Lindsey Graham is running a half-hour late when he arrives back at his Senate office at 6:00 p.m. for an interview, but that’s understandable. There was rush-hour traffic on Constitution Avenue, and he’s had more important places to be. Graham has just finished a meeting at the White House with a group of 15 Republican senators and President Donald Trump. They’d been discussing tariffs in the wake of Trump’s increasingly bellicose trade moves and Tennessee Republican senator Bob Corker’s announcement the day before, June 5, that he’d introduce a bill to take back some of the authority Congress had given the executive branch to raise tariffs.

“He asked me to call the meeting,” Graham says of Trump. “We talked yesterday and I said, ‘Well, let me get a group together, and we’ll see what happens.’ ” Within days, it’s clear that the meeting has been a success for Trump. Bob Corker is on the Senate floor berating his fellow Republicans for blocking a vote on his amendment despite the fact, he says, that “95 percent of the people on this [Republican] side of the aisle support intellectually this amendment” but are afraid “we might poke the bear”—i.e., President Trump.

“There’s a lot of concern that this tariff thing is going to get out of hand,” Graham tells me in his office on June 6. “We have to realize this is one of the centerpieces of the campaign; it’s not traditional Republican policy, but we need to respect the fact that he won. . . . Maybe we need to change [Section] 232 [tariffs] one day, but now is not the time to do that, because it will undercut his negotiating position.”

Graham’s role in protecting Trump’s protectionist policies isn’t entirely out of character. The senator from South Carolina, a textile-manufacturing state, has a mixed record on free trade: He voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2005, for example, but backed the Trans-Pacific Partnership in recent years.

What is surprising is the very existence of Graham’s close relationship with Donald Trump.

Trump is “the world’s biggest jackass,” Graham said a month after Trump launched his presidential campaign, in response to Trump’s trashing his friend John McCain and other American prisoners of war (“I like people who weren’t captured”). Trump responded by calling Graham an “idiot” who is “probably . . . not as bright, honestly, as Rick Perry” and by reading off Graham’s cell phone number at one of his televised rallies. Graham had to get a new number.

While most Republicans fell in line before the 2016 election, Lindsey Graham—along with fellow senators Mike Lee, Ben Sasse, John McCain, and Rob Portman—was a high-profile NeverTrumper on Election Day. “My party has gone batshit crazy,” Graham said in a February 2016 speech about Trump. Graham told Fox News that Trump is “a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit to be president.”

But sometime after the election, Graham became a neo-Trumper. “You know what concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the president some kind of kook,” Graham said in November 2017. “I intend to support him in 2020 without equivocation,” Graham tells me now.

What changed since 2016? A neoconservative, in Irving Kristol’s famous formulation, was a liberal who’d been mugged by reality. Neo-Trumpers like Graham, then, are NeverTrumpers who were mugged by—what, exactly? Necessity? Expediency? Sean Hannity?

To hear Graham tell it, policy is what changed his mind. “He’s on track to do big things,” Graham says of the president. “He built up the military. I campaigned on it. He got out of the Iran deal. I campaigned on it. He’s destroying ISIL. I campaigned on it. He’s restructuring the tax code and the way we do business. I campaigned on it. He’s doing much of what I campaigned on, and I’m pleased.” Graham now speaks regularly with Trump and has become a close ally on matters ranging from North Korea to health care.

What about the issues of temperament that in 2016 made Trump, in Graham’s view, unfit to be president? Is there anything specific, I ask, that has convinced the senator that Trump isn’t the “kook” Graham called him back then? “One, I got to know him,” Graham says. “I’ve played golf with him. You know, play golf with somebody for three or four hours, you get to know them better. He’s funny as hell. He’s got a great sense of humor. There’s a method to the madness.”

“He’s nobody’s fool,” Graham adds. “Very smart. And he asks a lot of good questions.”

In 2016, Graham also suggested Trump’s character made him unfit. “Name one sports team, university, publicly held company, etc. that would accept a person like this as their standard bearer?” Graham tweeted in October 2016 after the release of the Access Hollywood video, in which Trump bragged about groping women by the genitals. If that behavior disqualified Trump in 2016, why doesn’t it disqualify him in 2020? “The American people listened to all that, and they said: ‘I want him to be president.’ Okay. I believe the elections have consequences,” Graham says. “I’ve always been of an opinion when the election’s over, you try to help the guy that won.”

In his efforts to help Trump, Graham hasn’t just been running interference on trade policy. He took the lead on a last-ditch attempt to partially repeal and replace Obama-care by block-granting money to the states, a bill that conservative health-care expert Yuval Levin called the “most coherent” plan considered by Republicans. Graham says Trump “loves the idea,” and it’s “almost a certainty” it would pass in the (unlikely) event Republicans pick up a seat or two in the Senate and hold the House.

Graham has also been the most enthusiastic congressional supporter of Trump’s North Korea diplomacy. Graham says that Trump’s credible threat of military force has brought North Korea to the negotiating table, and he believes Trump agrees with him that a war with North Korea is better than letting North Korea develop an arsenal of nuclear-tipped missiles that could strike the United States. The prospect of war with a regime that already has nuclear weapons might seem crazy to many, but Graham at least doesn’t downplay how apocalyptic a war would be. “If [President Trump] has to pick between millions of people dying in America and millions of people dying over there, he’s going to pick millions of people dying over there if he has to,” Graham says. There’s no hint in his rhetoric that military action against North Korea would stop at giving them a “bloody nose.”

Graham says that he still calls it like he sees it, supporting the president when he’s right and opposing him when he’s wrong. “I’m really worried about what he’s talking about in Syria. We pull out of Syria, ISIS will come back, and the Kurds will get eaten alive by Turkey,” Graham says. “That’d be the biggest mistake he could make. It will undo all of his achievements when it comes to ISIS. It’d be an Obama-on-steroids decision. I told him that.”

