In his new book, a Washington journalist addresses a conundrum for anyone baffled by the political appeal of a charlatan. What does it take to shift a shrewd political operator from contempt for the charlatan to toe-licking superfan?
Lindsey Graham was the obvious one to ask. This is the Republican senator who once served as John McCain’s proud sidekick, bathed in all of McCain’s reflected moral authority and dismissed Donald Trump as a “racebaiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” in 2016 – before doing a screeching U-turn to become his ever-present golf amigo. So what changed, asked author Mark Leibovich? “Well, okay, from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it’d be odd not to do this,” said Graham. This? “This is to try to be relevant.”
The pathos would be overwhelming if Graham wasn’t one of the most powerful politicians in the US. “If you don’t want to be re-elected, you’re in the wrong business. I have never been called this much by a president in my life”, he explained.
Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader distinguished by U-turns in service of his yearning to be speaker one day, said he could get Trump on the phone “faster than any staff person who worked for him could get him on the phone”.
Servitude for access. What many outsiders perceive as pathetic and disturbing, Graham and McCarthy present as the normal business of politics.
Lack of moral case
When Graham said “Count me out” and “Enough is enough” on January 6th amid the blood and detritus of the Capitol riot, he didn’t actually mean he’d had enough of Trump, he explained afterwards; no, no – he only meant that the stolen election gambit hadn’t worked and that they should move on.
The parallels between Graham and Liz Truss are striking. The do-or-die defence of a mendacious, amoral leader, the lack of a moral case for any policy, the willingness to ride the disastrous far-right wave even as divisions engulf party, country, natural allies and international reputation. The only difference is that Graham failed to become US president while Truss will probably make it to 10 Downing Street.
From awkward beginnings, her hustings performances suggest some intensive Trumpish tutorials. When a presenter on GB News misread the date of a controversial pamphlet, Truss used the typo both to evade a tricky question and to take a swipe at a venerable British institution. “It’s not the BBC, you actually get your facts right,” she said to rapturous applause in a company that pays Nigel Farage to host a show.
“Pragmatic” is the word often used to describe the likes of Graham and Truss when commentators are struggling to sound diplomatic. Check out the hordes who dismissed Boris Johnson as an entertaining buffoon but on watching his rapid ascent to Downing Street were suddenly persuaded he would be an entertaining pragmatist instead.
In what sounded like the prayer of a despairing man, our Minister of State for European Affairs, Thomas Byrne, told Newstalk at the weekend that Truss had “shown herself to be pragmatic over the years”, pointing to her previous opposition to Brexit. On the one hand, people who have expressed “extreme Euro-scepticism” are her predominant backers, he noted glumly, on the other, there is reason to believe she will be “her own person”.
If that means repurposing rabid old Brexiteers into an ideological time-bomb of a government, then the Minister could be right on both counts. In addition to current suspects such as John Redwood, Iain Duncan Smith, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Kwasi Kwarteng and Suella Braverman, Truss will certainly find room for David Frost, the one who got a peerage for negotiating the “excellent” EU-UK treaty before running like hell from it (the treaty, not the peerage of course which lends him his relevance).
Trumpist tendency
His latest intellectual contribution is a tweet about Beethoven’s Ninth, the official anthem of the European Union. Apropos nothing, he refuses to consider it “the exclusive property of the EU, of ‘Remainers’, or of any other group”. The circle back to Farage and acolytes turning their backs on a performance of the Ninth in the European Parliament is complete. Childish ignorance and fully formed idiocy endure at what we must accept to be the highest rungs in Westminster.
The British once prided themselves on being pragmatic in the dictionary sense – ie “dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations”. But it’s a dangerous shapeshifter of a word. Pragmatism in Lindsey Graham’s case meant a conversion to Trump that was all about political expediency and he wanted everyone to know that. Now pragmatism has landed him in a grand jury investigation into possible election interference in 2020.
Pragmatism for Liz Truss has meant sticking her finger in the air, checking which way the wind was blowing, then posting it on Instagram. She became more Brexity than the Brexiteers themselves.
The Trumpist tendency is showing as she insults Nicola Sturgeon as an “attention seeker” and assures a Belfast hustings (Tory party members only) there will be no compromises on a renegotiated protocol if key demands are not met.
She got to the final ballot with only a third of the parliamentary party’s support so can’t afford to face down the European Research Group even if she wanted to. In a reckless striving for relevance, she will continue to pit English against English, British against British, British against Irish, British against Europe. A Little Englander running a little England is where her rhetoric leads, says the Guardian.
Not much sign of any pragmatism there but she is certainly relevant now.
Good job, Tory members, we’ll be seeing you very soon again.