"The one thing I thought Donald Trump did very well was give a damning indictment, like a prosecutor of Obama’s failed foreign policy," Lindsey Graham remarks. | AP Photo Sen. Graham gives Trump high marks for anti-terror speech

Lindsey Graham offered high praise Tuesday for Donald Trump's major counterterrorism speech, pronouncing the Republican nominee's call for "extreme vetting" of immigrants to the United States as a "necessity" while applauding the way he picked apart President Barack Obama's record.

The South Carolina senator, who has made it known that he will support neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton in the general election, remarked on the "Kilmeade & Friends" radio show that the Manhattan businessman had the basics right about preventing those from entering the country who have nefarious purposes. Pointing to the San Bernardino attack last December in particular, Graham noted that the woman shooter came to the country on a fiancée visa and subsequent postings on social media showed her to be someone the U.S. would not want to have in its borders.


"Donald's right about Major Hasan. There were plenty of warning signs," he said, referring to the perpetrator of the 2009 attack at Fort Hood in Texas.

Graham went on to say that there are two things that must be done: a "timeout" from refugees from "unstable" parts of the world, and back in the U.S., "we need to have our antenna up for radicalization."

"The one thing I thought Donald Trump did very well was give a damning indictment, like a prosecutor of Obama’s failed foreign policy," Graham remarked. "And it is true, whether people want to believe it or not—I believe it—that without Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq and failure to intervene in Syria in a timely way, that there would be no ISIL."

Lest Graham lead anyone to think he is wavering in his opposition to Trump, the senator made it clear in a separate interview with WABC Radio's Sid Rosenberg that he does not see a path to victory for the Republican nominee.

“So if we do lose, and the reason I think we’re going to lose, is because the demographic meltdown that came from harsh rhetoric and policies by Mr. Trump, making every problem we had in 2012 worse," Graham said. "It’s not about me not voting for Donald Trump, I’m not voting for Hillary Clinton, it is about America is changing and the party is being left behind.”