Nancy Mace went on CNN to beg President Trump to stop taking counsel on the Iran war from Sen. Lindsey Graham.
“I want President Trump to take Lindsey Graham out of the Situation Room,” Mace told Laura Coates on her eponymous show on Wednesday evening, saying the South Carolina senator “brags” about advising Trump on the conflict.
Graham has led a war hawk GOP faction since the conflict began on Feb. 28. Mace, the North Carolina congresswoman, has continually defied Trump by speaking out against “Operation Epic Fury.”
Indeed, she stormed out of a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday before her CNN appearance. “Just walked out of a House Armed Services briefing on Iran. Let me repeat: I will not support troops on the ground in Iran, even more so after this briefing,” she wrote on X after her dramatic exit.
She aired the same grievances on Laura Coates Live, targeting much of her ire at Graham, who served as an Air Force lawyer for six and a half years in the 1980s. Graham—whose long-running push for a hard line against Tehran prompted a colleague to dub him a “war pimp”—has been Trump’s point man on the conflict, but Mace wants the president to ignore his counsel going forward.
Mace, the first ever female graduate from The Citadel, a military academy in her home state, said she thinks Trump has “executed this war perfectly so far,” but reserved contempt for what she called the “Washington war machine.”
“Lindsey Graham?” Coates asked, prompting a candid rebuke from Mace towards her 70-year-old GOP colleague.
“I take that as Senator Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina. I take that as the military industrial complex,” she said. “I take that as a guy that is going back to my home state of South Carolina telling mothers and fathers to send their children into war to take an island over oil. And I am vehemently opposed to that.”
At the beginning of the conflict, Graham said boots on the ground were “not necessary.” He has since changed his tone, urging Trump to send troops to the strategically important Kharg Island.
Asked to explain her opposition, Mace said she wants Trump to eject the senator from the Situation Room. Coates then asked if Graham had been advising the president on the conflict.
“He brags about it,” she said. “I don’t think Lindsey Graham, for all of that hubris, has thought through the consequences of us taking Kharg Island.”
She warned that he has not considered a response from militant groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah.
“I want us to declare victory because we’ve won, President Trump has won, and now it’s time to show us the American people, what is the exit strategy?” Mace said. “Because the men and women that we send to war deserve an answer to how does this end.”
Graham has been contacted by the Daily Beast for a response.
