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      Former Top McCain Aide Says He Lied to Discredit a Times Article

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      “John McCain’s lie became mine,” Steve Schmidt wrote about Senator John McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist.The senior strategist for Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign said on Sunday night that he had lied to discredit a New York Times article that reported on Mr. McCain’s close relationship with a female lobbyist, a claim that the candidate and the campaign attacked at considerable length at the time.The statement from Steve Schmidt, which he published in a late-night Substack post, was a remarkable turnabout for a former senior aide who once praised Mr. McCain as “the greatest man I’ve ever known.”More than 14 years after The Times’s article appeared and four years after the Republican senator’s death, Mr. Schmidt let loose a furious personal assault on the credibility of Mr. McCain and his family.“Immediately following the story’s publication, John and Cindy McCain both lied to the American people,” Mr. Schmidt wrote, adding, “Ultimately, John McCain’s lie became mine.”Defending his long silence on the matter, Mr. Schmidt said in his post that he “didn’t want to do anything to compromise John McCain’s honor.” His post then questioned Mr. McCain’s judgment in choosing the relatively unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate and accused Mr. McCain of cowering before her — “terrified of the creature that he created,” he wrote.In an interview on Monday, Mr. Schmidt said he was motivated to speak up now in part because he felt he had been unfairly associated for nearly 15 years with Mr. McCain’s choice of Ms. Palin, which he called “a burden.”Mr. Schmidt also accused Mr. McCain — a self-styled maverick who fought leaders of his own party as he pushed for stricter campaign finance restrictions and ethics rules around political activities like lobbying — of lying about one aspect of the article that particularly angered the senator.The article, published on Feb. 21, 2008, reported that several people involved with Mr. McCain’s first presidential campaign, in 2000, became concerned that he and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, had a romantic relationship. It was an explosive and potentially damaging claim for a presidential candidate who positioned himself as a corruption-fighter committed to exposing Washington’s self-dealing ways.Mr. Schmidt in 2008 behind Mr. McCain, who denied that he had a romantic relationship with a lobbyist years earlier.Mary Altaffer/Associated PressThe day after the article was published, Mr. McCain appeared with his wife, Cindy, at a news conference and stated that the article was wrong. “I’m very disappointed in The New York Times piece. It’s not true,” he said.Mr. McCain continued to deny until his death that he had a romantic relationship with Ms. Iseman. Mr. Schmidt, however, said Mr. McCain had privately acknowledged an affair to him after The Times published its article. “John McCain told me the truth backstage at an event in Ohio,” he wrote.Ms. Iseman sued The Times and demanded that it print a retraction of the article on its front page. Less than three months after she filed the lawsuit, she dropped it. The Times appended a note to readers at the bottom of the article that said it “did not state, and The Times did not intend to conclude, that Ms. Iseman had engaged in a romantic affair with Senator McCain or an unethical relationship on behalf of her clients in breach of the public trust.”Mr. Schmidt did not name Ms. Iseman in his Substack post, though he made several references to private phone calls he had with a “lobbyist” he describes in disparaging terms.Ms. Iseman did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.A spokeswoman for The Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, said the paper stood by the article. “We were confident in the accuracy of our reporting in 2008, and we remain so.”Mr. McCain’s daughter Meghan, a conservative author and former co-host of “The View,” said her family had no comment on Monday. More

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      In Arizona, a Swing State Swings to the Far Right

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      SIERRA VISTA, Ariz. — Kari Lake has a strategy to get elected in 2022.Keep talking about 2020.Minutes into her pitch at the Cochise County Republican headquarters in the suburbs of southern Arizona, Ms. Lake zeroed in on the presidential election 18 months ago, calling it “crooked” and “corrupt.” She claimed nearly a dozen times in a single hour that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump, a falsehood that the audience — some of whom wore red hats reading “Trump Won” — was eager to hear. Ms. Lake, a former local Fox anchor who won Mr. Trump’s endorsement as she campaigns to become Arizona’s next governor, calls the 2020 election a key motivation in her decision to enter the race.“We need some people with a backbone to stand up for this country — we had our election stolen,” Ms. Lake said in an interview after the Cochise County event in March, adding, “I don’t know if it’s a winning issue, but it’s a winning issue when it comes to saving this country.”Republicans in many states have grown increasingly tired of the Stop the Steal movement and the push by Mr. Trump to reward election deniers and punish those who accept President Biden’s victory. At a time when Mr. Biden’s approval ratings are sinking, leaders in the party are urging candidates to focus instead on the economy, inflation and other kitchen-table issues.But 12 weeks before its Republican primary in August, Arizona shows just how firm of a grasp Mr. Trump and his election conspiracy theories still have at every level of the party, from local activists to top statewide candidates. And this week’s victory for J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author who received the former president’s endorsement in the Republican primary for an Ohio Senate seat, shows that loyalty to Trumpism goes a long way in battleground states.Still, some establishment Republicans worry that party leaders have gone too far and are effectively handing the closely divided swing state to Democrats in November.“Anybody who is still re-litigating 2020 will lose the general election,” said Kathy Petsas, a Republican who has served as a precinct captain and collected signatures for several candidates this year. “I think people at home have caught on, and I don’t think a lot of our candidates have caught on.”Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona with President Donald J. Trump in 2020. The race to replace Mr. Ducey, who cannot run again because of term limits, has become among the most expensive governor’s races in state history.