Lindsey Graham: ‘To my friends in Nebraska, that one electoral vote could be the difference’ - POLITICO

By David Cohen. 09/22/2024 04:23 PM EDT. Updated: 09/22/2024 11:13 PM EDT

  • Electoral Vote Change: Sen. Lindsey Graham is advocating for Nebraska to change its electoral vote system from a district-based allocation to a winner-take-all system.
  • Reason for Change: Graham argues that this change could prevent Kamala Harris from becoming president, which he believes would be detrimental.
  • Historical Context: Nebraska and Maine are the only states with a district-based electoral vote system. Nebraska adopted this system in 1992.
  • Political Reactions: The proposal has faced opposition, including a failed attempt to change the system in April, and criticism from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats.

“To my friends in Nebraska, that one electoral vote could be the difference between [Kamala] Harris being president and not, and she’s a disaster for Nebraska and the world1. I think Nebraska has been talking about this for years. It is a very close election. Sixty-three days ago, Chuck Schumer led a coup to overthrow Joe Biden, and he’s telling me or any other Republican what we should be doing? If they change the law in Nebraska, it won’t be on the phone in the middle of the night. It will be through a Democratic process,” Graham (T-SC) told host Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.

Welker responded: “I hear you’re calling it a coup. Of course, Democrats have the right to change who’s at the top of the ticket.”

Graham pushed back: “So does Nebraska.”

@RalphHightower: Graham, keep your God-damned fucking business out of Nebraska. Trump is in cognitive decline. He doesn’t have the stamina to campaign. Several psychiatrists through examining videos, have said that he meets the criteria of malignant narcissism2. He’s a loose cannon.

The essence – and biggest danger – of malignant narcissism is that it keeps growing, like malignant cancer. Fromm wrote: “It is a madness that tends to grow in the lifetime of the afflicted person. The more he tries to be a god, the more he isolates himself from the human race; this isolation makes him more frightened, everybody becomes his enemy, and in order to stand the resulting fright he has to increase his power, his ruthlessness, and his narcissism.”

  1. @RalphHightower: It’ll be a God-damned fucking disaster if Trump gets another four years. He admires dictators, Putin, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Putin is former KGB; he knows that flattery is key to controlling Trump. As a private citizen, Trump had at least seven personal phone calls with Putin, which in an earlier post may violate the Logan Act. Trump wishes that he had Hitler’s generals who were subservient to Hitler. Whereas the US armed forces uphold the Constitution. ↩

  2. Malignant Narcissism: Does the President Really Have It? / Psychology Today.
    Posted March 12, 2019
    Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
    Erich Fromm was a psychiatrist in the United States who immigrated from Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. He was a world leader in many aspects of mental health and diagnosis. In his 1964 book, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil, Fromm used this term for the first time when he identified the pathology of narcissism as having two types, “benign narcissism” and “malignant narcissism.”
    – benign narcissism focuses on pride in one’s work, one’s effort. In the process of achieving something, the person has to stay in touch with the reality around the task in order to accomplish it. “The energy which propels the work is, to a large extent, of a narcissistic nature, but the very fact that the work itself makes it necessary to be related to reality, constantly curbs the narcissism and keeps it within bounds. This mechanism may explain why we find so many narcissistic people who are at the same time highly creative.”
    – malignant narcissism. This is not about achievement, but rather something the person thinks they inherently have that’s special, “for instance, his body, his looks, his health, his wealth, etc. … Malignant narcissism, thus, is not self-limiting.”4 Fromm gives examples of many historical figures who had this type: ↩