Graham has also warned Trump against firing special counsel Robert Mueller and refuses to call the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election a “witch hunt.” But he thinks it’s unlikely Mueller will uncover evidence Trump has committed any impeachable offenses: “You could fire [former FBI director James] Comey for any reason except a corrupt reason.” The May 2017 memo by deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, critical of Comey’s handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, “suggests there were valid reasons. Democrats wanted Comey fired. I think it’s going to be tough to prove that the president committed obstruction of justice in firing a guy that most people wanted to fire.”

Back in August 2017, after a neo-Nazi killed counter-protester Heather Heyer in a vehicular terrorist attack at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Trump blamed “many sides” for the violence, failing to forcefully single out the side that committed murder, the side that claimed to have Trump’s support. The president made matters worse by saying some “very fine people” had participated in a torchlit white nationalist march where protesters chanted: “Jews will not replace us!” Graham issued a scathing statement:



Through his statements yesterday, President Trump took a step backward by again suggesting there is moral equivalency between the white supremacist neo-Nazis and KKK members who attended the Charlottesville rally and people like Ms. Heyer. I, along with many others, do not endorse this moral equivalency.



Many Republicans do not agree with and will fight back against the idea that the Party of Lincoln has a welcome mat out for the David Dukes of the world.



Trump responded with a pair of tweets: “Publicity seeking Lindsey -Graham falsely stated that I said there is moral equivalency between the KKK, neo-Nazis & white supremacists and people like Ms. Heyer. . . . Such a disgusting lie. He just can’t forget his election trouncing. The people of South Carolina will remember!”

It was only a few months after Trump warned Graham “the people of South Carolina will remember!” that Graham publicly did a 180 on whether Trump is a “kook.” Graham’s criticism of the president has been more tempered since Trump’s threatening August 2017 tweets, but he hasn’t gone completely in the tank for Trump.

In January 2018, Graham was at the Oval Office meeting where Trump said he opposed letting in more immigrants from certain “shithole” or “shithouse” countries. Georgia GOP senator David Perdue, who was also in the room, called the reported quotation a “total misrepresentation.” But Graham couldn’t bring himself to lie for Trump. “My memory hasn’t evolved,” Graham told reporters. “I know what was said, and I know what I said.”

“Following comments by the president, I said my piece directly to him yesterday,” Graham said. “The president and all those attending the meeting know what I said and how I feel. I’ve always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals.”

But there has been perhaps no greater rhetorical desecration of American ideals by President Trump than his recent gratuitous praise that Kim Jong-un, the tyrant of the North Korean gulag state, “loves his people” and that the North Korean people love him with “great fervor.” In Graham’s media tour following the Trump-Kim summit, he left no illusions about the brutality of Kim, but he didn’t call on Trump to stop sanitizing the Stalinist dictator. Trump demands an unusual level of loyalty from his supporters, and there is some price to be paid for being his ally.

While President Trump was initially arguing last week that he was forced to impose a policy of separating children from parents who had illegally crossed the border because a law passed by Democrats tied his hands, Graham said on CNN that it simply wasn’t true: “President Trump could stop this policy with a phone call.” But Graham didn’t call on Trump to actually make that call. When Graham was asked on CNN on June 15 whether his newfound support for Trump was “two-faced,” he had a simple answer: “If you don’t like me working with President Trump to make the world a better place, I don’t give a shit.”

While Graham argues he’s been motivated by policy and principle, it would be naïve not to consider the possibility that political necessity played some role in his evolving view of Trump. Texas senator Ted Cruz, for example, withheld his support from Trump through the Republican convention, relenting coincidentally at a time when the presidential polls tightened and he faced mounting pressure from his donors to back Trump. Cruz was thus able to avoid a serious primary challenge in 2018.

Graham was always certain to face a primary challenger in 2020, and the fact that he hasn’t previously been defeated is somewhat surprising. Frequently derided on talk radio for his stance on immigration as Lindsey “Grahamnesty,” he won a seven-way 2014 primary in conservative South Carolina with 56 percent of the vote (his closest challenger lost by 41 points), just a year after participating as an author of the “Gang of 8” comprehensive immigration reform bill.

But while voters were willing to tolerate Graham’s heresy on immigration, there’s reason to think they wouldn’t be as ready to tolerate opposition to the incumbent president in 2020. On June 12, South Carolina Republican congressman and staunch Trump critic Mark Sanford was defeated in a primary. In the 2013 House primary, voters were willing to overlook Sanford’s extramarital affair. But harsh criticism of Trump was apparently a bridge too far. On June 5, Alabama congresswoman Martha Roby, who had said she couldn’t vote for Trump after the Access Hollywood tape came out, came in first in her primary (39 percent to 28 percent) but, having failed to win a majority, was forced to a July runoff. Even in suburban Northern Virginia, Rep. Barbara Comstock, a Republican who didn’t vote for Trump, lost 39 percent of the vote to a primary challenger.

It’s no coincidence that two of Trump’s most outspoken Republican critics in the Senate, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, are not seeking reelection in 2018. Mitt Romney will very likely win the Utah Senate nomination this month without having committed to backing Trump in 2020, but Utah Republicans were a national outlier in their opposition to Trump. Among the dozens of current and former prominent Republican officials who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, Lindsey Graham may be the first neo-Trumper. But he likely won’t be the last.

Correction: This article originally stated that Mark Sanford resigned as governor of South Carolina. Sanford finished his term as governor but did resign as chairman of the Republican Governors Association.