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTwo forces have helped ensure election denialism remains a core issue in Arizona: the Republican-sponsored and widely derided review of the presidential vote in the state’s largest county, and Mr. Trump’s continued attacks on the Republican governor, Doug Ducey, for rebuffing his efforts to block election certification. More than three dozen Republicans running for office in Arizona — including six candidates for statewide posts — have made denying the 2020 results a centerpiece of their campaigns, according to two groups tracking candidates, States United Action and Pro-Democracy Republicans. States United Action is nonpartisan; Maricopa County’s top elections official, a Republican, began Pro-Democracy Republicans earlier this year.In interviews with more than a dozen voters at Ms. Lake’s campaign events, nearly all said “election integrity” was their top issue, and none believed that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the presidential election.“We need strong Republicans to get rid of the RINOs who aren’t willing to do anything, like our governor,” said Claribeth Davis, 62, using the acronym for “Republicans in name only” to refer to Mr. Ducey. Ms. Davis, a medical aide, said she recently moved from the Phoenix suburbs to Cochise County’s Sierra Vista, a rural section of southern Arizona, to “be with more like-minded people.”Trump supporters in November 2020 gathered outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in Phoenix, where ballots were being counted.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesNumerous courts and reviews have found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. The Republican-ordered review by Cyber Ninjas, a now-defunct company with no previous experience in elections, concluded that there had actually been even more votes for Mr. Biden and even fewer for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County. The county’s board of supervisors rebutted nearly all of the group’s claims. But none of that has tamped down the fervent belief among many Republicans that control of the country has been snatched away from them.“There’s nothing but elitists in charge,” said Suzanne Jenkins, a 75-year-old retiree who described herself as a Tea Party Republican and who drove about an hour to Sierra Vista to hear Ms. Lake speak.Understand the Ohio and Indiana Primary ElectionsTrump’s Grip: J.D. Vance’s win in Ohio’s G.O.P. Senate primary was a strong affirmation of the former president’s continued dominance of the Republican Party.How Vance Won: The author of “Hillbilly Elegy” got a big endorsement from Donald J. Trump, but a cable news megaphone and a huge infusion of spending helped pave his way to victory.Ohio Takeaways: It was a good night for Mr. Trump, and not just because of Mr. Vance. Here’s why.Winners and Losers: A progressive challenger was defeated (again) in Ohio, and a Trump-endorsed Pence (not that one) won in Indiana. These were some of the key results.There has been little political upside for moderate and more establishment Republicans in Arizona to speak out against the party’s far-right wing. Instead, the handful of them who have done so have faced protests, censure from local Republican organizations and harassment. Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, who has repeatedly defended the state’s 2020 election, has received death threats.“There’s not enough pushback,” said State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican who is not running for re-election. “Because everyone is afraid of a primary.”For generations, Arizona was a reliably red state. Even as Senator John McCain fashioned himself into a moderate maverick, the state was a hotbed of conservative anti-immigration politics that helped give rise to Mr. Trump’s candidacy and presidency. Mr. McCain’s name is now invoked as an insult by conservative Republicans, including Ms. Lake.But in the last four years, voters have elected two Democratic senators and chosen a Democrat for president for the first time in more than two decades, though Republicans remain in control of the State Legislature and the governor’s mansion.Arizona has long been a source of right-wing enthusiasm for the national party. The former Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, made national headlines in the early 2000s for his anti-immigrant policies, and in 2010 the Legislature passed what became known as the “show me your papers” law, effectively legalizing racial profiling. It was later struck down, and Mr. Arpaio is now running for mayor in a Phoenix suburb.Ms. Lake, who quit her job as an anchor for the local Fox station because of what she called its bias and dishonesty, frequently blasts the media as “brainwashed,” “immoral” and “the enemy of the people.” And her widespread name recognition has helped give her an early lead in the polls.But winning the crowded Republican primary is far from certain. Ms. Lake faces especially fierce opposition from Karrin Taylor Robson, a Phoenix-based business owner who has contributed millions to her own campaign. Already, the race to replace Mr. Ducey, who cannot run again because of term limits, has become among the most expensive governor’s races in state history, with $13.6 million in spending so far.Ms. Taylor Robson has not made the 2020 election the major focus of her campaign, but when asked whether she considered Mr. Biden the fairly elected president, she responded in a statement, “Joe Biden may be the president, but the election definitely wasn’t fair.”“We need some people with a backbone to stand up for this country — we had our election stolen,” said Kari Lake, who won Mr. Trump’s endorsement in her campaign for governor.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesMs. Lake says Arizona should finish the border wall that Mr. Trump began building. She has emphasized her ties to the former president, appearing with him at his rally in the state earlier this year, fund-raising with him at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and including his name on her campaign signs.Ms. Lake has made conspiracy theories a centerpiece of her campaign — releasing a television ad that told viewers that if they were watching the ad, they were in the middle of a “fake news” program. “You know how to know it’s fake?” she says to the camera. “Because they won’t even cover the biggest story out there: the rigged election of 2020.” She also touts her endorsement from the chief executive of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, a key financier of right-wing efforts to discredit the 2020 election.From first-time candidates to incumbents in Congress and the State Legislature, many Republicans in Arizona have increasingly embraced an extremist brand of right-wing politics.Representative Paul Gosar and State Senator Wendy Rogers both spoke at the America First Political Action