Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) most notorious tweet is gaining attention anew this morning.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) once predicted in a tweet, posted more than four years ago, that by nominating Trump to become the Republican candidate and subsequent President of the United States in 2016, the party would “get destroyed” and that its destruction would be well-deserved. Well, here we are.
Given the last four years, it’s easy to forget that before Lindsey Graham was an embarrassing Trump sycophant, he was one of the Republican Party’s fiercest Trump critics. And with this in mind, it was on May 3, 2016, when the South Carolinian wrote, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”
When Trump was elected six months later, it appeared Graham’s prediction was wrong. But as Trump prepares to exit the White House as a failed one-term president, the senator’s forecast is suddenly looking a whole lot better. NBC News summarized the political landscape this way:
Republicans lost the House in 2018. They lost the White House in November. And they’re on the cusp of losing the Senate after last night’s runoff results in Georgia…. So with two weeks before Inauguration Day and as a band of congressional Republicans today attempts to challenge Biden’s win on Capitol Hill, it’s almost official: President Trump will be leaving the Republican Party in worse shape than when he first became president.
A Washington Post analysis added that if Jon Ossoff ends up prevailing, Trump would become “the first elected president since the Great Depression” to lose the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and the White House in a single term, “and he would join just five other presidents in doing so.”
The last president to pull off this feat was Herbert Hoover, whose name pops up frequently when assessing Trump’s tenure in historical terms. Whether Graham wants any credit for being right five years ago remains to be seen.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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