Once the best friend of John McCain and now chief Senate sycophant, Lindsey Graham is the personification of the GOP's decline

Graham once called Trump 'unfit for office', among other insulting things. So what changed?

“Article 3 of impeachment against Richard Nixon: the article was based on the idea that Richard Nixon, as president, failed to comply with subpoenas of Congress. Congress was going through its oversight function to provide oversight of the president… The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day that he was subject to impeachment…”

Is that quote from an impassioned House Democrat calling for President Trump to comply with their numerous subpoenas and over 20 investigations? No. That was Lindsey Graham in December 1998, who at the time was a Republican representative of South Carolina's 3rd District making the case for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. How times have changed.

Flash forward to 2019, and Lindsey Graham is a sitting Senator who is standing by a president who has vowed not to comply with every single subpoena House Democrats have sent his way. This week, Graham advised Donald Trump Jr to ignore a subpoena from the Senate Intelligence Committee. #LindseyGrahamResign trended on Twitter after the news. The subpoena was issued by Graham's Republican colleague Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (NC). Burr, who isn't seeking re-election, has since been attacked by conservative media, like all Republicans who dare to show disloyalty to President Trump.

Donald Trump Jr has testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in the past, so they had every right to call him in for additional testimony. It also appears Trump Jr may have lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee about his knowledge of the Trump Tower Moscow deal and whether he told his father about the Trump campaign's June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian operatives.

Senator Lindsey Graham, who is now Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is telling someone who may have misled his own committee that he shouldn't comply with a Senate subpoena. Graham has pushed for President Trump's political opponents like Hillary Clinton to be investigated while downplaying the damning evidence of obstruction of justice outlined in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report. Graham has tried to help President Trump repeal the Affordable Care Act, even after his best friend the late Senator John McCain (R-AZ) struck down the effort in one of his final acts.

During Trump's presidential campaign, Graham called him a “jackass", a “kook", a “bigot", and said Trump was "unfit for office." He also called the now-president a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" who "doesn't represent" the Republican Party. As we know, Donald Trump attacked John McCain both while he was suffering from brain cancer and after his death. In spite of all this, Senator Lindsey Graham has become one of Trump's biggest allies on Capitol Hill.

From the best friend of John McCain to the chief Senate sycophant of President Trump, Lindsey Graham is the personification of the GOP's descent into Trumpism. So what has caused Lindsey Graham to go from preaching about the rule of law in the 1990s to trying to place a president above it in 2019? What caused Lindsey Graham to go from saying Trump doesn't represent the GOP to embracing him as the leader of his party?

What caused Lindsey Graham to go from warning about Russia's attacks on American democracy to cosying up to the man who was seemingly receptive to their election assistance?

There have been several conspiracy theories to try and explain Graham's behavior, but Occam's razor usually prevails in these matters. Graham's cosying up to Trump has been in an effort to avoid a primary challenge ahead of 2020 and, according to Graham, this all comes down to staying relevant.

In an interview on The New York Times' ‘The Daily’ podcast, Mark Leibovich inquired about this directly. The episode was rightfully entitled "What Happened to Lindsey Graham?" When Leibovich asked Graham about his relationship with McCain, Graham did not cite McCain's character or the fact he always stood up for what he believes in — instead, Graham said that McCain knew how to stay "relevant." He went on to say that his own relationship with Trump is built on staying relevant: ”If you know anything about me, it'd be odd for me not to do this... this is to try and be relevant."

As we've seen, President Trump is not an anomaly. Trump merely escalated the Republican Party's decades-old Southern Strategy of scapegoating minorities for the GOP base's economic woes. This is what the Republican Party is at its core: President Trump just ripped off the veil of decency. In order to stay relevant and maintain power, Republican lawmakers like Lindsey Graham have sacrificed their integrity to uphold what their party has become: the party of a wannabe authoritarian.

What happened to Lindsey Graham is what happened to the Republican Party.

Ahmed Baba is the co-founder of Rantt Media