Former President Trump, for whatever reason, decided to let South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham open for his Saturday rally at which tens of thousands of people showed up. Graham was brutally booed when he appeared on stage, likely because of his well-known neocon leanings.
In fact, not only did the crowd boo Graham, it did so without respite for the entirety of his six-minute speech, not letting up for as long as the neocon was on stage. Check out that brutal booing here:
Lindsey Graham was booed for six minutes straight while delivering a speech to a Trump audience.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 1, 2023
The caption on another video noted that Graham has tried to position himself as a Trump ally but is much-disliked by more conservative voters, even in his home state of South Carolina:
Nonstop boos for 4+ minutes now for @LindseyGrahamSC, one of Trump’s top Senate allies who won his 2020 reelect by 10+ points – but isn’t as popular in this very conservative part of SC as some other areas. pic.twitter.com/abfowRmj7k
— Meg Kinnard (@MegKinnardAP) July 1, 2023
When he appeared on the stage, Sen. Graham first waited about a full minute for the crowd to quiet down and stop booing him. Predictably, the booing did not stop. Rather, the crowd kept at it and so Sen. Graham tried begging the crowd to stop, saying, “Just calm down for a second.”
That didn’t work either, so he tried switching tactics. Doing so, Sen. Graham then tried to get the crowd to stop booing by warning about what the Democrats might be up to and saying that the solution is unity and getting people who disagree to talk to each other. In his words: “Let me tell you how you win an election, folks. You get people together that don’t agree all of the time to agree on the most important things. My hope is we can bring this party together ’cause he’s gonna be our nominee,” he continued. “He will be the nominee of the Republican Party, and let me tell you what’s at stake. If they win in 2024, they’re gonna pack the Supreme Court. So we need to get off our butts and make sure Donald Trump wins. If they win in 2024 … Puerto Rico and D.C. will be states. Four Democrats for the rest of our lifetime. They’ll abolish the electoral college, they will turn this nation upside down.”
Former President Trump, despite having been the one that invited Sen. Graham, decided to go the way the wind was blowing and mock Graham to his face later during the rally. Pointing at Sen. Graham, he said, “Now, you know, you can make mistakes on occasion. Even Lindsey down here, Senator Lindsey Graham, we love Senator Graham.” Continuing, Trump said, “We’re gonna, we’re gonna love him. We’re gonna love him. I know, it’s half and half.” His saying, “half and half” presumably meant half love and half hate.
As the conservative crowd kept booing, Trump turned up the dial on the roasting, saying that Graham is a liberal who can garner liberal votes and that’s the reason he is kept around, joking, “But when I need some of those liberal votes, he’s always there to help me get them, okay? We got some pretty liberal people. But he’s good. He’s good. We know the good ones. We know the bad ones, too. We got some real bad ones. But even he makes mistakes on occasion.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
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