Conference, a group with strong ties to white nationalists, and both were censured by their legislative bodies for their violent rhetoric and antics. Ms. Rogers and State Representative Mark Finchem, a Republican who is running for secretary of state, have acknowledged ties to the Oath Keepers militia group. Ron Watkins, who is widely believed to have played a major role in writing the anonymous posts that helped spur the pro-Trump conspiracy theory known as QAnon, is running for Congress. Jim Lamon, a Republican running for U.S. Senate, falsely claimed to be an elector for Arizona last year.Even Mr. Ducey, who was formally censured by the state Republican Party last year for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, has acknowledged the energy on the state’s hard-right, signing a bill that will require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. When reporters asked about his support for Ms. Rogers, Mr. Ducey said that “she’s still better than her opponent,” a Democrat, though he later applauded the Legislature’s vote to censure her. Mark Brnovich, the Arizona attorney general who is now running for U.S. Senate, has faced repeated criticism from other Republicans, including Ms. Lake and Mr. Trump, and accusations that he is dragging out the investigation into the presidential election.Representative Paul Gosar spoke at a Trump rally in Florence, Ariz., in January.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesState Senator Wendy Rogers, an Arizona Republican, addressed the crowd at a Trump rally. She was censured by the State Senate in March after giving a speech to a white nationalist gathering.Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressA few Republican candidates have made the economy and immigration the focus of their campaign. But even among those candidates, almost none have offered a full-throated defense of the 2020 election. Some Republicans believe that while focusing on 2020 is both irresponsible and politically unwise, it may not matter in Arizona, where the president’s approval rating is now at its lowest since he took office, a dive largely driven by independent voters.Because independent and third-party voters make up roughly 34 percent of the electorate, it is impossible to win the state with Republicans alone. Ms. Lake and other candidates like her may have already hit a ceiling even among primary voters, as polls show many voters remain undecided, and there is evidence of growing support for other candidates.“I am concerned that if these people get elected it will make another decade of craziness,” said Bob Worsley, a former state senator who describes himself as a moderate Republican. “I don’t know who has the stature to say, ‘Let’s bring this party back, bring the establishment base back into power.’ Now we’re a purple state and we don’t have a John McCain to try to crack the whip.” More

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      Tap Dancing With Trump: Lindsey Graham’s Quest for Relevance

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      Lindsey Graham’s moment, it seemed, came on the evening of Jan. 6. With crews still cleaning up the blood and broken glass left by the mob that just hours before had stormed the Capitol, he took the Senate floor to declare, “Count me out” and “Enough is enough.”Half a year later, a relaxed Mr. Graham, sitting in his Senate office behind a desk strewn with balled napkins and empty Coke Zero bottles, says he did not mean what almost everybody else thought he meant.“That was taken as, ‘I’m out, count me out,’ that somehow, you know, that I’m done with the president,” he said. “No! What I was trying to say to my colleagues and to the country was, ‘This process has come to a conclusion.’ The president had access to the courts. He was able to make his case to state legislators through hearings. He was disappointed he fell short. It didn’t work out. It was over for me.”What was not over for the senator from South Carolina was his unlikely — to many people, confounding — relationship with that president, Donald J. Trump.For four years, Mr. Graham, a man who had once called Mr. Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot,” exemplified the accommodations that so many Republicans made to the precedent-breaking president, only more vividly, volubly and candidly.But Mr. Graham’s reaffirmed devotion has come to represent something more remarkable: his party’s headlong march into the far reaches of Trumpism. That the senator is making regular Palm Beach pilgrimages as supplicant to an exiled former president who inspired the Capitol attack and continues to undermine democratic norms underscores how fully his party has departed from the traditional conservative ideologies of politicians like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and Mr. Graham’s close friend John McCain.To critics of Mr. Graham, and of Mr. Trump, that enabling comes at enormous cost. It can be seen, for example, in Republicans’ efforts to torpedo the investigations of the Capitol riot and in the way the party, with much of its base in thrall to Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lie, is enacting a wave of vote-suppressing legislation in battleground states.Mr. Graham, of course, describes his role in far less apocalyptic terms. Even as he proclaims — from under the hard gaze of a half-dozen photos of Mr. McCain — that the Republican Party is now “the Trump party,” even as he goes on Fox to declare that the party can’t “move forward” without the man who twice lost the popular vote, Mr. Graham casts himself as a singular force for moderation and sanity.Senator Lindsey Graham at a campaign rally last year with President Donald J. Trump.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHe alone can fix the former president, he believes, and make him a unifying figure for Republicans to take back both houses of Congress next year and beyond. To that end, he says, he is determined to steer Mr. Trump away from a dangerous obsession with 2020.“What I say to him is, ‘Do you want January the 6th to be your political obituary?’” he said. “‘Because if you don’t get over it, it’s going to be.’”Many of Mr. Graham’s old friends on both sides of the aisle — and he still does not lack for them — grudgingly accepted as political exigency his original turn to Mr. Trump. His deviations from conservative orthodoxy, they understood, had left him precariously mistrusted back home. Now, though, they fear he has reached a point of no return.“Trump is terrible for the country, he’s terrible for the Republican Party and, as far as I’m concerned, he’s terrible for Lindsey,” said Mark Salter, a close McCain friend who was the ghostwriter for Mr. Graham’s autobiography.