“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”

Reflecting on Tuesday’s midterm election results, a shellacking by Democrats that served as a rebuke to President Donald Trump, this quote deserves another look.

In 2016, in the midst of a heated Republican primary race, with assorted candidates jockeying to be the party’s presidential nominee, those words were posted by what now seems a surprising source: South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Of course, Graham himself had been one of the candidates in that bitter contest. Insults like “lightweight” and “jackass” were tossed back and forth, and Trump publicly shared Graham’s cellphone number. (Trump finally apologized for that stunt — at Graham’s funeral this past July. Better late than never, I suppose.)

By the time of Graham’s death this year, though, his earlier self would not have recognized the senator from South Carolina who had transformed himself into one of the president’s golfing buddies and closest allies.

In May of this year, after Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his Louisiana primary to a Trump-backed opponent, Graham reasoned on NBC News that Cassidy lost because he “tried to destroy” the........

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