Something is seriously wrong with Lindsey Graham

I know, I know. It's not exactly news that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-Donald Trump's Colon) is a world-renowned suck-up. But there are limits, even to sucking up, and Graham continues to explore the spaces beyond those limits like he's the Lewis & Clark of sucking up.

You may or may not have heard that convicted felon and seditionist answered an extremely stupid press question asking him who he'd like to see become the next pope by blurting out that Actually, he thinks the best next pope would be Donald Trump. You might have heard about that incident because it was such a pitch-perfect example of The Criminal freely blurting out whatever haunted curiosities are currently rattling around inside his dementia-addled head; you may not have heard about it because it's largely been ignored by a media that whitewashes each of these moments through editorial filters that insist that Trump is not, in fact, a delusional traitor now functionally incapable of holding the office he holds but instead is somehow Not That.

Lindsey Graham, unfortunately, did hear of it, and immediately rushed in to do whatever the monkeypox batboy hell this is.

I was excited to hear that President Trump is open to the idea of being the next Pope. This would truly be a dark horse candidate, but I would ask the papal conclave and Catholic faithful to keep an open mind about this possibility!

The first Pope-U.S. President combination has many upsides. Watching for white smoke.... Trump MMXXVIII!

Okay. So the first thing to keep in mind about this new statement from Graham is that he, ahem, truly did not need to say it. There was no public clamor over Trump's weird narcissistic burp; there was no roaring debate over the merits of making Donald Convicted Felon Adjudicated Rapist Child Predator the next pope that Graham might have felt obligated to weigh in on. Graham chose to issue his endorsement of the idea despite having the far better option, Shutting His Damn Piehole For Five Minutes, hanging in front of him in plain view.

He could not only have just said nothing; he could have taken the more customary route whenever a supposedly "serious" conservative is confronted with Trump once again saying something irredeemably stupid: deflection. Here are just some of the things Lindsey Graham could have done instead of rushing in to hump Dear Leader's leg:

• Chewed his fingernails

• Googled the possible side effects of fingernail chewing

• Taken a quick but invigorating nap

• Written a brief fan fiction story in which the Butter Cow from that one state fair comes to life and fights crime

• Proposed the development of a new American fighter jet made exclusively from vitamin D

These are only a handful of ideas; the real point here is that sitting senator Lindsey Graham could have done literally anything other than praising the batshit idea of making Donald Trump the combination U.S. President and Pope merely because Trump, who has spent the last few months hot-gluing gold-painted fripperies to Oval Office walls in an attempt to quite literally make himself the center of a new Gilded Age, briefly farted the idea into being.

No, this is a level of suckuppery not previously before seen. This is a concentration of suckuppery that's usually kept under strict lock and key at Los Alamos, with everyone in the research center fully aware that if someone so much as taps this thing too hard the whole region will become an uninhabitable wasteland of suck for a hundred generations to come.

Why stop with the idea of proclaiming Donald Trump, world-renowned shitheel and sex predator, an official decider of what God Himself is currently thinking? If we're now at the stage of Dear Leader worship where Dear Leader is considered a holy vessel, then there's clearly no award or position that the man isn't qualified for.

Introducing President Donald Trump, who has just won the Miss Universe pageant because he said so.

Kneel before President Donald Trump, who has just won every Oscar and Emmy to ever exist, including the ones for technical jobs he never once knew existed before this moment.

All hail President Donald Trump, just awarded Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Look at his fine coat; his alert eyes; his always-forward posture.

We are precariously close to sycophant Lindsey and at least 150 House Republicans proclaiming Donald to be the second coming of Jesus, and the only reason it hasn't happened already may be because they need to keep something in their back pocket for when Dear Leader has reduced the national economy to rubble and Americans with pitchforks begin closing in on them.

We could talk about all of the individual ways that "What if we make Donald Trump the pope" is legitimately insane, but there is no need to. All of it is obvious. What is not so obvious, however, is the mechanism by which Lindsey Graham transformed from his previous position as Washington's simpering Dignity Remora into whatever this newest incarnation is supposed to be.