“Lindsey is playing high-risk politics,” said Senator Dick Durbin, a liberal Democrat from Illinois who considers Mr. Graham a friend. “He is pinning the hopes of the Republican Party on a very unstable person.”What makes Lindsey run?Over the last four years, pundits and political analysts have endlessly teased the question. Yet what emerges from interviews with more than 60 people close to him, and with the senator himself, is a narrative less of transformation than of gyration — of an infinitely adaptable operator seeking validation in the proximity to power. It is that yearning for relevance, rooted in what he and others described as a childhood of privation and loss, that makes Mr. Graham’s story more than just a case study of political survival in the age of Trump.Raised just this side of poverty and left parentless early, Mr. Graham, 66, has from his school days chosen to ally himself with protective figures he calls “alpha dogs,” men more powerful than himself — disparate, even antagonistic, figures like Mr. Trump and Mr. McCain, the onetime prisoner of war so famously disparaged by Mr. Trump. Indeed, toward the end of his life, Mr. McCain privately remarked that his friend was drawn to the president for the affirmation.“To be part of a football team, you don’t have to be the quarterback, right?” Mr. Graham said in the interview. “I mean, there’s a value in being part of something.”It was in that role, amid unrelenting pressure from Mr. Trump and his sons, that Mr. Graham called Georgia’s top elections official in November to inquire about the vote tally in the state, which Mr. Trump lost by nearly 12,000. That call is now part of a criminal investigation of the Trump camp’s actions in Georgia.Yet nothing Mr. Graham does or says seems enough to satisfy the Trumps. That has left the self-described conciliator struggling to generate good will on both sides of the political divide.In mid-November, as he was publicly urging Mr. Trump to keep up the election fight, Mr. Graham made a previously unreported phone call to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., to revive a friendship damaged by his call for a special prosecutor to investigate the overseas business dealings of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter.It was short, and not especially sweet, according to three people with direct knowledge of the exchange. Mr. Graham told Mr. Biden that, in attacking Hunter, he had done only the bare minimum to satisfy Trump supporters back home. (A Graham spokesman disputed that account.)Mr. Biden, who viewed Mr. Graham’s statement as an unforgivable attack on his family responded by saying he would work with any Republican, but dismissed the approach as Mr. Graham trying to have it both ways, two people close to the president said.“Lindsey’s been a personal disappointment,” Mr. Biden said a few days later, “because I was a personal friend of his.”From Humble BeginningsIt is a truism of political biography that golf affords a window into both style and soul. And it has certainly played an important role in sustaining the precarious but durable Trump-Graham partnership. (That bond was on display in May, when the two men staged a Trump Graham Golf Classic fund-raiser, with an entry fee of $25,000.)Still, the senator’s frequent impromptu trips to Mar-a-Lago remain a bit of a puzzlement to the former president.“Jesus, Lindsey must really, really like to play golf,” Mr. Trump recently told an aide.The game — and the status conferred by playing with Mr. Trump — is no small thing to a man who grew up on the creaky lower rungs of the middle class, living in the back room of his family’s beer-and-shot pool hall, the Sanitary Cafe, in Central, S.C., a mill town at the midpoint of the freight line between Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C.His parents, Millie and F.J. Graham — known to everyone in town as Dude — worked 14-hour days and slept in the cramped apartment next to the bar’s two bathrooms, their kitchen separated by a curtain from the smoky tavern, with its jukebox, pinball machines and peeling laminate-wood counter. The future senator shared a single room with his parents, his sister, Darline, and the occasional patron, often coated in mill dust, who would wander in tipsily to watch TV with the family.A young Mr. Graham with his mother, Millie, in 1958.via Lindsey GrahamThe future senator being held by his father, F.J., several years earlier.via Lindsey GrahamMr. Graham was very close to both parents, and he finds it hard to discuss their loss without choking up. But his mother was the warmer presence; her husband was a wry but undemonstrative World War II veteran devoted to his family but preoccupied with keeping the business afloat and prone, in Mr. Graham’s early years, to drinking.“He had a tough side to him. He kept a gun behind the counter,” the senator’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, recalled in a recent interview, adding, “You knew that Mr. Dude was a kind, good man, but you weren’t going to mess with him.”It fell largely to Mr. Graham, 9 years older, to be parent to his sister. From his early teens, she recalled, it was Lindsey who helped her with her homework, Lindsey who gave her medicine when she was sick. Not too many years later, it would be Lindsey who told her that their mother was dying. “Lindsey took me to the end of the hall” at the hospital, she said. “He told me he didn’t know if she was going to make it.”The Grahams did not have the money or the time for real vacations, so to bond with his father, Lindsey decided they should take up golf. They began playing at a chewed-up county course, and it became such a weekly ritual that, to save on rental fees, Dude Graham eventually bought an old electric cart that could be charged, free, at the course’s cart shed.Mr. Graham with his sister, Darline, and his parents.via Lindsey GrahamShortly after Mr. Graham began attending the University of South Carolina, his mother was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. On weekends, he would ride a bus home to look after his sister. “It was just dark and lonely without him there,” she said.Fifteen months after their mother died, Ms. Nordone, still in middle school, woke up to discover Dude Graham dead, from a heart attack.“Don’t worry,” her brother told her, “I’ll always take care of you,” which he did as he ground his way through law school.Had this childhood led Mr. Graham to seek out father figures in his adult life? “That’s a tough question,” she replied. “I just don’t know.”Either way, his quicksilver mind and self-lacerating sense of humor made him a magnet for mentors and big brothers. Two of the earliest were his high school coach, Alpheus Lee Curtis, and Colonel Pete Sercer, the head of Air Force R.O.T.C. at the University of South Carolina, who guided him toward his first career, as a military lawyer, serving largely in Europe.Another mentor was Larry Brandt, his law partner when he returned to South Carolina. In an interview, Mr. Brandt recalled that Mr. Graham’s career in politics began when he was approached by both the local Republican and Democratic parties in 1992 to run for a state House seat held by an unpopular Democrat.