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Donald Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham went on the offense against Kamala Harris on Sunday calling her a “wrecking ball” for her stance on Israel’s war with Hamas, after it was announced that six hostages had been found dead in Gaza.
Graham appeared on ABC’s This Week on Sunday and opened up a line of attack against Harris’s foreign policy credentials – something that the Trump campaign has been trying to get off the ground this past week as it pushes back on criticism over a controversial visit to Arlington National Cemetery and a host of issues related to his running mate JD Vance.
“I would say on foreign policy, she [Harris] has been a wrecking ball,” Graham said on Sunday.
Contrasting her to JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, he went on to argue: "JD has been unequivocally supporting Israel. She has been horrible. She is slow-walking weapons. She did not attend the [Benjamin Netanyahu] speech [in Congress], and that juiced up every terrorist in the region.”
The South Carolina Republican also argued that increasing political and financial pressure on Tehran’s government was necessary to put the squeeze on Hamas and force the militant group to lay down its arms.
“If you want the hostages home, which we all do, you have to increase the cost to Iran. Iran is the great Satan. Hamas is the junior partner. They’re barbaric, religious Nazis, Hamas, they could care less about the Palestinian people,” he said.
As former Pres. Trump continues to launch personal insults against Vice Pres. Harris, Sen. Lindsey Graham says, "She’s been a wrecking ball on foreign policy."
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) September 1, 2024
“That’s what I would talk about, not her IQ. Her job performance has been lousy.” https://t.co/WgZGuE9Ysw pic.twitter.com/cjfKLoAVe5
“I would urge the Biden administration and Israel to hold Iran accountable for the fate of [the] remaining hostages and put on the target list oil refineries in Iran if the hostages are not released.”
Focus on the conflict in the Middle East is likely to intensify after the Israeli military confirmed that six hostages being held by Hamas, including one American-Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had been found dead by IDF forces in tunnels under Rafah, a region in Gaza. White House officials said on Sunday that the president had been in touch with Goldberg-Polin’s family.
This comes after Republicans, led by the ex-president, have attacked the vice president and President Joe Biden this past week over the chaotic pullout from Kabul, during which 13 American service members died in a suicide bombing and countless Afghan civilians were injured or killed in the blast. Horrifiying pictures emerged of panicked Afghans attempting to cling to departing American military aircraft, and falling to their deaths.
Trump led those attacks on Monday with a visit to Arlington to attend a memorial service for the slain US troops.
That visit sparked days of negative headlines for the Trump campaign after an aide was accused of shoving an Arlington National Cemetery worker.
The former president has responded by trying to attack the Biden-Harris administration over the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, landing some of those attacks this weekend with a series of video responses from Gold Star families.
Those attacks are part of a full-court press by the Trump campaign to recapture the race’s momentum ahead of the next major milestone: the first debate between Harris and Trump, set for nine days from Sunday. It will be the first time the two rivals have ever come face to face and comes as Harris is riding a surge in the poll numbers accompanied by a massive donation haul for her first month of campaigning.
Graham, who trends towards the neoconservative wing of the GOP, opposed the pullout from Afghanistan entirely — even as it was ordered initially by Trump. The former president, fuming over his loss to Joe Biden in November of 2020, initially sought to order all US troops out of the country immediately, but was rebuffed by top officials.
In 2021, Graham said that a full withdrawal from Afghanistan was “dumber than dirt”.
