Lindsey Graham Utterly Embarrassed During Pathetic Defense of Trump (2024)

Senator Lindsay Graham struggled to justify Donald Trump’s outrageous behavior on Sunday, including the former president’s brutal dismissal of his longtime ally.

During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, host Jake Tapper confronted Graham with Trump’s dismissive comments about him.

Last week, Graham had told Meet the Press that Trump “the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.” Tapper told Graham that Trump had responded to his urging to focus on policy, and played a clip of the former president speaking about the South Carolina Republican.

“Look, I like Lindsey. I don’t care what he says, okay?” Trump said during a CBS exclusive interview. “Lindsey wouldn’t have been elected if I didn’t endorse him. So you know, South Carolina—Lindsey’s my friend—but if I didn’t endorse, he would’ve had no chance of getting elected.”

Graham chuckled awkwardly when faced with Trump’s harsh dismissal.

“Well, I talked to him a couple of days ago now, and all I can say is that President Trump, when he was president of our country, we had the most secure border in 40 years, gas was at $1.87, Russia wasn’t invading Ukraine, the Arabs were making peace with the Israelis. He’s got a lot to be proud of,” Graham replied, continuing to heap praise on the Republican nominee.

“Me and him are good,” Graham added, attempting to sidestep Trump’s derisive response. “We’re going to be together. I’m going to Georgia with him. We’re going to try to have a unity event in Georgia to bring this whole party together. I will be by his side in this election. I am proud of what he did as our president. I look forward to him coming back.”

Throughout his interview, however, Graham continued to express significant differences of opinion from the candidate he was desperately backing. At one point, Tapper asked Graham, a staunch anti-abortion Republican, to respond to a post on Truth Social where Trump promised his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”

“What exactly is Donald Trump going to do to help women’s reproductive rights’” Tapper asked.

Graham couldn’t account for the president’s statement at all. “I don’t know, you need to ask him about that,” Graham replied, insisting that Trump was a “very good pro-life president.”

“He’s gonna leave the abortion issue to the states. He doesn’t believe there is a role for the federal government, my position has always been to be against late-term abortion. It’s a state issue—up to a point,” Graham said. He added that he had a bill that banned abortion after 15 weeks, which is not late-term. That bill was so unpopular, even within his own party, that it never made it to a floor vote.

Trump’s sudden, and baseless, declaration to advocate for women’s health has led to backlash from his anti-abortion supporters, who feel they have been abandoned by the Republican Party platform as it moves further from a federal ban. On Sunday, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance said that Trump would veto a national abortion ban.

Tapper also questioned Graham about an upcoming gala to support January 6 rioters, which is set to be held at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It’s unclear as of yet whether Trump will actually attend the event.

“Do you think it’s a mistake for him to go, and is it a mistake for this event to be taking place at Bedminster at all?” Tapper asked.

Graham said that those who stormed the U.S. Capitol “should go to jail, they committed a crime.” But he tried to equate Trump’s support for the rioters to Kamala Harris’s efforts to raise bail money for protesters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, following the riots over the death of George Floyd.

“So, when it comes to the parties condoning violence, I would say we both should knock it off in that regard,” Graham said.

When pressed on whether Trump should allow the fundraiser, Graham once again couldn’t explain the actions of the candidate he’d come to praise.

“Well, I’ll let him—there are people being held I think that have had their due process rights violated, quite frankly they haven’t been brought to trial yet, I don’t like that very much,” Graham said. “But I’ll leave it up to him, as to what caused his support.”

The election is still almost three months off, but Vice President Kamala Harris bested Donald Trump in at least one race that’s sure to eat away at the former reality TV star: the ratings game.

Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention captured the attention of 15 million people Thursday night, approximately 20 percent more than the 12.3 million who tuned into the last night of the Republican National Convention to hear Trump accept his party’s nomination.

Several top swing state markets also favored Harris. More viewers tuned in to the vice president’s speech in Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Philadelphia, the last of which saw a 50 percentage point increase over people who watched the last night of the RNC, according to the president of insights and analytics for Fox Entertainment, Mike Mulvihill.

“WEST PALM BEACH was the top market for Vice President Harris’s acceptance speech with a 20.2 rating,” Mulvihill wrote in a separate post. “West Palm was also the top market for Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last month (19.9).”

It is possible, though, that the entirety of the Republican National Convention got more viewers than its liberal alternative.

Donald Trump is trying to brush off the fact that he shared A.I.-generated images of Taylor Swift endorsing his campaign to his Truth Social account earlier this week, now claiming that he doesn’t know “anything about them.”

“I don’t know anything about them, other than somebody else generated them,” Trump told Fox Business correspondent Gary Trimble after his campaign event in Asheboro, North Carolina, on Wednesday. “I didn’t generate them.”

One fabricated image shared by Trump of the notoriously litigious pop star had Swift clad in red, white, and blue, posing like Uncle Sam before an American flag emblazoned with the text: “Taylor wants YOU to vote for Donald Trump.”

“I accept!” Trump captioned the image.

Another Swift-related post shared by the former president depicted a group of women marching in “Swifties for Trump” shirts (the post was labeled satire by its creator).

If Trump truly can’t tell the difference between an A.I. generated image and a genuine photograph, especially one that’s doctored to illustrate a campaign endorsem*nt, then that’s a significant problem. But it’s far from the only A.I.-generated image that Trump has shared in recent weeks. Shortly after he began posting to his Twitter account—the first time he’d done so in earnest since the January 6 riot—the former president shared an A.I.-generated video of himself and X owner Elon Musk dancing.

Still, Trump warned Trimble, “A.I. is always very dangerous.”

“Somebody came out. They said, ‘Oh look at this,’” Trump attempted to explain to the reporter on Wednesday. “These were all made up by other people. A.I. is always very dangerous in that way.”

Donald Trump once referred to cryptocurrencies as a scam, but as of this week, he appears to be all in on the digital coin.

On Thursday, the Republican nominee and his family announced the creation of “The Trump DeFi Project”—short for decentralized finance—to platform cryptocurrencies.

“For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites,” Trump wrote online in a post echoed by his son, Don Jr. “It’s time we take a stand—together.”

Few details are known about the Trump DeFi project, including its official launch date or its purpose, but the “official” Telegram channel of the project, “The DeFiant Ones,” promises updates in the coming days.

Trump has increasingly tried to frame himself as a pro-crypto candidate in this election cycle. At a Bitcoin Conference in Nashville in July, Trump promised to build out a “strategic national bitcoin reserve” if elected, according to CoinDesk. But the former president’s recent investments would show that his change of heart on the digital assets isn’t all an act. Financial disclosures released earlier this month show that Trump has $7.15 million coming from a source labeled NFT INT., likely referring to his NFT series. He’s also kept a stockpile of cash in the new-wave currencies, with the disclosure listing roughly $5 million in crypto.