Hello and happy Saturday. Sometimes the news cycle lends itself to focusing on one big story—war overseas or domestic political squabbles or scandal and outrage. The past week was more of an “and” week, with the Iran war heating back up and confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee and a primetime speech by the president on election integrity. And we woke up Sunday to the news that Sen. Lindsey Graham, 71, had passed away the night before, hours after returning from Kyiv. It was his 10th trip to Ukraine since Russia invaded in 2022, and while there he announced that Trump had agreed to a Russia sanctions bill that he’d sponsored with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
That episode is a microcosm of Graham’s complicated legacy: He was known for his bipartisanship (he worked on a comprehensive immigration reform package in 2013 that ultimately died in the House, and he voted for both of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees), was a staunch interventionist on foreign policy (he was a leading advocate for the Iraq surge in 2007), and … he was very close to Donald Trump.
Graham was a forceful critic of Trump before the 2016 election, and he condemned the events of January 6, 2021, saying that night on the Senate floor, “Count me out. Enough is enough.” But he also built a friendship with the president and was frequently his golf partner. In his piece on Graham’s death, Michael Warren attributed Graham’s cozying up to Trump as a product of his desire to pursue influence—he always sought to be “in the room where things happen.” Michael wrote:
As a hawk in a party that, under Trump’s influence, was already skewing dovish by 2017, Graham was a counterweight to another erstwhile intraparty Trump opponent, Sen. Rand Paul, on matters of national security and foreign policy. If Paul and other noninterventionists saw in Trump a compatriot against dumb foreign wars, Graham saw a willing convert to his interventionist cause—Trump didn’t want to look weak like Obama or Joe Biden, did he? Graham learned how to sell Trump on tough talk and even action in the Middle East, and then publicly praised him for it.
In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio pondered whether there was a “Graham era” in Republican politics, given that the senator served during both the Bush and Trump eras. He concludes that yes, the Graham era is a useful way to understand the evolution of the GOP. But that viewpoint doesn’t necessarily flatter Graham. He wrote:
Much of what came out of the Senate since 2003 had his fingerprints on it to some extent. “In South Carolina, Washington and especially overseas, he wielded enormous influence over federal spending, the courts and national security,” Politico’s Jonathan Martin correctly observed.
You tell me: Is America better or worse off with respect to spending, national security, and the rule of law than it was 23 years ago?
To say that Graham doesn’t bear primary responsibility for our steep national decline is true, but it’s also true that he either accelerated or did little to try to reverse the trends that led to it.
Graham was also a longtime champion of U.S. intervention in Iran, and he was working to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel before his death. However ambitious his hopes were on that matter, he recognized that it could happen only after the war was contained. The latest hostilities between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic ensure that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
The U.S. has conducted strikes on Iranian targets all week, Iran has struck U.S. installations and other sites across the Gulf region, and the Strait of Hormuz remains a point of contention. On Monday, Trump threatened to charge a 20 percent toll “on all cargo shipped” through the strait, before walking that back on Tuesday. As Kevin Williamson noted, “we’re the pirates” now. And he suspects none of this is going to go well for the U.S.:
The Trump administration has been fought to an effective standstill by Tehran, which pulled off the remarkable feat of gaining a strategic asset—effective control of the Strait of Hormuz—as a result of a war in which it has not won a single engagement. The U.S. is now trying to recover from that descent into geopolitical buffoonery. Trump may declare total victory twice a week, but in the real world the likeliest outcome is one that is economically and strategically worse for the United States than the status quo ante bellum.
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We published an interesting piece from Jonathan Ruhe, a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) and an expert on the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the Iran nuclear deal. He argues that the deal Obama negotiated forever changed negotiations between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic.
For the Obama administration, clinching the JCPOA showed the value of persistence and flexibility in achieving a diplomatic breakthrough, even if the results were open to serious criticism. According to this logic, further engagement might produce better agreements. Since then, Trump and Joe Biden—and then Trump again—sought renewed talks to reach an improved settlement. Iran’s takeaway pointed in the opposite direction. The JCPOA was so freighted with meaning, for both its advocates and detractors in Washington, because it represented a first in our multidecade standoff with the Islamic Republic. For Tehran, the deal was tolerable precisely because it was supposed to be the last: In exchange for sitting down with its archenemy and swallowing short-term nuclear constraints, there should be no further U.S. engagement or pressure over its atomic, military, and regional ambitions.
As I mentioned above, there was a bit of other news this week. John McCormack previewed the confirmation hearings for Todd Blanche, Trump’s nominee to be attorney general (John’s piece is highlighted below), and Nick provided postgame coverage of Wednesday’s testimony. And Thursday night, Trump delivered a speech detailing what he described as threats to election integrity. While he avoided litigating most of his (debunked) claims about the 2020 election being stolen, former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer wrote about a few of Trump’s statements that were short on evidence.
Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!
Last year, Trump said he negotiated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan. There are two parties who dispute Trump’s characterization of the U.S. role in that conflict: India, vociferously, and Pakistan, more quietly. India, in fact, rejected the Trump administration’s offer to act as a mediator in the Kashmir dispute. “We have a longstanding national position that any issues related to the federally controlled union territory of Jammu and Kashmir must be addressed by India and Pakistan bilaterally,” India’s defense ministry said. “There has been no change to the stated policy.” Trump also claims to have negotiated a truce in the Thai-Cambodian dispute. Neither the Thais nor the Cambodians seem to have got the word, and within a few weeks of the supposed ceasefire having been secured late last year, a half million residents of the border area were forced to flee fighting. Thai troops recently marched across the border, began raising Thai flags, and burned commercial buildings, according to a Cambodian complaint.
Abdul El-Sayed oozes self-confidence. He leans on platitudes, stretches the truth from time to time, and—with some of his controversial views—risks offending as many voters as he excites. But he is clear and concise and doesn’t get rattled when challenged by Stevens or reporters. Even for Democrats who do not share his antipathy for Israel, a hostility that ignores the October 7, 2023, massacre and kidnapping of innocent civilians by Hamas terrorists that sparked the war in Gaza, his position is proof of the sort of renegade authenticity voters crave. Haley Stevens, on the other hand, sounds like the experienced politician she is. In three news conferences with reporters last week—two in Lansing, one in South Haven—the congresswoman did not say anything glaringly inaccurate. But Stevens endeavored to avoid saying anything that might overtly repulse any of the several factions of voters that comprise today’s Democratic governing coalition, a goal that occasionally led her to answer with word-salad.
The Todd Blanche confirmation fight, which will kick into high gear when the Senate Judiciary Committee holds hearings on Wednesday and Thursday, is about everything and nothing. It’s about everything in the sense that the hearing to confirm Blanche as attorney general isn’t simply about Blanche—it’s about every instance in which the Department of Justice flouted the rule of law in the first 18 months of President Donald Trump’s second term. … This week’s hearings will thus serve as a target-rich environment for senators interested in conducting oversight on a wide array of issues—the Trump DOJ’s prosecutions or investigations of political foes like former FBI Director James Comey and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell; the DOJ’s decision to grant Trump and his family immunity from IRS tax cases; and the creation of a $1.766 billion slush fund to reward purported “victims” of “weaponization and lawfare” like convicted Capitol rioters. As deputy attorney general, Blanche personally signed off on the tax immunity deal for the Trumps but later backtracked on the $1.776 billion slush fund following bipartisan congressional backlash. … In another sense, the confirmation fight is about nothing because the Senate’s rejection of Blanche wouldn’t prevent him from continuing to serve in the role of acting attorney general for the remainder of Trump’s term.