Your New Senator Is a Total Lightweight. She’s Perfect.
The Bulwark · C · trust 44/100
Darline Graham is the very model of a modern MAGA senator.
Andrew Egger , Benjamin Parker , and Jim Swift August 21 Upgrade to listen 13 minutes 796 402 67 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.
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Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., attends the Senate Judiciary Committee mark up on the nomination of Todd Blanche to be attorney general, in Hart building on Tuesday, August 4, 2026. ( Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) 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.
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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.
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