Darline Graham Goes All In on Election Denialism

Darline Graham’s latest bid to solidify Donald Trump’s support involves a fraught empty gesture.

The 62-year-old younger sister and current holder of the late Lindsey Graham’s South Carolina Senate seat dodged questions on Monday as to whether she would have certified the results of the 2020 presidential election, as her brother had six years prior.

“Senator, you just mentioned that you agree with your brother on everything except for one matter, that being illegal immigration; you’d go farther than him on that,” said MS NOW’s Mychael Schnell during a press conference. “That being said, I’m curious, do you agree with him about the 2020 election, that Joe Biden was certified the winner of that election, was lawfully elected, and that you would’ve voted to certify the election, as your brother did?”

Graham responded that she believed that the “election system is broken,” attempting to redirect the question toward her support for the White House’s SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that has divided Congress for most of the year.

“You won’t commit to having certified the results of the 2020 election?” Schnell pressed in a follow-up question.

Graham refused to elaborate.

Trump has fervently championed Graham’s candidacy, despite the fact that she brings zero legislative experience to the job. She also seems to have little awareness of current events and pressing matters: Last week, Graham flopped on a softball debate question regarding Taiwan, shrugging that “national security is not my thing.” Nevertheless, her actual policy positions may not matter at all with the local electorate, depending on voters’ attitudes toward the president.

“If a voter’s decision is all about Trump, then they don’t care what she knows about foreign policy or anything else,” Scott Huffmon, a professor of political science at Winthrop University, told Newsweek Monday. “The question is will they ‘believe in’ this endorsement and be as, or more, motivated as the people who showed up at county meetings over the years to censure Lindsey Graham.”

Graham’s popularity—as well as Trump’s—will be put to the test Tuesday, when South Carolina Republicans head to the polls to officially decide whether she or five-term Representative Ralph Norman will replace the deceased lawmaker on the general election ballot.

For years, election denialism was one of the minimal litmus tests for MAGA allegiance, requiring wannabe Trumpians to publicly question the security of America’s democracy in order to invite the president’s political favor. But that may be changing: In recent months, Trump’s magic touch hasn’t been quite so effective. So far, 10 of Trump’s candidates have crumbled in this primary cycle—as many as lost in 2018, 2020, and 2024 combined.

President Donald Trump’s administration has come up with a new scheme that will  gut due process for asylum applicants. 

Officers at the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, or FDNS, have been reassigned to two other immigration projects, undermining training for the agency’s asylum program, The Guardian reported Monday. 

Immigration officers have been reassigned to two supposedly “high-priority” initiatives: screening South African refugees and “unlawful” voters, according to internal correspondence obtained by the publication. As a result, the FDNS will not be able to assign personnel to train the asylum officers of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS.

FDNS’s main functions are to investigate immigration-related fraud, establish guidance for vetting and adjudicating asylum cases, and implement screening policies and procedures. 

These new initiatives are clearly inspired by two Trump administration priorities that can best be described as seeking to fix something entirely nonexistent: the first, cracking down on phantasmal voter fraud; the second, supporting the immigration of Afrikaners, the white descendants of Dutch colonizers in South Africa, who are fleeing an equally imaginary white genocide.

Any disruption in training asylum officers will further slow down the processing of asylum cases—which have already come to a screeching halt under the Trump administration. 

Last month, the USCIS proposed a new rule that would refer asylum applicants for deportation without offering them an interview or hearing. The move is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to transform the agency into yet another arm of the president’s mass deportation machine. 

Vice President JD Vance has made two trips to Maine to stump for Republican Senator Susan Collins as her midterm election against Democrat Troy Jackson approaches. Yet Collins has been a no-show for each visit, leading to speculation that she is deliberately avoiding the vice president and the greater Trump administration.

In his latest visit to Maine on Monday, Vance heaped praise on Collins during a rally at defense technology manufacturer Compotech.

“Whenever I’m in the great state of Maine … I gotta give Susan a little bit of crap,” Vance said at the rally. “Susan is the most independent member of the United States Senate, and as the president of the United States Senate, she sometimes makes my job just a little bit harder. But she makes it harder because she is coming to work every single day and fighting not for a political party.... She fights for the great people of Maine.”

Vance also mentioned that Collins had been to his house about six times.

