Caligula’s Horse

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

All you need to know about the state of the GOP is that one of the candidates in last night’s South Carolina Senate primary runoff urged the Trump White House to declare “marshall law” during the coup plot of 2021—and that candidate was the comparatively responsible choice on the ballot.

 

The “marshall law” enthusiast was Rep. Ralph Norman. When asked a year later whether he regretted anything about his call for a fascist autogolpe in the United States, he admitted that he did. He regretted misspelling “martial.”

 

Normally a cretin like that would be a sure thing to receive the president’s endorsement, if not a payout from whatever corrupt new scheme is being cooked up in the West Wing to remunerate the heroic patriots of the failed putsch. But Norman forfeited that opportunity in 2023 when he committed an unforgivable act of disloyalty, endorsing South Carolina’s own Nikki Haley for president over Donald Trump.

 

On Tuesday, Trump had his revenge. His preferred candidate, Sen. Darline Graham, eked out a 5-point win over Norman in the race to replace her late brother, Lindsey, as the Republican nominee for Senate this fall.

 

Darline Graham seems like a nice person and her work as an advocate for the disabled is commendable, but no healthy polity would deem her fit to serve in the Senate. At a debate last week with Norman, she answered a question about Taiwan by flatly confessing that she’s “not that informed on national security.” (So much for carrying on Lindsey’s legacy.) One report from the campaign trail alleged that an aide “had been mouthing answers while standing behind her during events and press conferences.”

 

And a video clip of an interview during an event seemed to capture one of her staffers warning the reporter to ask “nothing too difficult here.”

 

Ignorance is preferable to malevolence, so I’d still choose her over Norman if there were reason to think she would show more civic fortitude than he did five years ago. There isn’t.

 

Desperate to ingratiate herself with Trump’s supporters before the runoff, Graham pledged to support ending the Senate filibuster in order to pass the president’s beloved voting reform bill, the SAVE America Act. (Again, so much for carrying on Lindsey’s legacy.) It was the least she could do to repay him: Trump spent an enormous amount of political capital on her candidacy, first endorsing her, then holding a rally in South Carolina last week on her behalf, and even spending close to $1 million via his super PAC to help her defeat Norman.

 

Virtually every Republican in the Senate owes their seat to the president to some degree, as most survive their primaries only at his sufferance. But no one will owe him more than Darline Graham will. In the span of six weeks, he took the plainly unqualified sister of a politician disdained by much of his own base and propelled her to a near-lock on a full six-year Senate term by rallying that same base behind her. If he attempts another coup this fall to reverse an electoral defeat, it’s unthinkable that she’ll react meaningfully differently from how Norman did in 2021.

 

And Trump knows it. Asked last week about her excruciating debate answer on Taiwan, he reassured Republican voters that “she’s going to do what the military wants, and really what the president wants.” When he’s right, he’s right.

 

Under the circumstances, handing Darline Graham a Senate seat is tantamount to handing Trump himself a Senate seat. It’s akin to Caligula installing his horse in the chamber, this time with the people’s consent. Which, as others have noted, makes last night’s result feel like a logical outcome for the modern GOP.

 

Mistakes were made.

 

I’m embarrassed that I thought Graham might lose this runoff. Go figure that the one time I assume Republican voters might take politics semi-seriously, I get burned.

 

One reason for my skepticism was the understandable doubt many felt about her ideological sympathies. After Trump endorsed her for a full term last month, one GOP official in South Carolina told Politico of local Republicans, “95 percent are saying, ‘What the hell are we doing here? We don’t know how she votes. We don’t know what she believes.’” Her debate gaffe would only amplify that anxiety, I thought.

 

It wasn’t just that she had no opinion on Taiwan, it’s that she didn’t know enough to even artfully BS her way through a non-answer. Something similar occurred during her victory speech last night when she attacked the Democrat on the ballot this fall for wanting government-run healthcare, boasting that her own parents sucked it up and went to work when they got sick.

 

And … both died of illnesses during her childhood, Graham then inexplicably reminded the crowd.

