Darline Graham was asked one question about national security at a debate last week, and she answered it honestly. That is the problem.
Six months ago, a Democrat gave essentially the same non-answer on the same subject, and the same people now defending Graham called her stupid.
Standing on a stage in Newberry, South Carolina, days before a runoff that could hand her the Senate seat once held by her late brother Lindsey, Graham was asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea are national security issues for the United States. She asked for the question to be repeated. Then she gave up. “I’m just going to be honest here. I’m not that informed on national security. So — but I do support the military.”
This is a seat that votes on whether the country goes to war. She was appointed to it. On Tuesday, Republican voters decide whether she becomes their nominee, and the most powerful people in her party are spending the final days making sure she does.
The seat was handed to her
Graham did not win her way into the Senate. When Lindsey Graham died, the governor appointed his sister to the seat, and Trump blessed it. She had never run for office. Her day job was commissioner of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind. Her qualifications for one of a hundred seats in the world’s most powerful legislature were a surname and an endorsement.
She finished first in the August 11 primary but couldn’t clear a majority, which forced Tuesday’s runoff against Representative Ralph Norman. The winner carries the Republican line into November. And three days before that runoff, she stood on a debate stage and confirmed, in her own words, the thing her critics had only been able to imply: she doesn’t know the material.
The question was whether the admission would cost her the support that had carried her this far. Instead, the party closed ranks.
Trump moves in
Trump flew to South Carolina on August 21 to rally for her. “I asked her to do this,” he told the crowd. “I said, ‘Darline, you gotta do it.'” And before boarding Air Force One, he was asked directly about the debate answer that had gone viral. He did not distance himself from it. He defended it.
“All she was doing is being honest,” Trump said. “She’s very smart, and she was being honest… She is going to do what the military wants, and really what the president wants.” Then the line that gives the whole thing away: “She understands that national security is my thing.”
So the appointed senator says national security isn’t her area, and the president’s argument for her is that it doesn’t need to be. She’ll do what he wants, because the subject belongs to him. Her admission of ignorance was not a problem to be managed. It was recast, in real time, as a virtue.
That recasting is easier to appreciate next to how Trump graded the same failure on the other team. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fumbled a Taiwan question at the Munich Security Conference in February, Trump did not call it honest. “Her performance was horrible,” he said. “I was surprised, actually. I didn’t know she was stupid. She had no idea. I don’t think she knew what Taiwan was.”
Two politicians, one subject, the same inability to answer. One is stupid and didn’t know what Taiwan was. The other is very smart and was just being honest. The only variable that moved was the letter after the name.
The cover story gets written on live television
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Then there was Sean Hannity, who supplied the excuse Graham herself would repeat.
In February, Hannity played AOC’s Munich answer on Fox and torched it. “Wow, even worse than Hillary. Radical squad leader AOC simply could not answer basic questions about global affairs. This is about as close to a Kamala Harris ‘word salad’ as you’ll ever get.”
This week, he brought Graham on his show and built her a shelter. “I wonder how many people around the country, if I gave them a map, could pick out Taiwan,” he offered. “I don’t think many.” Graham took the frame and ran. “I tripped up on one question. I was just honest, and I think that’s kind of a foreign concept.” The same host who mocked one politician’s fumble as a “word salad” now wondered aloud why anyone expected the other to know the answer at all.
The tell
Here is what makes this more than partisan noise. It is the same reflex that keeps turning up elsewhere. The Republicans who spent years insisting the Biden family’s finances demanded investigation, impeachment even, now wave off the Trump family’s far larger dealings as none of Congress’s business. Ted Cruz, who once called the Biden matter “official corruption from the then-vice president,” now says he doesn’t “have concerns on that front.” The question is never what happened. The question is always whose name is on it.
Graham told the truth about herself on that stage. The machine’s response was not to reconsider her. It was to build her a story, put the president on a plane, and run out the clock.
On Tuesday, the runoff tells us whether it worked.
