Lindsey Graham just screwed things up royally for Donald Trump
The thing about a show of solidarity is that it has to be, well, solid. If you arrange one and only some of the people involved decide they’re willing to participate, then you’ve basically just forced the others to signal that they’re against you by refusing to participate. That brings us to Lindsey Graham, who is an unstable idiot.
Donald Trump and his allies have given up any remaining pretense of innocence in the Ukraine scandal. They’re instead focusing on the notion that the impeachment process is unfair and is therefore a worse crime against Trump than any of the crimes that Trump has committed. To give you an idea of how well that strategy is working, just take a look at the fact that pro-impeachment poll numbers continue to rise. People aren’t buying it.
This meant moving on to Plan B. Unfortunately for Donald Trump, this involved letting Lindsey Graham take a swing at things. Graham seemed to think he was helping Trump by arranging for Republican Senators to unanimously condemn the manner in which the House impeachment process is being carried out. If every GOP Senator was willing to participate in a show of solidarity, it just might help Trump. It would have been unlikely to help, but at this point these guys are grasping at straws anyway.
The thing is, Lindsey Graham didn’t bother to do a headcount first, because it turns out three Senate Republicans didn’t want to put their names on the resolution. So now the story is that a few Republican Senators are already trying to distance themselves from Donald Trump, which makes Trump look even worse than if no resolution had been floated. This is the kind of stupidity that only Graham could pull off.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report