Valerie Biden Owens poses a question asked by many observers in Washington in recent years in her new memoir: “What happened to Lindsey Graham?”
The South Carolina Republican was among several GOP lawmakers who had “strong ties” to President Joe Biden as a senator representing Delaware for 36 years, his younger sister and confidant Biden Owens noted in his book “Growing Up Biden.” wrote.
But once Donald Trump – a man Graham had previously been elected president of – in 2016, Graham “became chiefly a sycophant for Trump,” she wrote in the book on April 12.
It was “disturbing” to see his brother’s old aides participate in “nothing or, worst of all,” as the Trump presidency brought “fresh declines almost every day”, Biden Owens wrote.
Graham was a staunch friend of the late Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and another friend of Biden and an enemy of Trump. Biden Owens suggested that after McCain’s death, “perhaps a part of Senator Graham’s soul also died”.
“The man is unfamiliar to me today,” Biden wrote Owens.
Graham’s spokesperson could not be immediately reached for comment.
Graham was long known for working in the aisle in the years preceding Biden, and Biden Owens wrote that he was among Republican senators who traveled to Delaware to attend a “Biden seminar” and to discuss bipartisan legislation. on which they worked together.
Biden Owens recalled Graham during a 2015 Huffington Post interview, saying, “The bottom line is if you don’t admire Joe Biden as a person you have a problem. You need to do some self-evaluation.” … He is as good man as God has ever made.”
That same year, Graham called Trump “an anti-racist, xenophobic, religious fanatic” in a CNN interview.
“He doesn’t represent my party, he doesn’t represent the values ​​men and women in uniform are fighting for,” he quoted Graham as saying.
But when Trump was elected president in 2016, Graham turned to making “character-killing comments about Joe and our family,” he wrote.
“Worse, he became the chief sycophant for Trump at a time when the very foundations of our democracy were being threatened,” she wrote. “It’s incomprehensible to me.”
