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Lindsey Graham called Donald Trump a “lying bastard” during the Ukraine impeachment scandal, a new book says.
But the senator said the then president was “great fun to hang out with,” according to The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021.
The book, by journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, also quoted him as saying that Trump could get away with assassination and that the GOP would still support him.
They claimed Graham said “he could kill fifty people on our side and it wouldn’t matter” when they bumped into him outside a DC steakhouse in 2019.
sen. Lindsey Graham reportedly supported Donald Trump’s claim that he could commit a murder and still has a fervent fan base, calling the former president a “lying bastard” who is nonetheless “fun to hang out with.”
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose voters, okay?” Trump famously said:
“He could kill fifty people on our side and it doesn’t matter,” the South Carolina Republican told journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser according to their new book “The Divider,” obtained by The Watcher.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose voters, okay?” Trump’s famous statement during a 2016 campaign shutdown in Iowa: “It’s unbelievable.”
Graham recalled a story about the husband-and-wife author duo about Trump bragging about his close relationship with evangelical pastors he met the day before in 2019. “Those damn Christians love me,” Trump had told Graham.
Graham stuck to his claim that it would be “insane” to impeach Trump for his July 2019 phone call with the president of Ukraine, but admitted he knew the former president’s mistakes.
“He’s a lying bastard,” Graham said, adding that Trump was “nice to hang out with.”
Graham and Trump’s fraught back-and-forth relationship has been puzzling to onlookers, starting with Graham in 2016 refusing to support Trump, deeming him racist and crazy.
But Graham became one of the former president’s closest allies during his presidency. Still, he voted to certify the 2020 election results against Trump’s will and blamed him for the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
“Trump and I, we’ve had an amazing journey. I hate to end up like this. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he has been a consistent president. But today, the first thing you’ll see. All I can say is I’m gone, enough is enough,” Graham said at the time.
Graham has defended Trump in the wake of the FBI raiding his Mar-a-Lago home, warning that there would be “riots in the streets” if the former president were indicted.
Other revelations in Glasser and Baker’s upcoming tell-all include that Trump was persuaded by an old college friend, New York cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, that buying Greenland was a good idea and that the former president was reportedly so paranoid that Iran would retaliate for the US murder of its top general, Qasem Soleimani, that he told guests at a Mar-a-Lago holiday party in 2020 that he was leaving early for fear of an assassination attempt by Tehran.
Rarely restrained in his commentary, both publicly and privately, Trump also reportedly told those around him that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was an example of why women should be careful with plastic surgery and said he would like Nikki Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, would not choose. as a running mate because she had a ‘complexion problem’.
In other excerpts of the book, Trump belittled his son-in-law Jared Kushner for worrying only about his “liberal New York crowd.”
Melania Trump reportedly told her husband he was “ruining” the United States’ COVID-19 response, a new report suggested Wednesday.
‘You’re blowing this up’: New book reveals Melania Trump criticized her husband’s handling of COVID – and his top general feared he’d authorize an attack on Iran if the presidency ended
Melania Trump told her husband he was “ruining” the United States’ COVID-19 response, a new report suggested Wednesday.
The former first lady was ‘devastated by the coronavirus and convinced that’ [Donald] Trump was screwing up,” the book claims, according to CNN.
In a phone conversation with former Trump ally Chris Christie, Melania would recall telling him she told her husband, “You’re screwing this up.” Apparently, she begged Christie to help Trump take the pandemic more seriously.
She told Trump, “This is serious. It gets really bad, and you have to take it more seriously than you take it.’
But according to the book, he didn’t do much more than brush her off.
“You worry too much,” Trump replied. ‘Forget it.’
That and other explosive revelations of the Trump presidency are revealed in a forthcoming book by New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser, “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021′.
Also among the bombings were concerns from Trump’s top general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, that the ex-president would order an attack on Iran on his way out the door of the White House.
And according to the authors, it was one of Trump’s associates who gave him the idea.
Milley told his staff at the time that it was a ‘What the hell are these guys talking about?’ moment,” the book claims.
Melania Trump reportedly told her husband about the pandemic: “This is serious. It gets really bad, and you have to take it more seriously than you take it”
Trump reportedly told his wife to ‘forget’ in response to her concerns
Trump was reportedly so paranoid that Iran would retaliate for the US assassination of its top general, Qasem Soleimani, that he told guests at a Mar-a-Lago holiday party that he would be leaving early for fear of an assassination attempt by Tehran.
But that’s not the only time the ex-president has scared his advisers for national security.
After Trump publicly sided with Russia’s Vladimir Putin over US intelligence agencies accusing the Kremlin of meddling in the US election, the director of national intelligence privately asked “associates” about the relationship between the two leaders.
‘I’ve never been able to come to a conclusion. It begged everyone to ask: what does Putin have on him that makes him do something that undermines his credibility?’ then DNI Dan Coats reportedly said.
In the Middle East, Trump is said to have shocked Jordanian King Abdullah II by offering him the West Bank that the monarch told a friend he thought he was having a heart attack.
Trump also invoked his National Security Council after a billionaire friend of his suggested buying Greenland from Denmark, a plan that eventually fell apart after public ridicule.
The former president himself told the authors of the forthcoming book that buying the area wouldn’t have been “so different” from his high-profile real estate purchases for the Trump organization.
‘I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ Trump said about Greenland.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, is said to have told his staff that he had a “What the hell are these guys talking about?” moment” when a former Trump staffer advised the president to attack Iran
‘You look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, “I need to have that store for the building I’m building,” etc. It’s not that different.”
And while Trump’s foreign chops were recognized by late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize, the book claims the ex-president had a hand in that, too.
A former senior aide to Trump told the authors, “The president asked Abe to nominate him over dinner.”
Other revelations include newly discovered messages from top Trump officials depicting the White House in a state of chaos during the 2018 midterm elections.
‘Okay, for the first time I’m really afraid of the country. The madness has been unleashed,” then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen wrote to a colleague.
She also said Trump’s defense, education and labor ministers were all threatening to resign.
Looking ahead to his future potential campaign in 2024, the former president didn’t say whether he would run, but poured cold water on the chances of running with Mike Pence again.
The reason was that Pence failed to prevent the 2020 election results — Trump’s defeat — from being certified by Congress.
“It would be totally inappropriate,” Trump told the authors. “Mike committed political suicide by not taking votes he knew were wrong.”