Donald Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham have had an inconsistent relationship since both were 2016 presidential hopefuls. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo Congress Trump’s on-and-off relationship with Graham hits the skids Until their recent cooling off, Graham was perhaps the only Republican who had Trump’s trust and enough juice with Democrats to cut a deal on immigration.

Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump were daily phone partners in the throes of the Obamacare repeal debate. But now — in a similarly heated legislative battle, this time on immigration — Graham’s direct line to the president has gone quiet, with the two men last speaking on Saturday.

Instead, the South Carolina Republican is appealing to Trump publicly through televised hearings and blaming White House aides as he tries to keep the president’s ear. It’s a critical relationship in the long-running immigration saga: Graham is perhaps the only Republican who had the combination of Trump’s trust, enough juice with Democrats to cut a deal and a line of communication with hard-charging Trump adviser Stephen Miller.


After cozying up to Trump for months, Graham now finds himself again in a confrontational role with the president after the now-infamous White House session in which Trump used strong and, according to some participants, profane language to describe immigrants from African nations, El Salvador and Haiti. Graham objected to remarks he said were made during the meeting.

But in an interview Wednesday, Graham insisted the relationship between the two men hasn’t frayed.

“I believe I’ve been helpful to the president; I can continue to be helpful to the president. The only way I can be helpful is to be me,” the senator said. “As to how we come out of this, I’ll tell you what my attitude will be: I want to help you at every turn because you’re president, but I’m not going to agree to things that I don’t believe in.”

In their most recent phone conversation, Graham said he stressed to Trump that he would not get a boost in defense spending — a top Republican priority in the stalled spending negotiations — without coming around to an immigration deal on Capitol Hill to satisfy Democrats.

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Trump’s response, in Graham’s retelling: We’ll see.

Trump and Graham have had an inconsistent relationship since both were 2016 presidential hopefuls. Trump publicly gave out Graham's personal cellphone number in 2015 after the South Carolinian criticized him. But after Trump became president, Graham earned his friendship during the GOP effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and the two seemed surprisingly friendly last year.

The newly precarious state of their relationship comes at a delicate time in Congress, as lawmakers stare down a Friday deadline to keep the federal government open. Many Democrats are threatening to revolt and vote against a stopgap funding bill as long as the immigration issue remains unresolved.

Bipartisan immigration plans that have emerged from both the House and the Senate have been panned by Republican leaders as unworkable because Trump won’t sign them. Yet a group of the second-ranking lawmakers in each chamber that has been deputized to strike a deal appears far from reaching one.

Trump has said any deal to extend protections for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children — known as Dreamers — must also include funding for ramped-up security at the Mexican border and changes to visa programs he opposes.

He blasted the Graham proposal, drafted with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and four other senators, as “horrible” on border security and “very, very weak” on other immigration law changes, in an interview with Reuters published Wednesday afternoon.

Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), the Senate GOP leadership’s point person on immigration, dismissed the plan as a “dead horse.”

And in an interview, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) laughed out loud when asked whether the so-called Gang of Six’s plan could pick up considerable Republican votes.

“Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin agreeing on immigration is not bipartisan,” Cotton said in an interview. “When Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin are talking immigration, those aren’t adversaries negotiating. Those are allies strategizing.”

Cotton, an influential adviser to Trump on a litany of policy matters, downplayed any sway that Graham might have on the president when it comes to immigration.

“The president was very disappointed at the proposal that Sen. Graham and Sen. Durbin brought to him last week,” Cotton said.

Graham has said Trump warmly received the bipartisan proposal in the morning, then panned it hours later. Cotton agreed: “Yeah, what happened between 10 a.m. and 12 noon? The president must’ve learned that their proposal was terrible.”

Nonetheless, Graham appears undeterred, working assiduously to court GOP support.

During the Senate GOP lunch on Wednesday, Graham paced in the hallway outside the Mansfield Room, where his colleagues were meeting, making calls on his cellphone. He accosted other Republicans, such as Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, engaging in conversations that appeared intense.

Corker, who backed a comprehensive immigration bill Graham helped write in 2013, said the South Carolina Republican was trying to win him over on his new Dreamer plan. Corker, however, “didn’t give him any indications,” the Tennessee senator said.

“He’s got sort of a double concern, it’s not just this. He doesn’t see the increased spending on the military happening until this happens,” Corker said. “He’s very passionate about it and a good advocate.”

Graham announced the names of four new Republicans he said supported the immigration proposal: Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mike Rounds of South Dakota. (A Rounds spokeswoman stressed that the senator merely supports the “effort,” however.)

As a group of senators — composed of Democrats and Republicans not particularly close to Trump — worked behind closed doors to try and come up with a deal, Graham has been their secret weapon. The South Carolina senator had been the group’s main conduit to Trump. He was also the primary member of a GOP-only working group on immigration that was chosen by leadership and in frequent dialogue with Democrats.

Graham also communicated with Miller, the influential White House policy adviser who, as an aide to former Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), worked furiously to kill the 2013 Gang of Eight proposal that Graham authored. In an interview earlier this month, Graham said he had recently spoken with Miller and boasted that the discussion was the “best conversation we’ve ever had.”

“Lindsey could go to the president and talk to him as a fellow Republican in terms of what he should do,” Durbin said in an interview. “We still know that there are voices in the White House counseling just the opposite. Lindsey has at least been able to give him the other point of view.”

The Illinois Democrat added: “He has — at least up until a few days ago — has frequent contacts with the president by telephone, and they’ve golfed together, they know one another, they went through the campaign together. I mean, there’s history there.”

Even in recent days, Graham has repeatedly insisted it’s not Trump who is to blame for the White House’s mixed signals on how to permanently resolve Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era directive shielding hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation. Trump moved last fall to wind down the program and called for Congress to craft a legislative alternative.

Graham had also refrained from directly confirming the “shithole” comments, which have caused an uproar both in Washington and abroad. In a floor speech Wednesday night, Graham did make an implicit dig at Trump’s reported remarks that the United States needs more immigrants from Norway: “America always needs good people, not just from Norway but from all over the world,” Graham said.

Still, Graham has placed the blame on White House aides. Notably, the senator called out chief of staff John Kelly on Wednesday. After meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus earlier in the day, Kelly told reporters that Graham and Durbin’s group should have worked on their proposal with a broader swath of ideologically diverse senators, as well as members of the House. The proposal “fell short” of what Trump was seeking in a Dreamers deal, Kelly said.

An impassioned Graham shot back.

“I will tell Gen. Kelly, I’ve been doing this for a very long time. I haven’t been fiddling,” he said, complaining that Kelly wasn't current on all of the congressional immigration discussions. “So when he lectured us about, you’ve just been sitting around and fiddling, I’ve been doing it for a very long time.”

But just as Graham and Trump’s relationship evolved since 2016, some people close to them expect it could shift again.

“Honestly, if you think about it, they have had a very fluid relationship based on open dialogue and honesty and frankness,” said Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). “Lindsey’s consistently who he has always been. So I don’t think that relationship has changed.”

Elana Schor contributed to this report.

