The Bulwark keeps providing content for traditional conservatives in America, even in a world where Brooks Brothers is a private equity play and Marjorie Taylor Greene is a more central GOP figure than Mitt Romney.
As a result, writers at The Bulwark often enough have to write about what happened to those previously of their own ilk — all those powerful conservatives who, unlike Liz Cheney, pledged fealty to Donald Trump and set fire to the principles that had — at least superficially — governed the political right.
Hence the new book The Corruption of Lindsey Graham — also being serialized at The Bulwark — a story about how the South Carolina lawmaker Lindsey Graham, a man who conservatives previously believed was principled, supposedly lost his way. The accomplished writer William Saletan pens the story, and it deals frankly with Graham’s becoming, in the establishment GOP’s opinion, “part of the evil” of the Trump MAGA revolution.
"I’m not interested in what’s distinctive about Graham. I’m interested in what isn’t. How does his story illuminate what happened to the whole Republican party? How did the poison work?" @saletan
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) May 9, 2023
https://t.co/t4QfwqvhcW
Bulwark asks things like: “How did a senator who clearly understood every element of the oncoming disaster—Trump, his angry fan base, and the timidity of the Republican elite—become part of the evil that followed?”
The gist of the thing is that Graham once said: “I’m not afraid of losing an election. I’m afraid of losing our soul.” And then, according to Saletan, Graham blatantly changed his mind.
Bulwark summarizes the work as “the extraordinary story of Lindsey’s Graham’s transformation from thought-leader to cringeworthy sycophant.”
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