We don’t have to guess what Graham really thinks of Trump. He’s told us. In May 2016, Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake of The Washington Post enumerated “The 10 Republicans who hate Donald Trump the most.” Graham came in number one. And for good reason. That month, the South Carolina senator tweeted that even if Trump won the Republican nomination, Graham would not support him because Trump had not “displayed the judgment and temperament to serve as Commander in Chief.” Graham even implied he might back Hillary Clinton. In June, when Trump said Judge Gonzalo Curiel could not fairly adjudicate his case because he was Mexican American, Graham called it “the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy. If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it. There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.”

Evidently not. More than a year later, Graham has become, as Michael Shear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it in The New York Times, the “Senate’s Trump whisperer.” He golfs with Trump. He travels with him on Air Force One. And he insists that Trump is “growing into the job.” Last month, when Corker questioned Trump’s fitness in terms similar to those Graham used during the campaign, Graham said his colleague’s comments were not “particularly helpful.” When Flake gave an impassioned speech from the senate floor about the threat Trump posed to liberal democracy, Graham explained that, for his part, “I’d rather not be a constant critic.” After all, Graham admitted in another interview, “I do better in South Carolina when I’m seen as helping him, ‘cause he’s popular.”

Nowhere is Graham’s transformation more dramatic than on the question highlighted by Tuesday’s attack: Trump’s attitude towards Muslims and terrorism. In a party that since George W. Bush left office has grown increasingly anti-Muslim, Graham had been a significant exception. In 2011, he joined Democratic Senator Richard Durbin in convening the first ever Senate hearings on “Protecting the Civil Rights of American Muslims.” And while his Arizona Republican colleague Jon Kyl derided the hearings as an exercise in “political correctness,” Graham insisted that “This is a hearing that we need to have” because “if I don’t stand up for” the religious freedoms of Muslims, “you won’t stand up for mine.” In September 2015, when Ben Carson said he could never support a Muslim for president, Graham told him “to apologize to American Muslims” for failing to recognize that “America is an idea, not owned by a particular religion.”

That December, when Trump responded to the attacks in San Bernardino by proposing a moratorium on Muslim immigration, Graham responded ferociously. “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” Graham told CNN. “He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. ... He’s the ISIL man of the year.” Graham even attacked Ted Cruz for not denouncing Trump’s ban strongly enough. “This is not a policy debate, Ted. This is about you and us and our character as a party,” Graham thundered. “Up your game. Condemn it, because it needs to be condemned.”