President Donald Trump claimed the late South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham almost immediately apologized for making a public break with him in the hours after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
During a Monday phone interview with Fox & Friends, Trump praised Graham, who died late Saturday, for remaining loyal to him, giving a “99 instead of 100” with the sole exception of “one bad moment” — a viral speech delivered in the Senate chamber while debating whether to reject Arizona’s 2020 electoral votes for Joe Biden.
“Now he had one bad moment, and that was you know on the January 6 thing … then he called me like about 40 minutes later, and he said, ‘Did I really say that? I can’t believe it,’ and he took it back … so I give him a 99 instead of a 100,” Trump said.
The president was referring to remarks Graham had made on the Senate floor after the upper chamber reconvened in the late hours of January 6, 2021, after law enforcement and National Guard soldiers cleared the Capitol complex of a pro-Trump mob who had stormed the building to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.
Graham, who had become a staunch ally of the president despite having run against him four years earlier, became emotional as he recalled how he and Trump “have had a hell of a journey” and called him “a consequential president.”
“But today, the first thing you will see, all I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough,” he said before adding moments later that Biden and then-California senator Kamala Harris had been “lawfully elected.”
Now, with Graham’s passing, Trump has claimed that the late senator almost immediately called him to walk it back.
“That was his only bad moment. He said, ‘I wish I never said it,’ but about 45 minutes later, he called. He said: ‘I made a big mistake,’” the president claimed.
No groups have stepped forward to support the president’s assertion that Graham called him in the moments after his emotional Senate floor speech. White House phone logs obtained by the House January 6 select committee do not show any contact between Trump and Graham that day.
Both the Senate and House remained in joint session to count electoral votes until nearly 4 a.m. on January 7, 2021.
But Graham’s break with Trump would only last for so long.
Within days, he was back in the fold after being harassed and verbally abused by a group of the president’s supporters as he walked through Washington National Airport for a flight home to South Carolina.
