The Real Reason Lindsey Graham Declared His Friendship With Joe Biden Over
In a pre-Donald Trump world, bipartisanship was perhaps a much more palpable concept than it is today. Just consider the late Arizona Senator John McCain or (breaking from our current norm) his wife, Cindy McCain, for that matter. As the Republican party remains, in some lights, a many-stringed marionette under ex-President Trump (sorry, but are we wrong?), it seems the very notion of any type of friendly relationship between Democrats and Republicans becomes ever the more fleeting. And the remarks of at least one prominent GOP senator are yet another instance of the new reality American politics is racing towards.
Via INSIDER, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, took to Fox News on November 10 to express his disdain for President Joe Biden, a man he allegedly once considered a friend. (Considering he possibly exaggerated his relationship with the McCain family late last month, and that Graham has been on a tear about the Biden family since the November 2020 election, calling Biden even a friend even previously is up for interpretation.)
Yet, assuming we can take Graham at his word, the senator stated on Fox News' "America's Newsroom" that while he "had a good personal relationship" with Biden, one final decision on Biden's part was all it took for him to sever ties. Here's more on what went down.
Lindsey Graham's explanation for severing ties with Joe Biden has to do with this action
Speaking with hosts Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino on November 10, Lindsey Graham disparaged the president over the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, where they have been stationed in a decades-long conflict since 2001 (via The Hill). "I've known Joe Biden for a long time," Graham said on-air on Fox News."He's a decent man, but what he did in Afghanistan, I will never forgive him for."
Graham failed to mention that plans for a U.S. withdrawal were well into the works during the Trump administration. In 2018, an American envoy which included former Republican governor and diplomat Nikki Haley met with members of the Taliban to get the ball rolling on extracting troops from the country. The Republican strategy of foisting the blame for the withdrawal onto Democrats has been a subject of criticism by the left ever since it came to a crescendo earlier this year. In August, CNN's Jake Tapper lambasted Haley and other GOP members who put the narrative on Biden by accusing them of an effort "to memory hole the last four years under President Trump." Regardless, you can't argue that Biden's poll numbers have dropped.
The friendship between Graham and Biden had seemingly disintegrated much earlier than Graham described, however. Via The Hill, Biden called Graham a "personal disappointment" in 2020 for backing Donald Trump's erroneous voter fraud claims.