Donald Trump’s Relationship With Lindsey Graham Is About to Go Very Ba

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham completely threw Donald Trump “under the bus” when the senator testified before the grand jury in Georgia’s election interference case, a new book reveals.

Graham, who has spent most of the last half-decade as a steadfast Trump loyalist, had been summoned to testify before the grand jury over a phone call he had made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. After fighting the subpoena for months, Graham finally appeared to testify—and flipped immediately, according to a new book by investigative reporters Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman.

“After fighting a four-month legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to block his grand jury subpoena—and losing—South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham turned on a dime ‘and threw Trump under the bus,’” Isikoff and Klaidman wrote in their book Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election, citing anonymous sources.

According to the testimony, which the authors confirmed, Graham said that if you told Trump “that Martians came and stole the election, he’d probably believe you.”

Outside of the pages of Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, Graham has positioned himself as one of the president’s most ardent defenders. Last month, he took a harsh stance against the effort among a handful of secretaries of state to kick Trump off their presidential ballots via the language of Article 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. And as recently as three weeks ago, Graham defended the former president’s actions on January 6, 2021, telling Face the Nation that Trump’s claim of presidential immunity was “valid.”

“Now, if you’re doing your job as president,” Graham said, a defense substantially at odds with the account documented in Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, “and January the sixth, he was still president trying to find out if the election, you know, was on the up and up—I think his immunity claim, I don’t know how it will bear out, but I think it’s a legitimate claim.”

In a hilarious side note, Graham also hinted that Trump cheated at golf, a sharp contrast to comments he made a few years earlier. In 2017, a more deferential Graham insisted that Trump “shot a 73 in windy and wet conditions!”

After his grand jury testimony, Isikoff and Klaidman wrote, Graham bumped into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who led the investigation into Trump and ultimately indicted the former president. Graham actually thanked Willis for letting him share his side of the story.

“That was so cathartic,” he said. “I feel so much better.”

Graham then hugged Willis, who seemed unperturbed by the encounter, an eyewitness told Isikoff and Klaidman.

The backstory will live in infamy: Graham called Raffensperger on Trump’s behalf soon after the 2020 election, after it became clear that Joe Biden was set to take the White House. According to Raffensperger, Graham asked whether the secretary had the power to throw out all mail-in ballots from certain counties.

Raffensperger told The Washington Post he felt Graham was asking him to illegally discount valid ballots. This phone call occurred a week before Trump’s own infamous phone call to Raffensperger, during which he begged the secretary to “find” the exact number of votes needed to flip Georgia to Trump. Raffensperger held firm in both cases.

Graham was so involved in the scheme that the special grand jury actually recommended he be indicted for his actions. The special grand jury’s full report was released in September, and it revealed that Graham and former Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue all narrowly escaped charges for their role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Donald Trump’s double-digit win in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary has pretty much everyone arguing that it’s time to either rally around Donald Trump as the GOP candidate or, if you’re not so inclined, to begin the campaign against him in earnest.  There is, however, one person not on board with this plan—Nikki Haley.

“You’ve all heard the chatter among the political class. They’re falling all over themselves saying this race is over,” Haley told a crowd of supporters after acknowledging Trump’s win in the Granite State. “Well I have news for all of them—New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation.”

“This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go,” Haley added.

Technically, that is true. But positioning herself once again as Trump’s leading rival doesn’t seem to be convincing anyone—including President Joe Biden, whose campaign took Trump’s Tuesday night win as the starting gun for “one of the longest and most grueling general elections in modern American history,” according to Politico.

Typically, a candidate needs to win 1,215 delegates across the country to secure their party’s nomination for the White House. But the resilience of Trump’s personality-cult fandom and his nationalist appeal to the Republican base, which at times has put him more than 55 percentage points ahead of his opponents in nation-wide polls, have singled him out as an “unbeatable” candidate in the GOP race, even with just 32 delegates in the bag. 

“I’m looking at the math and the path going forward, and I don’t see it for Nikki Haley,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel told Fox News’s Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum on Tuesday. “I think she’s run a great campaign, but I do think there is a message that’s coming out from the voters, which is very clear.”

“We need to unite around our eventual nominee, which is going to be Donald Trump, and we need to make sure we beat Joe Biden,” McDaniel added.

Other prominent figures from Republican leadership agreed with the sentiment, pushing Trump forward as their nominee after just one primary.

“It’s time for Republicans to unite around President Donald Trump and make Biden a one-term president,” Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer said in an announcement endorsing Trump. 

Donald Trump celebrated winning the New Hampshire primary in his signature style: a series of deluded ravings. But connoisseurs of the former president’s rants were treated to an unexpected dollop of irony last night, as Trump came out against the losers of elections laying claim to victory.

