March 8, 2021 ☼ graham ☼ trump ☼ gop ☼ legacy
Source: The Washington Post - Link
In an interview with Axios’s Jonathan Swan, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) painted former president Donald Trump as a sort of magical conservative chimera. That made it trickier, he suggested, for the Republican Party to leverage Trumpism without Trump.
“What’s hard is to take a movement that I think is good for the country, try to get the leader of the movement, who has got lots of problems facing him and the party, and see if we can make a go of it,” Graham said. “Mitt Romney didn’t do it. John McCain didn’t do it. There’s something about Trump. There’s a dark side and there’s some magic there. What I’m trying to do is just harness the magic.”
The article goes on to say there are three legs to this magic stool (ok, bad metaphor and worse pun).
Trump has convinced folks he’s anti-elite, a populist, and not “politically-correct”. Only the last is true.
Trump used right-wing media tactics: insinuation and lies.
Trump concentrated on white fear.