Your New Senator Is a Total Lightweight. She’s Perfect.
Darline Graham is the very model of a modern MAGA senator.
There’s been lots of reporting lately about the breathlessly fawning personal letters Natalie Harp habitually writes to her boss. Last night, the Daily Beast released two of them in full—and they’re so, so much creepier than advertised. We don’t want you to click away, so we’ll stick them down in the Cheap Shots—and we are relying on the honor system that you won’t simply skip ahead. All we’ll say up here is: Yikes. Happy Friday.
Join Catherine Rampell and JVL for Receipts Live today at 12:30 p.m. EDT today on Substack and YouTube.
Leave Darline Alone
by Andrew Egger
Darline Graham’s Taiwan gaffe couldn’t have come at a worse time. The South Carolina senator—sister and successor of the late Lindsey Graham—had hoped her Tuesday debate against Rep. Ralph Norman would quiet Republican whispers that she wasn’t ready for primetime ahead of next week’s runoff. Instead, she tripped headfirst over a question about America’s posture toward Taiwan and the South China Sea, managing only to say that foreign policy isn’t her area of expertise and she supports the military.
The moment was particularly painful because Lindsey Graham was one of the Senate’s biggest Taiwan boosters and China hawks. Darline Graham’s entire case is that she’s carrying on her brother’s legacy. And yet there she was in a damage-control appearance on Sean Hannity the next night, insisting that her voters are “concerned about a lot of things other than Taiwan,” like the Save America Act and men in women’s sports.
It’s all been very embarrassing for Darline. But I keep wondering: What if she’s right?
Here are two ways of thinking about the work of being a senator. One is as an awesome responsibility: One of just a hundred members of America’s upper legislature, the Greatest Deliberative Body On Earth™, setting down laws and policy for the most powerful country in the world. If that’s the job, then it’s hard to dispute that being informed on national security and foreign policy is crucial.
The other is as a fun D.C. social club and media platform. Nothing real ever happens in the ossified, deadlocked Senate, to whose legislating and foreign-policy-setting powers President Trump has helped himself in ever greater amounts. The job of a GOP senator is to say nice things about the president, vote down Democratic efforts to rein him in, and give him whatever he asks for in a massive reconciliation bill once or twice a year. (Pretending you might occasionally do something else is an optional extracurricular.)
I would like to live in a world where every senator believes in Option A. Is that the world we live in?
Keeping China constrained in the South China Sea is a longtime U.S. policy goal. It seems important that senators should know the issue back to front, and it’s a good thing that we have such a robust class of China hawks in the Senate GOP.
What has that class of China hawks been up to lately, by the way? Because I seem to remember that, earlier this week, President Donald Trump took a sledgehammer to our Pacific China posture in one of his most insane statements in recent memory. Fuming that South Korea was not sufficiently respecting his bromance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and that it had not joined his war with Iran, Trump abruptly ordered longstanding joint exercises with South Korea’s military cut short—a dramatic blow to our alliance, which relies in large part on American guarantees of protection against South Korea’s lunatic nuclear neighbor. America doesn’t provide these guarantees out of the goodness of its heart. South Korea would be a crucial regional ally, providing military support and key bases, not just in the event of a future conflict against North Korea, but against China as well.
What did the Senate’s GOP China hawks make of this senseless provocation, so damaging to our regional interests? They’re harder to find than usual at the moment, since the Senate is currently on recess.
But yesterday, I reached out to eleven of them: Jim Risch, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Pete Ricketts, Dan Sullivan, Todd Young, Bill Hagerty, Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, John Cornyn, and Ted Cruz. Did any of them, I wondered, have anything at all to say on the topic? Not a single one of their offices—not one—sent back a substantive reply.
The foreign policy titans of the Senate GOP have had their hands full not noticing things like this lately. They’ve sat by as Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department blows through our missile inventory pummeling a truculent Iran, despite growing concerns that this short-sighted action jeopardizes our future ability to defend Taiwan. They’ve repeatedly tied their own hands on the Iran conflict in other ways as well, shrugging at Trump’s brazen defiance of their warmaking authorities and routinely voting down War Powers resolutions that would force him to seek their permission to keep the Iran conflict going.
It’s Darline Graham’s contention that GOP voters don’t care about any of this. What they want their senators to be doing, she argues, is chasing a bunch of right-wing culture-war shibboleths: beating their heads against the wall of the DOA Save America Act, rabble-rousing about the elevenish male trans athletes a year who want to play in girls’ and women’s athletics. The Serious Men of the Senate flatter themselves that their job is more serious and important than this. But I suspect Darline might know what time it is better than they do.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump Is Finally Losing Ground Among Republicans… Focus groups show they’re mad about Iran. They’re mad about grocery prices. And they’re starting to wonder what on earth the president is doing, writes SARAH LONGWELL.