 

In a state as red as South Carolina, with two candidates on the ballot who would vote with Trump 100 percent of the time in the Senate, I thought Republicans might prefer a more surefooted, known quantity like Norman to a Trump-backed lightweight. Wrong.

 

My other reason for doubting Graham was the president’s growing political weakness. He’s been in a slump lately with his endorsements, and no wonder: As the Iran fiasco drags on and gas prices hover north of $4 per gallon, even some Republicans are fed up. Numerous polls lately have shown Trump’s support falling within the GOP, with one detecting a drop in “strong” support from 68 percent when he took office to 48 percent now.

 

In fact, when the head of the party is toting as much baggage as Trump is, the candidates in a runoff like South Carolina’s might reasonably hope not to receive his endorsement. Think back to 2010, amid the public backlash to Obamacare, when Barack Obama’s support in several key Democratic primaries proved notably unpersuasive. By fall of that year, many Democrats had all but disclaimed his endorsement. The first rule of politics: When voters are down on someone, keep your distance.

 

Sixteen years later, the current president was arguably in a worse position than Obama—not just deeply unpopular but a lame duck, and saddled with an endorsee of his own choosing in whom no one had much confidence. The moment seemed ripe for South Carolina primary voters to unofficially usher in the GOP’s post-Trump era by dealing him, and Darline Graham, a stinging defeat in the state that launched him toward the Republican nomination in 2016. Wrong again.

 

Her victory is objectively insane. Even so, I should have known better than to doubt it.

 

Self-determination.

 

For all the messianism that surrounded Obama during his first run for president, the Democrats of 2010 were still a recognizably normal political party.

 

It didn’t repose all power in the executive, as influential figures like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might have reminded you. And the party’s agenda wasn’t set by presidential whim. The debate over what eventually became Obamacare was a live one at the grassroots level during the 2008 primaries and continued with a give-and-take in Congress through 2009 and early 2010.

 

There was nothing during the Obama era equivalent to, say, the White House suddenly declaring a destructive, out-of-left-field trade war on Canada that practically no one supports. And, despite Obama’s popularity with the base, there was no unstated ethic among Democrats that he should be entitled to monetize the power of his office by peddling influence to enrich himself in a hundred different ways.

 

But in an immoral, autocratic movement like the postliberal GOP, Trump is the alpha and the omega. Power is reposed in the executive, and policy is set by whim. And so Republican voters will inevitably run headfirst into this question: What does it matter who represents them in the Senate? If Trump prefers a particular candidate, qualified or not, why shouldn’t he have them?

 

Andrew Egger made that point in considering Graham’s candidacy last week for The Bulwark. “Nothing real ever happens in the ossified, deadlocked Senate, to whose legislating and foreign-policy-setting powers President Trump has helped himself in ever greater amounts,” he wrote. “The job of a GOP senator is to say nice things about the president, vote down Democratic efforts to rein him in, and give him whatever he asks for in a massive reconciliation bill once or twice a year.” To illustrate the point, Egger noted the deafening silence from the Senate’s many Republican hawks about the president gratuitously blowing up our military alliance with South Korea.

 

If supposedly qualified, supposedly serious senators like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton are going to bite their tongues in fear as Trump wrecks the American-led international order, and Pete Hegseth wrecks the Pentagon, and Todd Blanche wrecks the Justice Department, and Scott Bessent wrecks financial markets, in what way is Caligula’s horse not “qualified” or “serious” enough to do their job?

 

Republican voters long ago ceded their power to set their party’s agenda to Trump—and, once again, the president knows it. With the possible exception of immigration, there’s no policy priority about which the right feels so passionately that it won’t default to “whatever Mr. Trump wants.” The result in South Carolina on Tuesday is the logical consequence of that: Most of the GOP base has functionally forfeited its right of self-determination, in this case its right to be represented by capable people in Congress, to its hero.