“Lindsey came to me and said, ‘What do you think?’” said Mr. Brandt, a lifelong Democrat. “Lindsey and I talked a lot over time about issues, and there’s no doubt Lindsey was a Democrat on all social issues.”Ultimately, he said, Mr. Graham’s decision came down to calculation more than deep partisan feeling: The Democratic primary would be competitive; if he ran as a Republican, he would be able to devote himself to the general election.He won, and within a few years was elected to Congress, which in 1999 led to a career-making performance as a House manager in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. Mr. McCain was so impressed with the barbed, folksy one-liners that he invited Mr. Graham back to his Senate office, where he declared himself a fan — and, oh, would Mr. Graham endorse him for president in 2000?Mr. Graham was House manager in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999.Douglas Graham/Congressional Quarterly, via Getty Images“I said, ‘Yeah,’” recalled Mr. Graham, who remembers thinking, in the moment, how far he had come from the Sanitary Cafe. “No one’s ever asked me to help them run for president. If Bush had asked me before him, I’d have probably said yes.”After Mr. Graham’s election to the Senate in 2002, the two became inseparable, communicating by flip-phone, often several times an hour, with Mr. Graham serving as sounding board, soother and tactical adviser. Their influence peaked as they supported the Iraq war before joining forces to question the Bush administration’s strategy and interrogation methods. They shared a vision for the Republican Party — inclusive, center-right, hawkish on foreign policy, more moderate on immigration and other domestic issues.But that ideal had long been fading when Mr. Graham joined Mr. McCain at his ranch in Sedona, Ariz., on election night 2016. Mr. Graham still believed Hillary Clinton would win in a romp, yet there he was, incredulously watching the returns come in for Mr. Trump, uttering profanities over and over and over.“I was in shock for a week,” Mr. Graham recalled. It did not take him long to make a decision. “Am I going to be fighting a rear-guard action here? Or am I going to try to work with him?”‘An Abiding Need to Be in the Room’Mr. McCain, whose own presidential aspirations ended after his loss to Barack Obama in 2008, had urged Mr. Graham to run in 2016. But he warned his friend against engaging in a one-on-one verbal brawl with Mr. Trump. Mr. Graham did not listen.“I want to talk to the Trump supporters for a minute. I don’t know who you are and why you like this guy,” Mr. Graham said on CNN in late 2015, before quitting the race. “Here’s what you’re buying: He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot. He doesn’t represent my party.”Yet scarcely two months after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, a grinning Mr. Graham could be found in the office of the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, chatting with Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s top advisers.The senator had been orchestrating his West Wing appearance, steadily softening his criticism of Mr. Trump on Fox, and working some of the network’s pro-Trump hosts, with the knowledge that the president would be watching. He had also had dinner with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.Mr. Graham’s presence bewildered some Trump aides, but not people who knew him. “He has an abiding need to be in the room, no matter what the cost,” said Hollis Felkel, a veteran South Carolina Republican political consultant.Mr. Graham said he was there to sell the president on a more hawkish foreign policy at a time when Mr. Trump was vowing quick withdrawals from Afghanistan. He was surprised, he said, how friendly the president was. Indeed, to hear Mr. Graham talk about his interactions with Mr. Trump is to be struck by how much he seems to relish them.“He came in and he was very gracious, like he’s trying to sell me a condo, showed me around,” Mr. Graham recalled.Mr. Graham said he reciprocated by praising his host’s political skills and pledging to support him when he could, especially on judicial nominations. He soon followed up with a flurry of phone conversations on politics, gossip and golf.That led to the prize Mr. Graham wanted from the start: an invitation to Mr. Trump’s club in Virginia.“Where it all changed is when we went for golf,” Mr. Graham said.Senator and president playing golf last summer at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va.Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Trump had his own motivations for making nice. He was an interloper who craved legitimacy, and found the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, unapproachable and humorless. Mr. Graham, according to Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist at the time, wasn’t a “stiff,” like so many others in Congress.“The senator closest to Trump was Lindsey Graham, and it’s not even a question,” Mr. Bannon said. “Have you met Lindsey Graham? I like him, and I think he’s the worst.”Like Mr. McCain, Mr. Trump was drawn to Mr. Graham’s ambidextrous, pragmatic politics — and his strategic amiability.“People apparently found the combination of my slight stature and gabby nature comical,” Mr. Graham wrote in his 2015 memoir, referring to a coping strategy learned in childhood. “I was expected to entertain folks. And I knew the more audacious I was the more entertaining I would be.”Mr. Trump also told his staff that he preferred the company of people he had turned — former enemies who had come to see that he was actually a good guy they could respect.Mr. McCain was decidedly not turned. While he understood the need to make peace with the party’s leader, he told Mr. Graham flatly that the president “is not one of us.”He kept his temper in check until Mr. Graham started raving about how “such a big, older guy” could put up an 18-hole score that nearly matched his age, according to a mutual friend.“My ass he shot a 70!” Mr. McCain yelled.