Lindsey Graham Was Caught Lying on Live TV (Again), Yet the Challengers for His Senate Seat Are Just as Awful

Senator Huckleberry from South Carolina has been tap-dancing on a very narrow beam ever since he called the current president a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” and worse back in 2016. His alternating spasms of self-degradation and lukewarm resistance—after the events of January 6, 2021, for example—have turned his political career into delicate crystal, always inches from shattering under him.

On Sunday, we had a vivid example of his political fragility when Kristen Welker treed him on the president’s recent campaign to charge former president Barack Obama for cheating him in the 2016 election. Graham wriggled and squirmed and pretended that Tulsi Gabbard had cracked the case. It was not pretty.

“I’m trying to let you know, and the media know, that we found something we didn’t know before. At the end of the day, I’m not calling for a prosecution against President Obama for treason, but I am calling for an investigation,” Graham said. “The only people colluding with the Russians were the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

Welker knew Graham was at best vamping and, at worst, lying his hindquarters into next Thursday.

“Senator, you’re saying there’s something new. This report goes back to 2020. It’s five years old. There’s actually nothing new in this report and nothing that changes any conclusion,” Welker said.

Graham’s reply? A mumbled “Whatever.”

That’s Graham’s whole political raison d’etre ever since 2016. He’s the Whatever Republican. And now, he’s got this guy coming after him. From The Post and Courier:

“We have seen where the swamp is, and the swamp is the United States Senate,” Dans said. “And the top swamp critter is none other than Lindsey Graham.” At times during the interview, he described the 70-year-old senator as a “warmonger” who is out of touch with the MAGA base. “There is no amount of lipstick that you can put on Lindsey to make MAGA fall for him, okay? That show is over. The jig is up. And it’s essentially Sunset Boulevard for Lindsey at this stage,” Dans said after referencing the July 2023 Trump rally in Pickens where Graham was loudly booed by the crowd not far from his own hometown of Central.

Lipstick? And Senator Graham as Norma Desmond? Don’t exactly need the Enigma Machine for that there. And Dans is quite a piece of work on his own.

Before becoming a behind-the-scenes force crafting the playbook for Trump’s return to power, Dans served in the president’s first administration—initially as a senior adviser in the Office of Community Planning and Development at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, then at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources arm.

After leaving government, Dans joined the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington where he helped oversee Project 2025—a sweeping effort that brought together more than 110 right-leaning organizations. The result was a 922-page blueprint to remake the federal government should a Republican return to the White House, and Trump has largely embraced the playbook despite repeatedly claiming during the campaign that he didn’t know and had “nothing to do with” Project 2025.

Asked if Trump lied to the American people, Dans said no. When pressed whether Trump’s campaign staff had knowledge of it, Dans said, “Yes, the people who worked on the campaign were aware of it. And more than that, the policies just completely pre-conditioned the American populace to want this change.”

This, of course, marked him lousy with the White House in a couple of dozen ways. He expressed doubt about the president’s truthfulness. (Horrors!) And he implied that the president was following someone else's ideas and not his inherent stable genius. This time around, the president already has endorsed Graham’s re-election, and he has assigned one of his top capos, Chris LaCivita, to run the campaign. LaCivita lost no time.

In a July 28 statement to The Post and Courier, LaCivita predicted: “Like everything Paul Dans starts, this too will end prematurely ... After being unceremoniously dumped in 2024 while trying to torpedo Donald Trump’s historic campaign, Paul Dans has parachuted himself into the state of South Carolina in direct opposition to President Trump’s longtime friend and ally in the Senate, Lindsey Graham,” LaCivita said.

At the moment, Dans is facing two other challengers to Graham in a Republican primary, including former Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, another beauty who became briefly famous once for comparing people on food assistance to feeding stray animals. Too big to be an insane asylum, as someone once put it.