South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has been an instrumental part of carrying out President Trump's agenda the past four years--so much so that it's easy to forget that he was once among the President's most ardent critics.
But amidst the drama of a stunning GOP defeat in the Georgia run-offs and a coup attempt by violent pro-Trump rioters at the US Capitol, Twitter unearthed a stunning reminder.
An all too prescient tweet of Graham's from 2016, warning of the danger Trump posed, resurfaced Tuesday.
It has since been retweeted again and again.
In the tweet, which Graham originally posted in May of 2016 just over three weeks before Trump secured the Republican nomination, Graham sounded an alarm to his fellow party members.
"If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it."
The tweet began to circulate again Tuesday night as the returns from Georgia's Senate runoff began to come in.
After losing the presidency in November, the Georgia runoffs were the GOP's last stand to hold onto any kind of power in 2021. As Republican Senate candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler's defeats gradually became more clear and the collapse of the GOP's power more certain, Graham's tweet suddenly seemed even more timely.
And then came the events of what Senator Chuck Schumer has called a new "day that will live in infamy" in American history.
As Trump's most die-hard GOP supporters in the House and Senate attempted to overturn, or at least delay, the certification of Joe Biden's Electoral College victory today, violent pro-Trump rioters staged a coup attempt in Washington. Infiltrating the Capitol and running amok through the halls of Congress, the rioters sent members of the Senate and House into hiding for nearly five hours as gunfire was exchanged in the halls. One rioter was killed.
And as the violence unfolded, the President, in whose name the insurrection was committed, posted a video to Twitter that praised the rioters in the same breath as he urged them not to resort to violence.
It's hard to think of a more apt symbol of what Graham once warned about, as well as the profound threat to democracy his and his colleagues' hypocrisy has posed.
And people on Twitter simply can't stop talking about it.
Today's events have brought a marked change to Senator Graham's pro-Trump tune.
In a series of tweets, he condemned today's violence and urged his colleagues in Congress to quickly complete the work of certifying Joe Biden's electoral victory once Congress came back in session this evening.
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