204. Why Lindsey Graham’s Death Will Change Trump’s Agenda

0:00Katty Kay:Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

0:21Anthony Scaramucci:Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent.

0:26Katty Kay:Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms.

0:38Katty Kay:Welcome to the Rest is Politics US. I am Anthony Scaramucci with Katty K. Katty, how are you? You look like you're in a television studio.

0:48Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, I've just stepped right out of a television studio, but I'm a little disappointed in your t-shirt, Anthony, because you have a t-shirt saying World. The only t-shirt anyone can be wearing right now is this t-shirt. I have an England t-shirt. I was just wearing it on Morning Joe.

1:02Katty Kay:Well, I have a vintage jersey from 1990.

1:05Anthony Scaramucci:Then you need to be putting that on and you do not need to take it off between now and Wednesday. You're now with us. You're on Team England, Anthony.

1:13Katty Kay:I got bullied a little bit by Alistair Campbell, but I'm going to put it on next time you see me. So here's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about Lindsey Graham and the unfortunate and untimely tragic death of Lindsey Graham, but also what it means for the party, but who Lindsey Graham was and actually what he represented to the Republicans and what the arc of his political career was, 31 years in the Senate. And then we'll talk a little bit about ICE, Caddy. I want to talk about the situation where we've got a lot of immigrant communities in intense scrutiny. And even though it's dialed down from a media perspective, the president and his team are still going after people.

1:54Katty Kay:And it's put the United States on the human rights watch list. So those are going to be the two big topics we're going to talk about. And of course, for members only, we'll be addressing things like the New York Times subpoenas and some of the things that are going on around the world. Okay, let's start with Lindsey Graham. You knew Lindsey Graham. I saw you interview Lindsey Graham. I saw him on Morning Joe with you. You've been to parties with Lindsey Graham. Who was and who is Lindsey Graham?

2:19Anthony Scaramucci:I've known and worked with Lindsey Graham for years and interviewed him many times. I mean, dozens of times in my career in Washington. And I've interviewed him because he was one of the senators who was interested in the rest of the world. So when I was working with the BBC on the news side, BBC was a useful outlet for Lindsey Graham. So of course, as it was for Marco Rubio, our paths crossed because he always wanted to make sure that he was reaching audiences around the world. He wanted to be able to impact things in Ukraine. And so I had a lot to do with him. And in many ways, Lindsey Graham represents for me the arc of the Republican Party in the era of Donald Trump.

3:00Anthony Scaramucci:He goes from somebody who was a hawk and a conservative from South Carolina, but who was an ally of John McCain, trying to make sure that they did things around torture in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, stuck his neck out there trying to get comprehensive immigration reform when he felt that that was popular. In the era of Obama, he tried to work across the aisle to get climate change policy on cap and trade, a tax on carbon emissions. And then Lindsey Graham sees the Tea Party coming. In the Obama era, he sees that America is changing and he starts to become more conservative. He drops the immigration work.

3:43Anthony Scaramucci:He drops the climate-related work and he starts shifting himself. In 2016, of course, he runs against Donald Trump but runs ferociously. I mean, he has some of the most excoriating things that anybody has said about Donald Trump. The way to make America great again is to tell Donald J. Trump to go to hell was his famous line. But then he becomes an ally of Donald Trump. But what's interesting, so he is a shapeshifter. He's a political shapeshifter. But behind that shapeshifting, that what had brought me initially into contact with Lindsey Graham, his commitment to American leadership, his desire to get things down on the world stage, his antipathy towards Russia and his very strong support for the Ukrainians, that stayed.

4:31Anthony Scaramucci:And I think those people who are criticizing Lindsey Graham today and saying, listen, this is a guy who totally lost his values, they will quite quickly see how valuable he actually was in trying to maneuver Donald Trump around the edges to be more pro-Ukrainian, to do things to help the Ukrainians. So he's such an interesting character. He was funny. He was incredibly smart. But I'm sure you knew him as well, Anthony, that you had things to do with him too. What do you make of that arc that he went through, that journey he went through?

5:04Katty Kay:Gatti, I met Lindsey Graham for the first time in 2007. I had gotten invited to Davos, Switzerland, and I had been a Republican fundraiser. I'd never met him before. And there was an event in Davos. John McCain, Senator John McCain from Arizona, Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, were giving a presentation on US foreign policy. And so, I signed up for it, And I went to it and they said that, you know, they said Iran was minutes away from having a nuclear weapon. It was 2007, 19 years ago. I said, oh, wow, this has got to be a huge deal. Iran is minutes away from having a nuclear weapon. So that's been our chant for two decades.

5:44Katty Kay:But I remember him being a globalist and I remember him being a US Truman Doctrine, Ronald Reagan continuation of the American story and the American help for Western liberal democracies and other nations that were believers in freedom. And then the shift started to happen. Okay. I also remember when I was with Jeb Bush working on the campaign when Donald Trump gave out Lindsey Graham's cell phone number because he was trying to say, because Trump had given money to all these people. And of course, you give enough money to a politician, you get the cell phone number. And of course, Donald Trump gave out his cell phone number and Lindsey Graham smashed it on TV and got himself a new phone.

