Lindsey Graham sinks to a whole new low
While much of the American public moved quickly to condemn Donald Trump’s full-blown racist attack on freshman House Democrats, the arguably more vile comments from Lindsey Graham largely went unnoticed, even while he shamelessly tried to defend Trump’s idiotic Twitter tantrum by referring to the four freshmen as anti-American communists.
On Fox News Sunday, Graham spoke of his visit to a migrant detention center in McAllen, Texas along with Mike Pence. A picture of Pence standing before the center’s gates has already gone viral, inviting inevitable comparisons to the Holocaust and will permanently haunt Pence’s political career – forcing the vice president to admit that the centers are horrifically overcrowded. The holding cell in the picture was packed with 400 men, with not enough room for them to lie down.
Of course, Graham and Pence omitted the more ominous details of the facility – that it lacked showers and agents wore face masks due to the smell. It’s also somehow the fault of the Democrats that this is still going on, despite the overwhelming evidence that the Trump administration has been planning this all along and sought to make the experience for asylum seekers as traumatic as possible. Naturally, Graham reminded us of that when he simply opened his mouth during the Fox News interview.
“I don’t care if they have to stay in these facilities for 400 days,” Graham retorted, insisting with no evidence that the detainees he encountered were dangerous men – stoking the same racist and xenophobic fears that Donald Trump appeals to. He was alluding to the fact that some of the detainees they had met had been held there for 40 days, many for simply looking to flee violence in their home countries. As Graham is also up for re-election in 2020, it’s imperative that his role in abetting the most horrifying scandal of the Trump administration become as widely known as possible – as well as his role in weakening the power of the Senate to be a check on this administration.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making