The Washington Post has just told us that, on January 6, Gamecock Graham, the Palmetto State’s cheap imitation of a US senator, urged the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms to “Take back the Senate! You’ve got guns. Use them! … What are you doing? … We give you guns for a reason — use them.” He said this as he was fleeing the mob of Trumpers surging toward what Chief Justice Roberts, without a scintilla of irony, calls “the “world’s greatest deliberative body”.
This looks like an interesting development. The mob was looking to hang Pence, not Graham, he of the schlocky on-again/off-again — but mostly on, given the prevailing winds — bromance with Trump. Admittedly, this is not entirely fair in that it suggests an equivalent with Achilles/Patroclus, Frodo Baggins/Samwise Gamgee, or even The Odd Couple. In reality, the Donald/Lindsey affair is very much top-bottom; one sticks out a boot, the other licks it … and smacks his lips in appreciation.
Interesting because, assuming the report is true, it runs counter to the conventional narrative that someone like Graham is selective in his advocacy of force, namely, police are to shoot blacks and browns, not whites and definitely not Republican whites. The very idea, then, that Graham would call for plugging (overwhelmingly white) MAGAs with deadly rounds to defend the Senate causes a serious headache. The fleeting thought: Is Graham human?
The answer, of course, is no. When the House impeached Trump for inspiring the January 6 mob, Graham duly voted to acquit: “This was an impeachment effort driven by passion and hatred against President Trump.” It’s safe to assume he would have done so even if police had opened fire and killed Trump supporters. But what looks like inconsistency probably is simple political calculation. For Graham, the GOP bread will continue to be buttered with Trump.
There is clarity to this. As the NYT says: Graham “ is a narrative of … gyration — of an infinitely adaptable operator seeking validation in the proximity to power. It is that yearning for relevance, rooted in … a childhood of privation and loss. … His beliefs are, generally speaking, fungible.” We can expect no less: boots will continue to be licked because that’s what Graham’s constituents, including the commercial interests that pay to return him to the Senate every six years, want from him.
That there was, fortunately, only one fatality (promptly marinated in the sauce of reactionary righteousness) caused by the forces of order that day is attributable to their restraint, itself to some extent the product of an affinity of views. We don’t yet know whether Trumpers will see as a betrayal Graham’s urging that they be shot down as they tried to further the criminal aim of his and their cult leader. Most likely, as long as Graham continues to make the boots shine, they’ll forgive and forget.
