Flailing Fox & Friends hosts struggled to keep President Donald Trump on message as he rambled during what was supposed to be a tribute to his late ally, Senator Lindsey Graham.
The South Carolina lawmaker died at the age of 71 on Saturday evening. Trump, 80, called into the softball show on Monday morning to pay further homage to Graham before quickly veering off topic.
After calling him a “nice guy,” bigging up his political chops and jesting about his golf game, Trump said Graham was a big supporter of the SAVE America Act, then began ranting about all manner of things, including terminating the filibuster, voter ID, Spencer Pratt, and California gubernatorial hopeful Steve Hilton.
“He was starting to say, ‘Terminate the filibuster.’ Otherwise we’re going to have, you know, these continued ridiculous, crazy Trump derange... The Trump derange... These people suffer from a very fine disease known as Trump derangement syndrome. And he was seeing that,” he yacked, sounding slightly slurred.
Lawrence Jones pressed hard to get Trump back on topic, but he resisted. “Mr. President, Mr. President...” he implored, as Trump ranted on.
“He was really coming a long way on the terminating the filibuster, which is the single smartest thing we could do,” he said, ignoring Jones’s pleas.
Trump had said earlier in his phone call that Graham had phoned him after his trip to Ukraine last week. Jones tried to ask whether he noticed anything different about the senator during the call, but he wasn’t finished with his freewheeling point, which, at this juncture, was touching on the viability of mail-in ballots.
“Mr. President, real quickly, did you notice anything different from Lindsay?” Jones demanded, speaking directly over Trump. The president ignored it. “So these, these elections are very dishonest,” he instead offered, sticking with his point on ballots.
Finally, co-host Griff Jenkins managed to steer the topic back to Graham. Trump referenced previous flash points, including Graham’s derision after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots in 2021, giving him a friendship score of “99 out of 100″ because of this dissent. “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough,” he had said.
Trump claimed during the Fox News segment that Graham called him 40 minutes after those 2021 comments, saying he had a change of heart. “I had nothing to do with that, by the way, just so you understand,” Trump assured the hosts.
Trump’s comments on Graham’s golf game weren’t so glowing. “He was a nice man. He was a great guy. Loved playing golf, loved being outside. He’d play golf with people, and you just liked him. It wasn’t that he was a great striker of the ball. He wasn’t exactly a perfect... He wasn’t Jack Nicklaus. He was not Tiger [Woods]. But he was... he loved it. And he had fun, you know? He was a man who had a lot of fun. He had fun with politics, but he was really good at it.”
