A Sunday show stop for South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) saw the lawmaker feed into the corporate media narrative on the focus of former President Donald Trump’s campaign.
“Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.”
(Video: NBC News)
Between pushback over Vice President Kamala Harris being dubbed a DEI hire and the various splinter groups like “White Dudes” and “Karens” assembling on her behalf, identity politics remained an evident focal point of the Democratic Party’s strategy against the “orange man.”
Rather than decry detractors who’ve claimed Trump has strayed from a record and policy-based campaign, Graham appeared to buy the talking point whole cloth on “Meet the Press” Sunday as he agreed when host Kristen Welker prompted him with a point from former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley.
“Do you agree with Nikki Haley?” she asked after airing a clip of an appearance by the former South Carolina governor on Fox News from earlier in the week.
“Yeah. I don’t think — I don’t look at Vice President Harris as a lunatic. I look at her as the most liberal person to be nominated for president in the history of the United States,” said Graham. “She’s going to the Soviet Union playbook to lower prices called price control; she wants to eliminate private health care; she’s for reparations; she’s against fracking; she’s for the Green New Deal and on and on and on. So, I would make it about policy. A nightmare for Harris is to defend her policy choices.”
“Do you think former President Trump should stop talking about Vice President Harris’ race and intelligence?” the host asked to which the senator replied, “Yeah.”
“President Trump can win this election. His policies are good for America and if you have a policy debate, he wins. Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election,” added Graham who suggested that people like himself, Haley and Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia should be out on the trail for Trump.
During an appearance on “Special Report” Haley had criticized the president for going after Harris on issues like crowd size and her intelligence and said, “You can’t win on those things. The American people are smart. Treat them like they’re smart. It’s not about her. It’s about the American people. Talk to them and let them know you need their vote.”
Among those reacting to the take, Trump’s running mate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance had said during an interview with Fox News Digital, “To the people who say that Donald Trump should do something different, they had an opportunity to make Donald Trump do something different by challenging him over three separate primaries, every single one of which he won. I think Donald Trump has earned the right to run the kind of campaign that he wants to run.”
“If you listen to what Donald J. Trump says, if you look at what I say, we are prosecuting the case against Kamala Harris on policy,” he went on.
Meanwhile, the president himself hadn’t shied away from sounding off on Haley’s comments and the idea that she join the trail in some capacity. Taking questions from his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump was asked about the ambassador’s remarks to which he said, “Sure. I think we have done very well. I think that we are hitting a nerve. I think that this is a different kind of a race. All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.”
He went on to add after asserting he had a “very calm campaign,” that, “I appreciate her advice. I have to do it my way. You know, I ran against her and I did it my way. People said I should maybe do it a different way. But I won in South Carolina by numbers that nobody has ever seen before. It wasn’t even close. I think she is a good woman. I would love to have her support. She gave me support. But I would love to have her got around and campaign.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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