6:32Katty Kay:And he was lighting Trump up. and everybody in the Republican Party goes through that carousel, myself included. So I stand also accused of some of that hypocrisy. So what happens is you hate on Trump, you think he's mad, you try to deal with Trump, and then you either realize he's completely mad and you have to denounce him, or you do what Lindsey Graham did, which is you equivocate to try to get on side with Donald Trump to see if that's a better solution politically. And so we can sit there and criticize Lindsey Graham. That's what he did. But that's frankly what politicians do, Caddy. So we can sit here and sneer at him.

7:12Katty Kay:I'm not one of those people. I will say that he will be missed. Ukraine will miss him.

7:19Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah. And Zelensky has already come out, right? And he spoke from Zelensky to a bunch of reporters on the phone saying, I have the okay from the White House to put the secondary sanctions on those countries that are importing oil from Russia, that are importing Russian oil. So he felt he was making progress. And Zelensky clearly felt he was making progress. I think Zelensky will miss him.

7:42Katty Kay:He will miss him. I think Israel will miss him as well, because at the end of the day, even though he was a cipher of Donald Trump's, he was still in the camp of trying to fight for these people's types of freedoms. And so when I got bounced from the White House, I got a chance to speak at the Republican. It's like the Jewish Congress, the RJC was out in Vegas. Sheldon Adelson actually invited me to be keynote speaker. I sat with Lindsay that day and I was watching that metamorphosis take place. And frankly, as a Republican, a former Republican, we all went through a metamorphosis with Trump. but I think it cost Lindsay in the end.

8:22Katty Kay:I think that that was soul tearing for Lindsay Graham. I don't think Lindsay Graham slept well at night thinking about the juxtaposition of what Trump was doing to America, what Trump was doing to the world, and what him and John McCain's view of those things were.

8:42Anthony Scaramucci:This is the guy that called him a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot back in 2016, and then goes to playing golf with him all the time, there is no way that it didn't weigh a little heavy on him. And actually, I remember John McCain saying just before he died about Lindsey Graham, because the two had been very close, the three amigos of John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham trying to get things done. Those were the days when actually Republicans would work with Democrats. I mean, he's also a reminder of an era of American politics that has just gone. There is none of that comedy.

9:16Anthony Scaramucci:But he, John McCain, they've had a huge falling out because of Lindsey Graham going over to the Trump side and John McCain never did. And John McCain said, well, I hope he feels it was worth it. I mean, that's a devastating thing to say to somebody who has been such a good friend of yours.

9:32Katty Kay:I don't think Lindsey slept well as a result of that. But I will say this, that in Trump's world, in Trump's Washington, and by the way, Caddy, I stand accused. And so I have to own everything in life. I think it's the best way to do it. I called Trump the president of the Queens County Bullies Association. And then I went on to become his communications director. And I tried to stay loyal to him, by the way. I didn't break from Trump until 2019. And I'm in a better place for it. And Lindsey would have been in a better place for it if he actually broke from Trump. But I think the legacy of this is in Trump's Washington.

10:11Katty Kay:He casted the shadow over Washington and the world for a decade plus. But in Trump's Washington, the currency, Caddy Kay, the currency was proximity. And Lindsey Graham knew that. And so he was going to do whatever it took to have a proximate closeness to Trump. And I think it cost him morally. And I it cost him from a whole perspective. And I would just say for other politicians out there, it is not worth it. Okay. He should have listened to his mentor, John McCain, and backed off of Trump. And history will judge Lindsay unkindly, unfortunately. And that's sad for me because I liked him as a person, but he'll be judged unkindly.

10:53Anthony Scaramucci:So I think history will, and I want to talk though a little bit more about the Ukrainian side of this, because I think Ukraine is the one area where you could make the case that the moral compromise, the personal compromise that Lindsey Graham went through from having called him, you know, race baiting and xenophobic to playing four hours of golf with him a weekend. And that is perhaps the case where you can say there was emerging, particularly in this second term, a strong isolationist wing, much stronger than there had been in the first term. A strong isolationist wing of people around Donald Trump in senior positions and in the influence world.

11:33Anthony Scaramucci:But I'm thinking particularly people like J.D. Vance, right, who had this antipathy towards any engagement with Europe. We saw it in the Munich speech, but was more open to dealing with Russia. You had the Steve Witkoffs, you had the Jared Kushners also more open, particularly in Steve Witkoff's case, much more open to dealing with Russia maybe didn't fully understand the complexities of trying to negotiate with Vladimir Putin. And Lindsey Graham, who had been in the Senate for a long time and is an expert. I mean, Donald Trump is surrounded by people on the foreign policy side, apart from Marco Rubio, who are not experts, who don't really know the brief.

12:12Anthony Scaramucci:And I think we're seeing the fallout of that from Iran and from the negotiations with Russia. But Lindsey Graham knew that. And And maybe you can make the case that given what was at stake in Ukraine, and all of the European countries would probably agree with this, you wanted to keep Donald Trump on board as much as was possible on the Ukraine war and keep him putting pressure on Russia. I don't know if this sanctions act goes through now, the Secondary Sanctions Act goes through, but to his credit, Lindsey Graham never gave up on that. And he was calling reporters from Kiev and saying, listen, I'm excited.