And my own theory, which is as good as anyone's and twice as good as anyone whose actual job it has been to figure things like this out, is that he broke. The man flat-out broke.

Graham has long existed as an aforementioned Dignity Remora. By himself he is whiny, petulant, and devoid of principles, but the man has been able to survive in Washington by attaching himself to people with more dignity than him, courting their friendship, adopting their own pet issues as his own, and becoming the Mini-Me version of his chosen target. It was Sen. John McCain for a very long time—so long, in fact, that people begin to forget that it was all an act to Lindsey and were genuinely surprised when the man ditched McCain's corpse even before it was cold in order to latch himself to the anti-McCain, Donald Damn Trump.

Graham did his loyal best to retool his personality and supposed beliefs into the half-assed, deeply embarrassing versions required in order to ingratiate himself to The Criminal, and between that and golf managed to pull it off for a long time.

But right now, who is Lindsey Graham to Trump? He's nobody, that's who. He's just another face in a crowd of suck-ups who have all learned, hundreds of hundreds of them, how to suck up to The Criminal every bit as well as Lindsey ever could; sucking up to a narcissist is so pathetically easy that a howler monkey could pull it off. Trump doesn't need Linsey to make him feel good. Trump spends his every waking moment in a pornographic soup of sycophancy, a non-stop orgy of people fellating his supposed brilliance from the time he gets up to the time he dozes off.

In the building. Outside the building. On television. In the newspapers. Billionaires with wealth that makes his own look trivial flock to the White House to simper and offer praise. Cabinet meetings exist solely so that each official can announce their deepened love and respect for Dear Leader. And, of course, the man's own brain is pudding, and any praise that his unconscious mind thinks he may have lost out on is simply fabricated and declared real.

Lindsey Graham is nothing in this environment. He is a dirty sock on the floor, at best. He is of no more or less significance than the servers standing behind the Mar-a-Lago buffet tables.

Look at Elon Musk. Elon Musk has achieved a level of sycophancy that science had previously thought impossible; if Lindsey is a remora, Musk would be a cymothoa exigua, a parasitic louse that bites off a fish's tongue and attaches itself in the tongue's place, feeding off its host's blood and announcing new administration policies on an ad-hoc basis.

Musk has no real day job, and can therefore attach himself to Trump all day, every day. He moved into Mar-a-Lago—quite literally. He moved into the Secretary of War Suite of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House, and installed a gaming PC there, presumably so that he could putter away the hours in which Trump was asleep but Musk was still vibrating and bug-eyed.

When Musk appears at cabinet meetings, he is never without a Trump-praising hat; when cabinet members found themselves presented with their own pro-Trump hats at their latest meeting, Musk topped them by putting on two.

Listen to this, if you dare. Lindsey Graham has nothing on this.

Linsey Graham could present himself to Trump buck-naked, greased up, and holding a bar of solid gold and it would barely make it into the top half-dozen moments of sycophancy Donald had been presented with that day.

Lindsey Graham has nothing he can use to remain attached to Trump—and it's killing him.

That, I think, is the reason the Senate's most accomplished bootlicker jumped up to say that Yes, Donald Fucking Trump really ought to be considered in the deliberations to elect the next pope. It is the reason Lindsey, grasping wildly, omitted all the horrors such a scenario would entail to weakly offer up a theory that there would be "upsides" to having a combination President-Pope, by which he might have meant that it would be more efficient on office supplies or he might have meant "because Vatican City has so much shit to steal and Donald could send DOGE and Melania in to pry all of it loose."

When you are looking to be the creepiest stalker of a person who is surrounded by creepy stalkers who are much richer than you, have far more free time than you, and who provably have no sense of shame whatsoever, you're going to have to dig deep to get that senpai to notice you.

So sure, pipe up to support Donald Trump's idea that maybe he'd like to become the new pope. Put yourself out there with that.

But you're still selling Trump short, Linnie. Are you suggesting that Donald Trump could not be crowned Best in Show at Westminster?

Because Elon Musk's telling him he definitely could, if he wanted it.