Senate hawk Lindsey Graham is pushing Donald Trump to pick a fight with yet another country.
Not content with the president’s existing foreign entanglements—including his war on Iran, seizure of Venezuela’s oil industry, and blockade of Cuba—Graham now wants him to target NATO ally Spain.
During a Monday night interview on Hannity, the South Carolina senator responded to the news that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had told Trump that Spain would not be party to the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.
After Spain denied the U.S. use of its airbases in support of strikes on Iran, Trump said, “We could use their base if we want, we could just fly in and use it, nobody’s going to tell us not to use it.” This prompted Sánchez to offer a simple retort: “No to war.”
The Spanish leader said his country would “not be complicit in something that is bad for the world – and that is also contrary to our values and interests – simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.”
Incensed, Graham told Fox News’ Sean Hannity, “Spain, you won’t let us use your airbases—our airbases in your country. I am encouraging President Donald Trump to move all of our bases out of Spain.”
“Given Article 5 commitment under NATO,” Graham continued, referring to the clause that states that an attack against one NATO member is an attack against all, “we should not have airbases in a country that won’t let us use them.”
“To our friends in Spain, you have lost your way. I don’t want to do business with you anymore. I want our airbases out of Spain and into a country that will let us use them.”
Not content with trying to dictate the president’s foreign policy and alienate allies, Graham also devoted much of his interview with Hannity to praising Israel, offering a message “to all the antisemites, all the isolationists” in which he said, “I’m not with you, I’m with Israel. I will be with Israel until my dying day. They’re the best ally we could hope for.”
At the end of the interview, Graham told Hannity, “God bless Israel. We should move all our stuff to Israel.”
His bizarre interview immediately sparked backlash from more isolationist conservatives, including former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who just one day ago was urging people to keep Graham out of Trump’s orbit.
“When did Lindsay Graham become our president?” Kelly asked on X, misspelling the senator’s first name. “In the past 24 hours he’s threatened Lebanon, Cuba, the Saudis, the wider Arab region and now - checks notes - Spain.”
In another post, Kelly wrote, “Let’s get real. The problem with Lindsay Graham isn’t (just) that he’s a homicidal maniac, it’s that Trump likes and is listening to him, and Trump’s favorite channel is parading him around like a Hefner bunny in stockings on every show.”
Graham, whose thirst for attacking Iran prompted one colleague to dub him a “war pimp,” has bragged about having worked to convince the president to go to war with the Middle Eastern nation.
“We were thinking about this early, early on about how Iran is a spoiler for expanding the Abraham Accords and stability in the Mideast,” Graham told Politico. “I told him before he took office … if you can collapse this terrorist regime, that’s Berlin Wall stuff.”
Speaking to Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on the weekend, Graham boasted about the destruction the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes have wrought on Iran, telling her, “This regime is on death row now. It is going to be on its knees. It’s going to fall, and when it falls, we’re going to have peace like no other time….you can’t do it by talking.”
In the same interview, he also declared, “The liberation of Cuba is upon us,” adding, “It’s just a matter of time now.”
“We’re marching through the world. We’re cleaning out the bad guys. We’re going to have relationships with new people that will make us prosperous and safe.”