 

I saw a hot take somewhere last week speculating that Graham’s cringy Taiwan debate gaffe was actually a contrived four-dimensional-chess move to show Republican primary voters how relatable, authentic, and outsider-y she is. I’m skeptical of that, but after watching Sean Hannity defend her by noting that most Americans can’t find Taiwan on a map either, I wouldn’t discount it completely. (One is reminded of the famous Roman Hruska quote about mediocrity.) The joy of being part of the GOP in 2026 is not needing to know anything about anything, as all policy decisions have been entrusted to the wisdom of the president.

 

“I love the poorly educated!” Trump famously declared on the campaign trail in 2016. No wonder.

 

Treating ignorance as not just a virtue but a qualification for elective office is the predictable endgame of populism. It feels appropriate that the unlikely Graham dynasty in South Carolina has ended up there, as the family’s political trajectory perfectly mirrors the political trajectory of the broader conservative movement over the last 10 years. From harsh Trump skepticism circa 2016 to first grudging and then enthusiastic accommodation of Trumpism during the president’s first term to “I dunno, whatever Mr. Trump says” now: Whatever else you might think of them, Lindsey and Darline do fairly represent their Republican constituents.

 

On the ballot.

 

If the first rule of politics is “when voters are down on someone, keep your distance,” we should expect GOPers on the ballot to want the president to keep a very healthy distance from their own races this fall.

 

And they do want that, I’m sure. But according to an Atlantic report published this morning about Trump’s plans for the midterms, they’re not going to get it.

 

The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks.

 

…

 

Another person told us that because Trump will inevitably be part of voters’ considerations, highlighting his achievements makes sense. “I think everybody does understand that the president and his agenda are on the ballot to some degree,” another person told us.

 

That’s not all. The unusual two-day midterm convention the GOP is staging next month will feature appearances by the president on both nights, the second of which will see him deliver the keynote address. As ever since 2016, for Republicans, there’s no problem that can’t be solved with more Trump.

 

In a normal party, a midterm strategy like the one described by The Atlantic would also be objectively insane. Democratic candidates didn’t want Obama around in the fall of 2010, knowing that associating themselves with a leader toward whom voters felt aggrieved risked making them look callous or “out of touch.” The safe play when you’re saddled with an unpopular president is to focus on your own legislative record and the things you’ve achieved for your constituents while in office. Make your election about you, not him.

 

But in an abnormal autocratic party like the GOP, there’s a certain logic to trying to make all midterm races a referendum on the president. The man himself explained it capably during his rally for Darline Graham last Friday. “The problem that we have is, they say that Trump does great when he’s on the ballot, but when he’s not on the ballot, his people don’t come and they don’t vote for senators, congressmen, and other Republicans,” Trump told the Republican faithful in Myrtle Beach. “So what I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.”

 

This must be the first time in American political history that a guy with a 38 percent approval rating is begging the public to imagine their vote as a thumbs- up or thumbs- down on his performance. But if the big worry for the GOP in this election is getting its own base motivated to turn out—and that’s usually the worry for the in-party before a midterm—then “Trump’s on the ballot” might plausibly be its shrewdest play.

 

After 10 years of conditioning right-wing voters to believe Congress shouldn’t matter (or, really, even exist), Republican strategists won’t convince them to suddenly start caring who represents them in the House and Senate. They It might get them to care about congressional races, though, by framing a Democratic victory as a dire threat to the president’s ability to govern by whim without legislative restraint. In a party whose only principle is “whatever Mr. Trump wants,” the prospect of Mr. Trump not being able to do whatever he wants is a sensible pitch.

 

A faction willing to vote for Caligula’s horse will, by definition, be more excited to turn out for Caligula himself. That’s the GOP’s theory of putting Trump symbolically “on the ballot.” Having built a party of autocratic freaks, it has little choice but to tailor its get-out-the-vote message to the base’s appetites—even if, in doing so, it alienates every non-freak voter in America.

 

However else things shake out in November, thanks to the president’s extraordinary intervention, Darline Graham is a safe bet to be a member of the Senate when it’s seated next year. In a party that now exists to serve one man, it’s likely that a lot of somewhat less equine Republican candidates won’t be as lucky.