South Carolina senator — and BFF of former President Donald Trump — Lindsey Graham is heading down to Mar-a-Lago to play golf and huddle with the 45th president in hopes of bringing about a detente between Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
It won’t work.
That fact isn’t Graham’s fault. Nor is it a bad idea for him to try to play peacemaker between Trump and McConnell, the two most powerful figures within the GOP. “They’re now at each other’s throat,” Graham said on Fox News this week. “I’m more worried about 2022 than I’ve ever been. I don’t want to eat our own.”
Yup. He’s right. Following the acquittal of Trump by the Senate over inciting the riot at the US Capitol, McConnell took to the Senate floor and blasted Trump, insisting that there was “no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.” Trump shot back with a lengthy — y falsehood-ridden — statement in which he called McConnell a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.”
A fissure like this is, without question, a bad thing for the Republican Party as it tries to retake the majorities in the House and Senate it lost during Trump’s presidency. If Trump and McConnell spend the next two years using Senate primaries as a series of proxy battles in the fight for control of the GOP, it will assuredly hamstring their chances in the 2022 midterms.
So Graham’s mission makes sense. But again, it will fail. And it will fail for one specific reason: Donald Trump could care less about what’s best for the Republican Party.
Ver, in order for Graham to succeed in his effort to (re)build a bridge between Trump and McConnell, he needs both men to have the best interests of the GOP as their top priority. That has never been and will never be Trump’s top priority.
He has never made any attempt to hide the fact that his list of priorities goes something like this: 1. Triunfo 2. Triunfo 3. Trump blood relatives 4. Everyone else in the world. Whenever Trump did something in office that was broadly interpreted to help the Republican Party at large, it was purely a happy offshoot of his main goal: To advance his own brand and self-interest.
Remember that before Trump ran for president is 2016, he had a loose — at best — affiliation with the Republican Party. As PolitiFact noted, in the decade between 2005 y 2015, Trump was a Republican for five years and a Democrat for four.
And Trump’s actions while in the White House make very clear where his loyalties lie. Take former Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake. Flake emerged as one of Trump’s most vocal critics in the early days of his presidency, insisting that the President represented a deeply distorted version of the GOP that should be rejected if the party wanted to survive. Trump went after Flake, insisting that *he* wasn’t a real Republican — despite Flake’s near-flawless conservative voting record. The party base lined up behind Trump and forced Flake to retire before he faced a likely loss to a Trump-backed primary challenger.
That was a taste of things to come. Time and time again over Trump’s four years in the White House, he made clear that fealty to him was far more important than commitment to long-standing conservative values. Trump quite clearly saw the Republican Party as a cult of personality organized around his whims and whines, not a national political party with a set of beliefs that transcended any one person.
This is the Trump that Graham is going to try to make peace with over the weekend. You can’t appeal to someone’s party loyalty when they have no party loyalty. Trump cares solely about himself and advancing his own personal, financial and political fortunes. And you can’t bargain with someone like that.
