Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was booed on stage while stumping for former President Donald Trump at a rally in Graham’s home state of South Carolina Saturday.
“Thank y’all for coming. Thank you very much,” Graham started saying amid jeering from the crowd.
After several minutes, Graham urged the attendees to settle down.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Just calm down for a second. I think you’ll like this,” he said.
Graham leaned into the on-again off-again relationship to try to rally the MAGA supporters Saturday.
“So let me tell you how you win an election folks—you get people together that don’t agree all the time to agree on the most important things,” Graham added. “My hope is we can bring this party together cause he’s gonna be our nominee.”
Graham and Trump have a notoriously rocky relationship. When Trump was running for president in 2015, Graham called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” noting “he doesn’t represent my party.” The relationship has remained hot and cold for years. Last year, Graham said that Trump was losing his sense of reality following the 2020 election. “He said that during that time, if somebody had told Trump that aliens came down and stole Trump ballots, that Trump would’ve believed it,” one juror said of Graham.
But just this month, following Trump’s indictment, Graham told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos he thinks “Donald Trump is stronger today politically than he was before.” In the same breath, Graham reiterated that he didn’t approve of taking classified information from the U.S. government.
“I’m not justifying his behavior,” Graham said. “If it were up to me, nobody would take classified information in their garage or Mar-a-Lago.”
In recent months Graham has appeared on Fox News to beg Republican viewers to donate to Trump.
When Trump took the stage, he took moderate steps to defend Graham for the crowd.
“We’re going to love him. He’s half and half. When we need those liberal votes, we need him,” Trump said, according to The Greenville News.
Donald Trump offered to campaign for Lindsey Graham in his home state after the South Carolina crowd booed him off stage.
Evelyn HocksteinBut later, when Trump mentioned Graham again, the crowd took to booing again.
“Do you mind if I come down and campaign a little for you, Lindsey?' He was one of my earliest endorsements from the go and I appreciate it, Lindsey."
Some residents accused Graham of using Trump’s reputation to bolster his own political image.
“I voted for him years ago, I voted for him last year, but we need to vote him out,” one resident, Michael Propes, said.
Graham is filled with “wishy-washiness,” another Trump supporter, William Billew, said.
