Lindsey Graham Is Losing It, Starts Yelling at a Poster

Debate over the $95 billion foreign aid bill in the Senate reached the prime minister of Poland. Well, sort of.

On Monday night, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham lit into a poster of a tweet by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk castigating Republican senators for voting against giving aid to Ukraine. (Just a few hours after this meltdown, Graham would join 25 other members of his party in voting against the aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.)

Graham seemed to take particular offense at Tusk’s invocation of Ronald Reagan, who, according to the prime minister, “must be turning in his grave” at his party’s turning a blind eye to Russian aggression. “Shame on you,” tweeted Tusk.

Addressing (and gesticulating at) the poster directly, Graham admonished Tusk’s Twitter avatar for suggesting that Republican senators had abandoned Reagan’s legacy.

“To the prime minister of Poland, if Ronald Reagan were alive today, we wouldn’t have this broken border.… How would you feel if seven million people came in illegally into Poland? Would you have this attitude: We’ve got to put Ukraine ahead of Poland?”

Graham has been supportive of military aid to Ukraine in the past. As recently as September, he called it a “good investment.” But he has recently changed his tune, parroting Donald Trump’s talking points that any aid to Ukraine should instead be a loan. Graham also seems more interested in attacking Democrats over the border, even after killing a draconian bipartisan “border deal” last week.

Adhering to a rapidly disintegrating GOP party line of theoretical support for Ukraine, Graham assured his piece of cardboard that he “[wants] to help Ukraine … and make a stronger NATO,” but claimed that before he could support an ally facing invasion, he needed to get a bill bundling aid to Ukraine with border security provisions—presumably a different bill from the one already rejected by Graham and his colleagues—through the House of Representatives.

The $95 billion aid bill eventually passed without Graham’s support, but it faces resistance from House Republicans. In the meantime, Graham claims he “could care less what” Tusk thinks about him. His red-faced poster routine suggests otherwise.