12:51Anthony Scaramucci:I finally got the White House to agree with this. We can do the secondary sanctions. So a lot of people have compromised with Donald Trump. A lot of people have had to put their own feelings and their own values. And John McCain was pretty scathing about Lindsey Graham. But maybe if Lindsey Graham was the counter to J.D. Vance, actually managed to get something through that helped the Ukrainians on his multiple visits to Kiev, perhaps it was worth it. I mean, perhaps does he, Antony, provide a blueprint in some ways for how people who are more in favor of America's global leadership need to act?

13:33Anthony Scaramucci:I mean, does it, I don't know, does this just, whether he, now we're going to see Lindsey Graham is gone and so we're going to see a populist reckoning on Ukraine and Iran. Maybe he can't hold the, post his death, he can't hold the line anymore. But he did provide something of a model perhaps, didn't he?

13:50Katty Kay:In some ways, Caddy, but I mean, he's a study in human nature and human weaknesses, and he's a study in transparency, because ultimately, if you want to serve yourself and you want to be next to the powerful and you want to feel significant, you sort of do what Lindsey Graham did. You know, when you spend five years in a prisoner of war camp serving your country and you don't give up your fellow citizens who are servicemen in that prison of war camp.

14:16Anthony Scaramucci:In the case of John McCain.

14:17Katty Kay:In the case of John McCain, you come back, you're like, hey, I'm not doing that. And I did a hybrid of that. So I actually understand both sides. I went in, tried to help Trump, became impossible. I did still try to stay loyal to him. And when that also became impossible, I denounced him. They would have all been better off getting together and saying, hey, this is a really bad guy. He's really bad for America. And he's doing a lot of existential damage. They're sitting there. the fuse is burning. They all know what I'm saying is true. The fuse is burning. Rome is burning. And they're like, okay, well, hopefully Rome won't completely burn down by the time this guy leaves.

14:55Katty Kay:But that's the problem with that whole scenario.

14:58Anthony Scaramucci:Well, I think it's interesting to see that the people who are going to run to replace him, because there's going to have to be a special election to replace Lindsey Graham, but the people who are running are running from the right. They're not running from his traditional American global leadership position.

15:14Katty Kay:That's another thing he would say, well, if it's not me, it'll be someone further to the right of me. And that's why I'm – that's the equivocation alibi in your own brain as you're trying to apologize to yourself for doing the things that you're doing. But there's a paradox of momentum here in Ukraine. And just briefly, on Friday, the day before he died, Graham Blumenthal and Wicker, the senators got together and basically said that they had the support now.

15:41Anthony Scaramucci:A bipartisan group of senators, by the way.

15:43Katty Kay:But they have the support. And I think his death, to pursue into what you were just saying earlier about him finally getting Trump to sign on, his death may accelerate that. So there's a paradox here. This may be actually short-term good for Ukraine and what's going on in terms of the pressure that can be put on Russia. I think you also, if you're pro-Israel and you're losing somebody like Lindsey Graham, You got to say to yourself, okay, that's not great. But you also have people like Cotton and Cruz and Wicker that are also pro-Israel. So I feel like there's a deeper bench for Israel, okay, in the United States Senate.

16:24Anthony Scaramucci:There's a deeper bench, but I don't think either Cotton or Cruz quite have the president's ear in the way that Lindsey Graham did. I mean, he invested a lot of time on that golf course and he came back. I mean, another moment, right? You had January the 6th. Lindsey Graham says the next day, I'm getting off the Trump train. I've had enough. The president did not act well on that day. And then, of course, he gets back on the Trump train. And I think Trump belittled him in public, but he did spend an awful lot of time with him. And to the extent that there was a conduit from the White House to the Republicans in the Senate, it went through Lindsey Graham.

17:02Anthony Scaramucci:It didn't go through Ted Cruz. There's not much love lost between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. He hasn't done that work that Lindsay did, didn't have that mannerism that Trump seemed to appreciate. So I think this is a very bad day for Netanyahu. I think there are a lot more bad days for Netanyahu coming, but I do think losing Lindsay Graham is a bad day for Netanyahu. One other thing quickly that is worth talking about, I think we just want to put it to rest, the number of conspiracy theories that I heard from smart, sensible people within minutes of hearing of Lindsey Graham dying, that he had just come back from Kiev.

17:40Anthony Scaramucci:He must have been poisoned. Was it the Russians who poisoned him? Was it the Israelis? Was it Mossad that poisoned him? It was wild out there for a while. I think that is all Anthony being put to rest. This was a heart attack. He said he wasn't feeling very well. He had been going to go on television on Sunday and he said he'd go to a doctor after that Sunday. Of course, he never – television appearance, of course, he never managed to do that. And then Kash Patel comes out and says all of the resources of the FBI are being put at the use of the family, which somehow just pours fuel onto the flames of conspiracy theories.