“John was just surprised and to certain extent disappointed, but not really angry, with the closeness of the Lindsey Graham relationship with Trump,” said Joseph Lieberman, a former Democratic senator from Connecticut who was close to both lawmakers.When Mr. McCain’s aggressive brain tumor was diagnosed in the summer of 2017, Mr. Graham compartmentalized, comforting his friend and courting Mr. Trump.The president enlisted Mr. Graham and another McCain ally, Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, to win over Mr. McCain on a key campaign promise, repealing Obamacare, and Mr. Graham eagerly agreed. Both assured White House officials they had persuaded Mr. McCain to vote “yes,” according to former West Wing aides involved in the talks.They had not. On July 28, a dying Mr. McCain returned to Washington to deliver his defiant thumbs-down, and it seemed, for a moment, that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party was not as tight as he claimed.There would be one more act. The McCain family had insisted that the president and his entourage would not be welcome at the senator’s state funeral, but Ivanka Trump, who had collaborated with Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, on the issue of human trafficking, insisted on attending. It was Mr. Graham who persuaded Ms. McCain to reluctantly extend an invitation to Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner.Afterward, Mr. McCain’s daughter Meghan angrily told the late-night host Stephen Colbert, “My father had been very clear about the line between the McCains and the Trumps.”Mr. Graham paid his respects after the death in 2018 of Senator John McCain, a longtime friend.Erin Schaff for The New York TimesBy this time, Trump aides were noticing a curious dynamic: It wasn’t just that the president absolved Mr. Graham for the Obamacare debacle; the senator was one of the few people who could get away with taking on Mr. Trump and his temper.The most common source of flare-ups was Afghanistan. During one golf outing, the two men got into a screaming match after Mr. Graham said he would rather deal with a bomb killing civilians in Kabul “than in Times Square.”Mr. Trump barked an expletive, shouted, “You guys have been wrong for 20 years,” and stomped off, according to a person who witnessed the exchange.A few minutes later, they were chatting amiably as if nothing had happened, the person said.Some of the president’s top advisers were growing annoyed by Mr. Graham’s pesky omnipresence — finagling flights on Air Force One, showing up at the West Wing on little notice. “Sometimes he’d just like to sit with the president in the dining room off the Oval at the end of the day,” a former senior White House official said.In early 2019, as the Trumps were sitting down to dinner, Mr. Graham phoned up the president’s assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, to say he was coming up to the White House residence with Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, to discuss a plan to address one of the many crises plaguing the administration.Mr. Trump obliged, Melania Trump felt put upon and nothing came of it, aides familiar with the episode said.‘I’m the Senator From South Carolina’Mr. McCain’s death in August 2018 had been a profound loss for Mr. Graham, and during the interview in his office, he nearly broke down describing the hours he spent at his friend’s hospital bedside, holding his hand, during those final days in Arizona.Yet he also acknowledged that the dissolution of the partnership had freed him to look after his own political interests, which entailed cozying up to the right-wing populists who increasingly dominated his party in South Carolina.“I jokingly refer to Senator Graham as Senator Graham 1.0 and the Senator Graham 2.0 who came along during the Trump years, the 2.0 being the preferred upgrade,” said Nate Leupp, chairman of the Greenville County Republicans and one of several party leaders in South Carolina who said they had long been wary of the senator’s “maverick alliances.”Mr. Graham’s 2016 presidential primary bid — a bit of a lark, intended to vault him to the national stage as a solo act — had been a humiliating reminder of how vulnerable he was at home: When he dropped out in December 2015, he was polling in single digits in South Carolina.His McCain-esque positions on immigration and trade, he admits, were part of the problem. “I adore John McCain. Yeah, he’s done more to mentor me and help me than any single person in politics,” Mr. Graham said. “But having said that, I’m the senator from South Carolina.”Perhaps the most sensitive issue for Mr. Graham was his bipartisan record on judicial appointments.Mr. Graham had long argued that presidents deserved to have their judicial nominees confirmed, and in 2010, he voted for Mr. Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan. It came at a cost: Anti-abortion protesters in South Carolina hanged him in effigy, and when he ran for re-election in 2014, six primary opponents popped up, each hammering him for being too liberal on the courts.Mr. Graham has played down the episode, but it clearly scarred him.“I have triplets, and I would probably do anything, including breaking the law, to protect them. He’s got a Senate seat,” Mick Mulvaney, the former acting White House chief of staff, said of Mr. Graham on a recent podcast.So when a second Supreme Court vacancy opened up in early 2016, Mr. Graham signed on to Mr. McConnell’s refusal to allow a Senate vote on the nomination of Merrick Garland, on the grounds that it came too close to the November election.And several people described a similar determination to prove his conservative bona fides in what was probably Mr. Graham’s most memorable public performance in the service of Mr. Trump: his outraged defense of Brett M. Kavanaugh, whom he had known for a decade, against sexual misconduct allegations during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings in September 2018.“You’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics!” Mr. Graham said.Yet if Mr. Graham’s performance won him kudos from skeptics back home, it did not translate into safety ahead of his re-election campaign. The election became a referendum, of sorts, on Mr. Graham’s shotgun conversion to Trumpism.In mid-2019, his eventual Democratic opponent, Jaime Harrison, began raising tens of millions of dollars from donors nationwide. And after a mid-September 2020 poll showed the candidates in a dead heat, Mr. Harrison raised $1 million in 24 hours, part of a $57 million quarter, the richest for any Senate candidate in history.