It’s no surprise Collins didn’t show up to the rally. President Trump has a nearly 60 percent disapproval rating among Mainers as of last month, and nothing indicates any future improvement. The vast majority of Mainers don’t think their state is affordable, and Maine business has suffered significantly due to the most recent 50 percent tariff trade war the Trump administration started with Canada.

Collins has made a point to distance herself from Trump on his new tariffs threat against Canada, saying that they would be a “mistake.” She also drew a line in the sand against the administration’s attack on mail-in ballots, which she called “very important to the people of Maine,” particularly seniors.

Collins was called out by Jackson the morning of the rally.

“How ’bout fuel prices going through the roof because of the war on Iran? How ’bout ICE murdering people here in Biddeford? Let’s give a shoutout to Susan Collins about how poor of a job she’s doing for the state of Maine. I’m sure JD Vance loves her because she’s doing everything that he wants for her,” he said. “But she’s not doing it for Maine people.”

Jeanine Pirro, President Trump’s handpicked U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, messed up the prosecution of two accused MS-13 gang leaders earlier this year.

CNN reports that in April, Pirro, a former Fox News host, failed to get a jury to convict Moises Rivera-Luna, who is accused of ordering murders on U.S. soil from a Salvadoran jail cell more than 10 years ago, or his co-defendant Tokiro Rodas Ramirez, who was reportedly a local MS-13 leader in D.C.

And it wasn’t the first time she struggled to secure a conviction: A jury failed to reach a verdict on the two men less than five months earlier.

Trump celebrated bringing Rivera-Luna to American soil in March 2025, making the failed conviction all the more embarrassing. Under Pirro’s leadership, D.C. federal prosecutors keep running into problems with jury trials, securing convictions in only four of eight federal cases in 2026 prior to Rivera-Luna’s mistrial in April.

It didn’t get better for the Justice Department after that, either. The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office has tried close to a dozen more criminal cases in federal court, only to have four trials end with deadlocked juries and two other defendants acquitted. It’s a highly unusual pattern, according to several investigators, unnamed former prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other legal experts who spoke to CNN. The conviction trial rate in federal criminal trials is around 90 percent.

One factor could be that Washington, D.C.’s jury pool doesn’t have a lot of confidence in the Trump administration or the DOJ, and that D.C. federal prosecutors, already stretched thin by firings and resignations, are stuck retrying cases weeks or months after their original verdicts.

“This is not a political case. I think this is a failure of proof and a stubbornness born of desperation on the part of the prosecutors’ office,” Robert Feitel, a defense attorney representing an MS-13 defendant, told CNN.

Pirro’s office got a lot of negative attention after they charged Olympic canoeist David Hearn with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool when the pool was clearly damaged by botched renovation efforts. That case quickly fell apart, and the charges were dropped despite President Trump’s anger and insistence that his efforts were sabotaged. But it seems that her office can’t even handle seemingly straightforward criminal cases.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright claimed last week that the United States helped move 15 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday. He also claimed that the average daily oil exports were more than eight million barrels over a seven-day period.

But a consistent gap has emerged between the Trump administration’s claims and industry firms’ findings, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Kpler, a ship-tracking firm, estimated that the U.S. moved a daily average of roughly 2.3 million barrels of crude and oil products in August. Huax, another tracker, placed average daily exports at between two million and five million barrels. For context, before the U.S. attacked Iran, an average of 20 million barrels of oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz every single day.

Vortexa, another tanker tracker, found that a seven-day average peaked at 9.2 million barrels—a number far closer to the administration’s claims. But its 28-day average was roughly six million barrels. Clearly, the number can vary greatly depending on what specific dates are selected.

Wright has claimed that private data firms are undercounting the number of ships passing covertly through the strait, but one expert explained why that’s not likely.

Rory Johnston, a founder of Commodity Context, an oil-market research firm, told The Wall Street Journal that the firms tracking tankers had all found similar numbers. “You’d expect someone to have figured out a way to validate the White House numbers if there was a way,” Johnston said. “As of yet, I haven’t seen anyone do it.”

Since the beginning of the war, industry firms have struggled to monitor the passage of ships that are forced to “go dark” and silence their marine radio tracking systems. Still, the numbers the Trump administration is presenting aren’t supported by any information from the companies that are actually loading the ships.

The London Stock Exchange Group estimated the amount of crude and oil being loaded onto ships in the Persian Gulf was about 1.9 million barrels a day—down from 4.4 million barrels a day in July.

Wright has also insisted that the United States has gained full control of the Strait of Hormuz.