Trump was the victor Tuesday night, winning the Granite State’s Republican primary with 54.5 percent of the vote. Nikki Haley came second, but her 43.2 percent support was far higher than anyone initially expected—a fact she celebrated as she promised supporters she would keep pushing.

Haley’s resilience immediately infuriated Trump, who turned his victory speech into a Haley roast. “I find in life, you can’t let people get away with bullshit,” he said, flanked by the nightmare blunt rotation of Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott, and Eric Trump.

“And when I watched her in the fancy dress—that probably wasn’t so fancy—come up, I said, ‘What’s she doing? We won.’ And she did the same thing last week,” Trump said, referring to Haley celebrating after coming third in Iowa.

Having failed to fully purge himself of his excess emotions during his speech, Trump then took his grievances to social media, at one point writing on Truth Social, “Could somebody please explain to Nikki Haley that she lost—and lost really badly. She also lost Iowa, BIG, last week.”

It’s pretty rich for Trump to say that people who lose should just accept their loss. After all, he has been indicted twice, once at the federal level and once at the state, for failing to accept a loss so hard that he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Trump also suddenly seemed to become clairvoyant and declared himself the winner of the Nevada caucus, which doesn’t take place until next week.

“SHE JUST LOST NEVADA, WHICH IS UP NEXT!” he wrote. “WE JUST WON NEVADA!”

For the most part, Trump spent the rest of the night blasting his Truth Social followers with dozens of news clips talking about how he had swept to victory. At one point, he bragged that he “BROKE THE ALL-TIME RECORD FOR VOTES CAST—BOTH SIDES, DEMOCRAT AND REPUBLICAN—IN THE HISTORY OF THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY!”

This isn’t quite accurate. Voter turnout for the Republican primary did hit a record high, with more than 300,000 people showing up to vote. But Trump performed poorly among moderates, nonaffiliated voters, and younger voters.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene had some choice words for Republicans who don’t back Donald Trump, yet another sign of how much sway the former president still has over the GOP.

Trump is facing off against Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. Many lawmakers, such as Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Nancy Mace, have already called the race for Trump. Haley isn’t backing down, but Greene thinks she should.

“Not only do [Republicans] support President Trump, we support his policies,” Greene told MSNBC Monday night. “And any Republican that isn’t willing to adapt these policies, we’re completely eradicating from the party. So it’s up to Nikki Haley, what she does.”

Greene’s use of the word “eradicate” is chilling, as it mirrors several of Trump’s recent fascistic comments. It also indicates that Trump and his allies intend to leave no room for dissent, even within their own party.

While calling out Haley may be understandable, as she’s the last major obstacle to Trump in the Republican primary, Greene’s inflammatory comments show just how little Trump criticism is tolerated in the party. Obviously, Haley is running against Trump for the Republican nomination. But she has been very careful not to outright criticize him in instances when it really mattered.

Haley was quick to defend Trump when he was indicted multiple times last summer, claiming the charges were part of a political agenda. She has twice said she would pardon Trump if he is found guilty of trying to overturn the 2020 election. And just last week, she said Trump was “innocent” of sexual assault until proven guilty—despite the fact that he has already been proven guilty of assault.

Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ social media account “Libs of TikTok,” has landed herself a government position supervising school libraries.

The professional agitator was appointed to the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee by Oklahoma’s education superintendent, Ryan Walters, a Republican who has previously described teachers’ unions as terrorist organizations and has attended events hosted by Moms for Liberty.

Raichik’s new role will see her deciding what public school students in the state—which ranks fourth in the nation for the most banned books, according to a 2022 report by PEN America—are allowed to read.

That’s despite Raichik’s history of making extremely inflammatory and heavily edited posts that at one point led to bomb threats in Oklahoma schools after Walters reshared them across his own platforms.

“Chaya is on the front lines showing the world exactly what the radical left is all about—lowering standards, porn in schools, and pushing woke indoctrination on our kids,” Walters said in a statement on Tuesday. “Because of her work, families across the country know just what is going on in schools around the country. Her unique perspective is invaluable as part of my plan to make Oklahoma schools safer for kids and friendly to parents. Chaya has a much-needed and powerful voice as well as a tremendous platform that will benefit Oklahoma students and their families.”

Besides her extreme politics, Raichik is a notably odd choice for the job. For starters, she does not appear to have any experience in schools or government, and she does not live in Oklahoma. Though according to some locals, that’s not so different from the qualifications of the man who appointed her to the position.

“Elections have consequences,” Crystal LaGrone, the chair of the Wagoner County Democratic Party, told The Daily Beast in August. “And we get people like Ryan Walters in positions of authority, where they really don’t have any expertise, and are attention-seeking. It feels like he wants to make a name for himself, not help the kids of Oklahoma.”