“I’m getting overwhelmed,” Mr. Graham lamented to Sean Hannity on Fox. “LindseyGraham.com. Help me.”The senator campaigned for re-election last year. He won by 10 points.Gavin McIntyre for The New York TimesBehind the scenes, Mr. McConnell tapped his national fund-raising network, channeling $10 million to Mr. Graham’s cause, and two Ohio-based dark-money groups chipped in $4.4 million.As for Mr. Trump, he made one appearance with Mr. Graham in South Carolina and cut one campaign ad. But he did let Mr. Graham raise money off his brand, and, in the end, the senator raked in about $111 million, almost nine times what he had raised in 2014 and nearly as much as Mr. Harrison.Mr. Graham won by 10 points.After the ElectionEven with a renewed six-year lease on public life, Mr. Graham hasn’t stopped tap dancing.In the days following the election, he scrambled to stay on Mr. Trump’s good side, publicly urging him not to concede until he had exhausted all his legal challenges and listening calmly on late-night phone calls as the president raged about a stolen election. He even wrote a $500,000 check to aid Mr. Trump’s legal defense.But privately he was already reaching out to Mr. Biden and counseling Mr. Trump to ramp down his rhetoric. And he steadfastly refused to appear at news conferences with Mr. Trump’s legal team or repeat their false claims — which annoyed the president and infuriated his son Donald Jr., always a Graham skeptic, retweeting stories with a “#whereslindsey” hashtag when he felt the senator was not standing up for his father.The biggest source of residual anger inside the Trump bubble was Mr. Graham’s refusal, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to acquiesce to White House demands for hearings into Hunter Biden’s business dealings.Mr. Graham said all the right things on Fox, and hinted he would get to the bottom of the matter. But his staff advised him that it was impossible to tell reality from disinformation, so he delayed and deliberated, happily deferring to the homeland security committee.He had a better relationship with the president’s middle son, Eric, yet he, too, was growing frustrated that the senator would not even retweet claims of election fraud. At a family meeting, he fumed that Mr. Graham had always been “weak” and would pay a price because his father would be the most powerful Republican for years to come, according to a political aide who was within earshot. Mr. Trump was working the senator, too, according to people familiar with the exchanges.Mr. Graham said that what happened next had nothing to do with the pressure bearing down on him. But on Nov. 13, he called Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, the first of a series of interventions Mr. Trump and his allies were to make into the tallying of the results in Georgia.Mr. Raffensperger has said that Mr. Graham asked if there was a legal way, using the state courts, to toss out all mail-in votes from counties with high rates of questionable signatures. And a Raffensperger aide who was on the call said in an interview that Mr. Graham’s goal was getting as many ballots thrown out as possible.Even so, he made no overt request to discard ballots, according to another Raffensperger aide, Gabriel Sterling. As such, prosecutors investigating the Trump camp’s actions in Georgia would probably have difficulty establishing any wrongdoing by Mr. Graham.In the interview, Mr. Graham laughed off the idea that he had done anything wrong, saying he had called “Ratzenberger” simply to ask about auditing signatures.Around the same time, he made another call, to Governor Ducey in Arizona. His aim, Mr. Graham said, was not to overturn Mr. Biden’s narrow victory but to counter the “garbage” Mr. Trump was getting from his own legal team, according to an aide who was given a readout.In Mr. Graham’s mind, he had threaded the needle: He had professed loyalty and value to Mr. Trump while taking an unequivocal public stand, as Mr. Biden’s inauguration approached, opposing efforts to block certification of the election.Then came Jan. 6, and his presumed declaration of independence.Mr. Graham, in fact, began softening his tone almost immediately, following a tongue-lashing from the president and a confrontation, two days after the Capitol assault, with dozens of Trump supporters at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, chanting: “Traitor! Traitor!”Mr. Graham was escorted by security through a Washington airport in January while Trump supporters called him a traitor.Oreo Express/Via ReutersBy Jan. 13, when Mr. Trump was impeached on charges of inciting the riot, Mr. Graham was back on board, offering advice on how to quell a possible revolt by Republican senators. What followed, in the eyes of many Senate colleagues, was a frenzied overcorrection.Mr. Graham has become an ever-more-frequent face on Fox, denying the existence of systemic racism and decrying federal aid to Black farmers as “reparations.” He posted a video of himself firing an AR-15 bought as protection from marauding “gangs” and forcefully backed Ms. Cheney’s expulsion from House leadership. He has embraced the culture-war grandstanding that he and Mr. McCain mocked when they were a team — recently saying he would “go to war” against students at the University of Notre Dame for trying to block a Chick-fil-A on campus over the anti-L.G.B.T.-rights politics of its executives.Yet there are signs Mr. Graham may be playing an inside-outside game. He has placed himself at the center of a monthslong effort to draft bipartisan police-reform legislation and recently met with the Rev. Al Sharpton to hear him out on the bill. And when he tested positive for Covid-19 after being inoculated, he made a point of telling vaccine deniers in his own party to get their shots.During his near-weekly golfing trips to Mar-a-Lago, he said, he is still trying to persuade Mr. Trump to “take it down a notch.” He remains convinced he can get him to play by the rules, and not the other way around.Many of the people who have known him longest are not so sure.From his office in Walhalla, just up the road from Central, Mr. Graham’s old law partner, Mr. Brandt, has been thinking about something the senator told him during a visit eight or nine years ago.“Larry, you are too honest to survive in Washington,” Mr. Graham said. “Eighty-five percent of the people there would sell their mothers to keep their jobs.”Mr. Brandt ran into Mr. Graham at a local restaurant in 2017, as the senator was beginning to court Mr. Trump. Mr. Brandt took him to task, reminding him of their “85 percent” conversation. “I said, ‘Lindsey, don’t sell your mother,’” he recalled.Two years later, Mr. Graham called to say he was coming back to town, and could they have dinner? Mr. Brandt said he was eager to see him — and to give him an earful about his friendship with the president. Mr. Graham said sure, and promised to ring back.“I’m still waiting on that call,” Mr. Brandt said. More

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      ‘Stop the Steal’ Didn’t Start With Trump

