CHAPTER 25

I WAS RETURNING TO THE Manchester Radisson from dinner with my colleague Jon one night in early November 2015 when I caught a glimpse of a familiar figure standing in the lobby. He was alone, suitcase in hand, his dry-cleaning slung over his shoulder. The early 2000s-style flip phone was the giveaway: it was Lindsey Graham.

The senator offered each of us a customary fist bump. “Good to see y’all,” he said. “Where’s the bar?” The only reason Graham didn’t already know where the hotel bar was located was that he wasn’t usually a Radisson man. The South Carolina senator typically stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn down the street instead. But the HGI cost $50 a night more than the Radisson during this particular week, and the cash-strapped candidate, who was still polling deep within margin-of-error territory, needed to save every penny he could.

Graham had traveled from DC to New Hampshire on his own, his campaign unable to spring for a single aide to accompany him. For just about anyone else, it would have been a sad scene. Here was a sitting US senator, one with the most impressive foreign policy résumé of anyone in the GOP field, reduced to the ranks of a lonely guy on a business trip looking for someone to have a drink with. But Graham wasn’t in the least bit unhappy. For him, it was all just part of the ride, and he was always eager to share a drink and a laugh.

We headed down the hallway to JD’s Tavern. Moments after ordering his Bailey’s on the rocks, Graham dove into his warmongering stand-up act: “Christie and I might be a good ticket,” he said. “Because we both just want to kill people.”

“People”—in this context, I should say, was shorthand for “terrorists.” In public and in private, Graham talked a lot about killing terrorists. He viewed the world as an exceptionally dangerous place, ready to detonate at any moment. Still, he knew that many of his detractors saw him as a reckless jingoist who hadn’t truly absorbed the lessons that had come from launching the Iraq fiasco in the first place. That’s why he talked about killing “people” sometimes instead of killing “terrorists.” Embracing the warmonger caricature was his way of deflecting it.

After he was finished talking about killing, Graham opened up the floor by asking us the overriding question that continued to nag at him: “How the hell am I losing to these people?” There was no good answer—not one, at least, that would ever satisfy him. The truth was that Donald Trump was a unique phenomenon who had managed to obliterate all of the normal rules of how you win a presidential nomination. On that front, Graham more or less agreed. When the conversation turned to his less reckless opponents, we told him that we were planning to spend the following day on Jeb Bush’s campaign bus.

“Why do you think Jeb is running for president?” Graham asked.

“Because he feels like he’s supposed to?” I replied.

“Bingo,” he said.

“Now, why am I running for president?”

Jon and I answered in unison this time: “To kill people!”

Graham slapped the table and nodded pensively, as he hoisted his Bailey’s. By any objective measure, the man had a zero-percent chance of being elected president, but as his drink slowly disappeared, he couldn’t help but lay out for us his magical path to the nomination: exceed rock-bottom expectations in Iowa, finish in the top three in New Hampshire, win his home state of South Carolina, and then he’d be off to the races from there. It was never going to happen, and Graham must have known it. I couldn’t help but think that he remained in the race mostly for the fun of it—the sheer joy of schlepping around New Hampshire to regale his audiences of a couple of dozen people in public and a couple of journalists in private. The boundless pleasure of needling his three top targets for ridicule—Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Donald Trump—was perhaps his very favorite thing of all.

“I’m fairly confident that if I went onto the Senate floor and murdered Ted Cruz, I could get a majority of Republican senators to testify that it was suicide,” Graham told us. It was an exceptionally provocative thing for a sitting US senator to say, which made the remark especially hilarious and, I thought at the time, strictly private. Three months later, however, Graham repeated the very same joke at the Washington Press Club Foundation Congressional Dinner on stage in front of a live audience. I was surely among the most surprised when a few weeks after that, Graham endorsed Cruz’s campaign, pegging the reviled Texas senator as the last best chance to stop Trump’s march to the nomination. One thing about Lindsey Graham was that he always kept you on your toes.

After we ordered another round of drinks, Jon texted our two other HuffPost colleagues to let them know that they’d better get down to JD’s, if they ever wanted to hear a US senator expound on how he could get away with murdering one of his colleagues. Within moments, they had joined us at the table. By that time, Graham had gotten his fill of Ted Cruz homicide jokes and had moved on to skewering Rand Paul. “I’d do anything to get on that debate stage with Rand,” Graham, who’d been relegated to the undercard debates, said. “I just want to poke him a little bit.” He stuck his index finger out and poked the air to illustrate.

As much as he salivated over the prospect of going toe-to-toe against Paul, Graham’s dream scenario was to find a way to share a stage with Trump, the Republican competitor for whom he harbored his most visceral disgust. Someone at the table asked Graham what would be the first question he’d pose to the Republican front-runner in such a scenario. This was the first time all night that he turned serious. “What exactly did you mean when you said that John McCain was not really a war hero?” he said without hesitation. Graham added that although his own failure to break through in New Hampshire didn’t really trouble him on a personal level, the thing that did hurt was the degree to which he knew that McCain wanted him to win. He hated the idea of letting his old buddy down.

When it was time to call it a night, the senator thanked us for taking care of his tab, and then we all poured out into the lobby. As he headed toward the elevator, we had to remind him about his dry-cleaning, which he’d left hanging under the staircase. This was what running for president of the United States was like for Lindsey Graham.

After spending a long, boring day on the trail with Jeb Bush, on the following night, my colleagues and I returned for a late dinner to JD’s, one of the only places in town that served food after 9:00 p.m. on a weeknight. We had just sat down at our table when a familiar face entered the bar. He’d been out on the campaign trail, too. Once again, the senator from South Carolina was flying solo, and he didn’t need to ask this time before pulling up a chair. When the waitress came, he first ordered a water but then thought better of it and asked for a glass of Riesling.

Graham was in an even spicier mood than he’d been the night before, as he in rapid succession wondered aloud how Bobby Jindal had convinced his wife to marry him, questioned the trustworthiness of people who don’t drink, and talked quite a bit more about killing people. When I excused myself briefly to call my editor, Sam Stein, Graham took the phone from me and recorded a voice mail for Sam. “Scott’s in jail,” the senator deadpanned. I’d never enjoyed the company of a politician so thoroughly.

Although he hadn’t made a dent in the polls, Graham was making his own kind of impression on New Hampshire. After he got up to use the restroom, our waitress came over to refresh everyone’s drinks.

“Where’d Riesling guy go?” she asked.

I fidgeted in my seat. “Actually, he’s a US senator,” I said.

“Oh, Bailey’s guy?” the waitress replied. “Yeah, I know Lindsey.”