Darline Graham’s latest bid to solidify Donald Trump’s support involves a fraught empty gesture.
The 62-year-old younger sister and current holder of the late Lindsey Graham’s South Carolina Senate seat dodged questions on Monday as to whether she would have certified the results of the 2020 presidential election, as her brother had six years prior.
“Senator, you just mentioned that you agree with your brother on everything except for one matter, that being illegal immigration; you’d go farther than him on that,” said MS NOW’s Mychael Schnell during a press conference. “That being said, I’m curious, do you agree with him about the 2020 election, that Joe Biden was certified the winner of that election, was lawfully elected, and that you would’ve voted to certify the election, as your brother did?”
Graham responded that she believed that the “election system is broken,” attempting to redirect the question toward her support for the White House’s SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that has divided Congress for most of the year.
“You won’t commit to having certified the results of the 2020 election?” Schnell pressed in a follow-up question.
Trump has fervently championed Graham’s candidacy, despite the fact that she brings zero legislative experience to the job. She also seems to have little awareness of current events and pressing matters: Last week, Graham flopped on a softball debate question regarding Taiwan, shrugging that “national security is not my thing.” Nevertheless, her actual policy positions may not matter at all with the local electorate, depending on voters’ attitudes toward the president.
“If a voter’s decision is all about Trump, then they don’t care what she knows about foreign policy or anything else,” Scott Huffmon, a professor of political science at Winthrop University, told Newsweek Monday. “The question is will they ‘believe in’ this endorsement and be as, or more, motivated as the people who showed up at county meetings over the years to censure Lindsey Graham.”
Graham’s popularity—as well as Trump’s—will be put to the test Tuesday, when South Carolina Republicans head to the polls to officially decide whether she or five-term Representative Ralph Norman will replace the deceased lawmaker on the general election ballot.
For years, election denialism was one of the minimal litmus tests for MAGA allegiance, requiring wannabe Trumpians to publicly question the security of America’s democracy in order to invite the president’s political favor. But that may be changing: In recent months, Trump’s magic touch hasn’t been quite so effective. So far, 10 of Trump’s candidates have crumbled in this primary cycle—as many as lost in 2018, 2020, and 2024 combined.
President Donald Trump’s administration has come up with a new scheme that will gut due process for asylum applicants.
Officers at the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, or FDNS, have been reassigned to two other immigration projects, undermining training for the agency’s asylum program, The Guardian reported Monday.
Immigration officers have been reassigned to two supposedly “high-priority” initiatives: screening South African refugees and “unlawful” voters, according to internal correspondence obtained by the publication. As a result, the FDNS will not be able to assign personnel to train the asylum officers of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS.
FDNS’s main functions are to investigate immigration-related fraud, establish guidance for vetting and adjudicating asylum cases, and implement screening policies and procedures.
These new initiatives are clearly inspired by two Trump administration priorities that can best be described as seeking to fix something entirely nonexistent: the first, cracking down on phantasmal voter fraud; the second, supporting the immigration of Afrikaners, the white descendants of Dutch colonizers in South Africa, who are fleeing an equally imaginary white genocide.
Any disruption in training asylum officers will further slow down the processing of asylum cases—which have already come to a screeching halt under the Trump administration.