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main story‘Stop the Steal’ Didn’t Start With TrumpMainstream Republicans and conservative commentators have been pushing the idea that Democrats can only win through fraud for decades.Opinion ColumnistJan. 15, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETJan. 6, 2021.Credit…John Minchillo/Associated PressTo explain the attack on the Capitol, you can’t just turn your focus to Donald Trump and his enablers. You must also look at the individuals and institutions that fanned fears of “voter fraud” to the point of hysteria among conservative voters, long before Trump. Put another way, the difference between a riot seeking to overturn an election and an effort to suppress opposing votes is one of legality, not intent. And it doesn’t take many steps to get from one to the other.Conservative belief in pervasive Democratic Party voter fraud goes back decades — and rests on racist and nativist tropes that date back to Reconstruction in the South and Tammany Hall in the North — but the modern obsession with fraud dates back to the 2000 election. That year, Republicans blamed Democratic fraud for narrow defeats in New Mexico, which George W. Bush lost by just a few hundred votes, and Missouri, where the incumbent senator, John Ashcroft, lost his re-election battle to a dead man.Ashcroft’s opponent, Mel Carnahan, was killed three weeks earlier in a plane crash, but his name was still on the ballot, with his wife running in his stead. Shocked Republicans blamed Ashcroft’s defeat on fraud. At Ashcroft’s election-night party, the state’s senior Republican senator, Kit Bond, said, “Democrats in the city of St. Louis are trying to steal this election.”In 2001, as the newly minted attorney general under President George W. Bush, Ashcroft announced a crackdown on voter fraud. “America has failed too often to uphold the right of every citizen’s vote, once cast, to be counted fairly and equally,” he said at a news conference that March:Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed. The polling process has been disrupted or not completed. Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on Election Day.The Republican National Committee supported this push, claiming to have evidence that thousands of voters had cast more than one ballot in the same election.Over the ensuing years, under pressure from the White House ahead of the presidential election in 2004, the Justice Department ramped up its crusade against voter fraud. Of particular interest was ACORN, a now-defunct advocacy organization that was working — as the presidential election got underway — to register hundreds of thousands of low-income voters. Swing-state Republicans accused the group of “manufacturing voters,” and federal prosecutors looked, unsuccessfully, for evidence of wrongdoing. Later, Karl Rove would press President Bush’s second attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, to fire a number of U.S. attorneys for failure to investigate voter fraud allegations, leading to a scandal that eventually led to Gonzales’s resignation in 2007.ACORN and voter fraud would remain a bête noire for Republicans for the rest of the decade. Conservative advocacy groups and media organizations produced a steady stream of anti-ACORN material and, as the 2008 election campaign heated up, did everything they could to tie Democratic candidates, and Barack Obama in particular, to a group they portrayed as radical and dangerous. ACORN, Rush Limbaugh said in one characteristic segment, has “been training young Black kids to hate, hate, hate this country.”During his second debate with Obama, a few weeks before the election, the Republican nominee, John McCain, charged that ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” And his campaign materials similarly accused Obama, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party of orchestrating a vast conspiracy of fraud. “We’ve always known the Obama-Biden Democrats will do anything to win this November, but we didn’t know how far their allies would go,” read one mailer. “The Obama-supported, far-left group, ACORN, has been accused of voter-registration fraud in a number of battleground states.”McCain and the Republican Party devoted much of the last weeks of the election to a voter fraud scare campaign with ACORN as the villain. And while, in the wake of the election, these allegations of illegal voting never panned out, the conservative fixation with voter fraud would continue into the Obama years and beyond.Not that this was a shock. As an accusation, “voter fraud” has been used historically to disparage the participation of Black voters and immigrants — to cast their votes as illegitimate. And Obama came to office on the strength of historic turnout among Black Americans and other nonwhite groups. To the conservative grass roots, Obama’s very presence in the White House was, on its face, evidence that fraud had overtaken American elections.In 2011, Republicans in Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin capitalized on their legislative gains to pass new voter restrictions under the guise of election protection. Other states slashed early voting and made it more difficult to run registration drives. One 2013 study found that in states with “unencumbered Republican majorities” and large Black populations, lawmakers were especially likely to pass new voter identification laws and other restrictions on the franchise.The 2012 election saw more of the same accusations of voter fraud. Donald Trump, who had flirted with running for president that year, called the election a “total sham and a travesty” and claimed that Obama had “lost the popular vote by a lot.” According to one survey taken after the election, 49 percent of Republican voters said they thought ACORN had stolen the election for the president.ACORN, however, no longer existed. It closed its doors in 2010 after Congress stripped it of federal funding in the aftermath of a scandal stoked by right-wing provocateurs, whose accusations have since been discredited.The absence of any evidence for voter fraud was not, for Republicans, evidence of its absence. Freed by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which ended federal “preclearance” of election laws in much of the South, Republican lawmakers passed still more voter restrictions, each justified as necessary measures in the war against fraud.Prominent Republican voices continued to spread the myth. “I’ve always thought in this state, close elections, presidential elections, it means you probably have to win with at least 53 percent of the vote to account for fraud,” Scott Walker, then the governor of Wisconsin, said in a 2014 interview with The Weekly Standard. “One or two points, potentially.”Rank-and-file Republicans had already been marinating in 16 years of concentrated propaganda about the prevalence of voter fraud by the time Donald Trump claimed, in 2016, that Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote with millions of illegal ballots. If Republican voters today are quick to believe baroque conspiracy theories about fabricated and stolen votes, then it has quite a lot to do with the words and actions of a generation of mainstream Republican politicians who refused to accept that a Democratic majority was a legitimate majority.The narrative of fraud and election theft that spurred the mob that stormed the Capitol would be unintelligible without the work of the Republican Party, which inculcated this idée fixe in its voters. “Stop the Steal” wasn’t a Trump innovation as much as it was a new spin on an old product line that, even after the violence on Jan. 6, Republicans are still selling.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More