering from dementia.
“Decrepit,” Trump spat, speaking of Biden.
“He had an army. An army for Trump. He wants that back,” Parscale later told others. “He feels a little pressure of not being in the fight like he was and he’s wrapping his head around how to get back there.
“I don’t think he sees it as a comeback. He sees it as vengeance.”