The Rookie

Darline Graham—appointed to the United States Senate last month to fill the seat of her late brother, Lindsey, and now campaigning to keep it—has spent the past week demonstrating that the only qualification she possesses is a surname and a presidential endorsement. Everything else, it seems, is irrelevant.

Let’s begin with the debate. When asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea constitute national security issues for the United States, Graham responded with the kind of refreshing candor regarding her unpreparedness for the job that would get you fired from Wendy’s, let alone a Senate campaign. “National security is not my thing,” she explained, adding that she is “not a polished politician” and “not an expert on national security.”

This is the foreign policy equivalent of applying to be a surgeon and announcing that blood isn’t really your thing. One half-expects her to follow up by noting that legislation also isn’t her thing, and that the Senate chamber gives her mild vertigo.

But Graham was not done. In what can only be described as a bold reimagining of American demographics, she informed the debate audience that South Carolina contains “50 million people.”

The actual population is 5.6 million, which means Graham overshot by a factor of nearly nine. To put this in perspective, there are only about 335 million people in the entire United States. In Graham’s South Carolina, the state would comprise roughly fifteen percent of the national population, making it larger than Texas and Florida combined. This is not a gaffe; this is a hallucination. When your estimate of your own state’s population is off by 44 million souls, one wonders what other figures you might be fuzzy on: the national debt, perhaps, or the number of branches of government (it’s three, Darline).

Her opponent, Ralph Norman, has run as a “tested conservative,” which in this context means he has at least heard of Taiwan and owns a map.

Rep. Nancy Mace, no stranger to her own theatrical moments, compared Graham’s debate performance to “applying to be a lifeguard and saying water isn’t your thing.” It is a rare day when Nancy Mace is the voice of measured understatement.

But none of this matters, because Donald Trump has arrived to explain that actually, ignorance is honesty. Graham wasn’t unprepared, you see; she was “being honest.” She is “into the price of groceries, the price of beef,” and that, apparently, is sufficient qualification for a seat in the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Putting aside for a moment the irony of Donald Trump praising the virtues of honesty, he is essentially reducing the United States Senate to a neighborhood Facebook group where expertise is suspect and knowing the cost of ground beef is a substitute for understanding the foundational tenets of our foreign policy. Graham herself has leaned into the anti-credentials pitch, declaring that her lack of political experience is an asset and comparing herself to Trump, who “had never served in an elected office before.” It’s the political equivalent of a flight school applicant invoking Amelia Earhart’s disappearance as proof that experience is overrated.

Graham has taken the courageous stance of “fully trusting” Trump on the Iran war, which is convenient because it absolves her of having to learn what the Iran war actually is.

So here is where we stand: a United States senator who does not know her state’s population, who does not consider national security her “thing,” and who believes that honesty is an acceptable substitute for competence, is quite possibly going to be elected by the people of South Carolina because her brother was delightfully obsequious and sufficiently servile to Dear Leader.