Reuters Sen. Lindsey Graham has emerged as one of the staunchest defenders of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Sen. Lindsey Graham doesn’t like President Trump ridiculing Christine Blasey Ford, but he insists she’s been given a lot more respect than women who alleged sexual misbehavior in the 1990s.
At a campaign rally in Mississippi, the president on Tuesday scoffed at Ford’s claim that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her in the early 1980s.
“How did you get home? I don’t remember. How did you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know,” Trump mocked. “What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where is the house? I don’t know. Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? I don’t know. But I had one beer. That’s all I remember.”
At a forum hosted by the Atlantic, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, pressed Graham on the president’s behavior.
“Everything he said was factual,” the South Carolina senator said initially. “He’s frustrated his nominee has been treated so badly.”
Goldberg interjected. “Actually it was a personal, degrading attack on someone who is a private citizen ...”
Graham interrupted:
“Here’s what is personally degrading. ‘This is what you get when you go through a trailer park with a $100 bill.’ ” Sen. Lindsey Graham
We deleted a tweet that did not accurately reflect the context of Lindsey Graham’s quote in the below video clip. pic.twitter.com/U5ihRhiP27
— Yahoo News (@YahooNews) October 3, 2018
Say what?
As it turns out, Graham was parroting an infamous line by James Carville, one off the architects of Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1992 presidential election. Carville made his remark a few years later, after Paula Jones accused Clinton of exposing himself to her when he was governor of Arkansas.
What Carville actually said was, “Drag a hundred dollars through a trailer park and there’s no telling what you’ll find.” He and other Clinton allies furiously attacked several women who came forward to allege misbehavior on the part of the president.
After a moment’s silence, Graham quipped to the Atlantic audience: “Most of you all are too young to remember this.”
“The bottom line is,” Graham continued, “I know what can happen to a woman who comes forward in a political environment. ... For every woman who comes forward, God knows how many never said a word and take it to their grave.”
Yet not every accusation is true, said Graham, who’s emerged as Kavanaugh’s staunchest defender in the Senate. The third-term senator is a former military prosecutor.
Opinion: Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has spent his life justifying an unjust system
“Sometimes people are accused of something they didn’t do. So President Trump went through a factual rendition that I didn’t particularly like, and I would tell him to knock it off. You’re not helping. But it can be worse.”
“The point is, we have come a long way,” Graham said. “I thought [Ford] was handled respectfully [during the hearing]. I thought Cavanaugh was treated like crap.”
