‘It is not often a senator gets that kind of a sendoff’: Bill Maher on Lindsey Graham

Bill Maher giving Lindsey Graham a warm sendoff is the kind of thing that stops you for a second, because Maher has spent years mocking Graham as a Trump sycophant who bent whichever way the wind blew. And yet there he was, calling him the "Trump whisperer" and noting that the Senate itself said they'd miss him for exactly that skill. That's not nothing. That's an admission from someone who never had much patience for Graham's political shapeshifting that the shapeshifting actually did something useful.

What Maher is really describing, whether he means to or not, is the value of having somebody in the room who can talk to Trump in a language he understands and actually move him. Washington loves to sneer at that kind of access as flattery or weakness. But you don't get a bipartisan reputation as "the guy" who can walk a president back from the ledge, or push him toward a deal, by being a pushover. Graham built that role over years, took heat from both sides for it, and it turns out plenty of senators privately leaned on it more than they'd admit in public.

There's something almost funny about a late-night host handing out that kind of praise, given how often Graham was a punchline on shows exactly like Maher's. It's a reminder that the caricature of him as just a weathervane never captured the whole picture. People who actually worked with him, including people who disagreed with him constantly, saw a guy who could get things done precisely because he didn't treat Trump as an untouchable force to be dodged or an idol to be worshipped, but as someone you had to actually talk to.

Whatever you thought of Graham's politics, and plenty of conservatives had their own complaints about him over the years, that particular skill is rarer in this town than people want to admit. Maher noticing it, out loud, on his own show, says more about Graham's actual role in Washington than most of the obituaries will.