End of the Endless Summer… The Eve Babitz revival offered an intoxicating escape from our modern literary anxieties. Her final, briefly wonderful book of letters brings us back down to earth, writes HENRY BEGLER.
The Politics of AI Are Shifting in Real Time… Mark the summer of 2026 as the moment when an unlikely supermajority of Americans came together on one issue: their opposition to data centers. DAVID WALLACE-WELLS joins TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily.
Trump Just Ordered the Government to Delete the Receipts… On The Illegal News, ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL to discuss the Trump administration’s move to erase corporate ownership records, the latest developments in the Fauci investigation, how a bizarre election controversy in Alaska led to a DOJ investigation, and what Democrats still need to learn about persuasion in the Trump era.
Natalie Harp Is an Intelligence Nightmare… On Bulwark Takes, MICHAEL WEISS and MARC POLYMEROPOULOS discuss the “human printer,” Trump’s “economic D-Day” against Iran, the risks of secondary sanctions and a prolonged blockade, and why Tehran may retaliate rather than simply give in.
Life Is a Highway: The Terror of ‘It Ends’... Writer/director ALEX ULLOM joins SONNY BUNCH on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood to discuss his new existential indie horror.
Quick Hits
SPEAKING OF DRONES: Gen. Randy George was a well-respected infantry officer and something of a reformer—a rarity at the top of rigid conservative hierarchies like the U.S. military. The defining effort of his tenure as chief of staff of the Army was the Army Transformation Initiative, which sought to catch the service up to the technologies of the modern battlefield, like drones and directed-energy weapons.
Then Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired him in April, on suspicion of leaking internal disputes to the press. George’s acting successor is Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who was confirmed as vice chief of staff in January after a stint as a senior military assistant to Hegseth.
LaNeve recently ordered an experimental drone unit George had pioneered shuttered, reports the Wall Street Journal. An Army spokesman told the Journal that “Ultimately, these aerial systems are enablers that support our soldiers.” Sure, fine—but how is kind of an important question, as anyone who’s been paying attention to the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Nagorno Karabakh over the past six years would realize.
The Journal reported that “The elimination of a futuristic drone battalion is part of a broader ‘back-to-basics’ approach ordered up by . . . LaNeve.” Did America’s enemies get that memo, too?
BAIT-AND-SWITCH: If you’re an American healthcare company, you probably rely in some form or other on immigrants. If you’re an unscrupulous American healthcare company, you might lure people here with the promise of work and a better life, only to pay them poorly, and if they try to quit, threaten to charge them $10,000 or more for the privilege—oh, and maybe also call ICE.
That’s exactly what a group of nurses accused Avant Healthcare Professionals of doing in a lawsuit. At first, the firm fought the suit—but then it signed a $3 million settlement. Avant Healthcare Professionals, it turns out, is part of Jackson Healthcare, as in Rick Jackson, who just days before the settlement won the Georgia Republican gubernatorial primary.
If this news had come out before the primary, it’s hard to tell how Jackson would have fared. Maybe Republican primary voters would have punished him because his company lured people here from abroad. Or maybe they would have rewarded him because it subsequently mistreated them.
INVESTIGATION INCEPTION: The government is investigating the government for investigating the guy in charge of the government for crimes against the government. Did you get that? Reuters spells it out in more detail:
The U.S. Justice Department has requested to interview FBI officials who were involved in the 2022 search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida as part of a wide-ranging probe examining past investigations of the president, four sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
The requests came from investigators working with Joe diGenova, a Trump ally who began overseeing the Florida-based investigation earlier this year. The investigation has been seeking to establish that Trump was the victim of a criminal conspiracy against his rights.
A refresher: The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago because Trump had illegally stashed troves of extremely highly classified documents there, including some related to nuclear secrets. At various points, he discussed some of these documents with people who had no business knowing about them in places where discussions about such things had no place being held. When the government asked for the documents back, Trump went to extreme lengths to lie, hide the documents, and avoid returning them. The only reason he’s not in Florence, Colorado is because Judge Aileen Cannon’s sycophancy toward him was second only to Natalie Harp’s.
Can’t wait for the next administration, when the FBI gets to investigate Justice Department officials for investigating FBI officials for investigating Trump.
Cheap Shots
Food for thought in these letters: Who comes off worse, the worshiper or the worshiped?
Dear Mr. Egger,
I’m sorry if I ever wrote a comment in Morning Shots criticizing you or Bill. I never want to give you anything other than praise and adoration. Also, I’m sorry for going through your garbage, and I’m not mad that you called the police. I want to be a better person. I have to sign off now, as it will soon be count time here in the D.C. Central Detention Facility.
With all my heart,
Justin
“The very model of a modern MAGA senator”. 🤣🤣🤣
Gilbert and Sullivan would be so proud.