A Self-Proclaimed "MAGA Rambo" Takes on Lindsey Graham | Vanity Fair

Paul Dans speaks in a mash-up of movie references. In discussing the primary campaign he just announced against longtime South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, he quotes Casablanca. When I saw him during an event held alongside the Republican National Convention last summer, he used The Matrix as an analogy for the deep state. And to describe himself? “I’m kind of a MAGA Rambo, if you will,” he tells me when I get him on the phone this week. “And now it’s my time to come out of the jungle.”

Dans, who is 56, came to the public’s attention during the 2024 campaign as the mastermind behind Project 2025: The blueprint, which laid out plans to consolidate executive power, close down the Department of Education, and end diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, became a campaign trail liability to Donald Trump, who distanced himself from the document. (As soon as he was in office, he began to follow it closely.)

Now that Project 2025 is on its way to becoming the law of the land, Dans has come to believe that Graham isn’t sufficiently committed to the president’s agenda. The race, he says, is a “steel-cage match for the future of MAGA.” In one corner, there’s Dans, who boasts of being “one of President Trump’s top fighters,” and was the architect of the plan to consolidate executive power, dismantle the administrative state, and impose a conservative social agenda on the nation. In the other is Graham, a “70-year-old childless warmonger with no stake in the future of this country” and a “MAGA pretender,” as Dans describes him.

At first glance, the race seems set up to be yet another Trump-era purity test—an over-the-top loyalist taking on an over-the-hill, old guard Republican, one who, just about a decade ago, urged his party to tell Trump to “go to hell” if it truly wanted to make America great. “His act is over. It’s Sunset Boulevard for him,” Dans tells me.

But is it? Graham received the president’s coveted “Complete and Total Endorsement” for his reelection campaign this spring. “Lindsey has been a wonderful friend to me,” Trump posted in late March, “and has always been there when I needed him.” Dans tells me he views Trump’s endorsement as “premature.” (Trump “endorses what I stand for on a daily basis,” Dans says.) But a White House spokesperson told me this week that Trump stands by his Graham endorsement. And Chris LaCivita, Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager and a current senior adviser to Graham’s reelection effort, has accused Dans of having “parachuted” into the race, telling Vanity Fair that he’s attacked “one of the key GOP Senate leaders responsible for passing the lion’s share of President Trump’s key campaign promises”: “Paul Dans thinks South Carolina Republicans are dopes,” LaCivita adds. “Not only is Dans the dope, but he’s the antithesis of common sense.”

But Dans is hoping that his long history of supporting the president will provide an advantage: He was on the Trump train long before Graham boarded, having been an advocate for a Trump run in 2011, when the now president was still a punch line. Graham, meanwhile, remains a key ally to Trump, who has conquered Capitol Hill to such a degree that it is hard to imagine what a more loyal Congress would look like.

But Dans believes the MAGA movement has yet to reach its full ascendancy—and he wants to get it there, whether he has Trump’s explicit permission or not. “We can’t afford to have [Trump] flip the keys to Lindsey for the next generation,” Dans tells me. “Sometimes you just have to go and take the car without asking.”

Dans served in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Office of Personnel Management in the second half of Trump’s first term. He and his wife—the fitness influencer and former professional ballet dancer Mary Helen Bowers, who trained Natalie Portman for her Oscar-winning turn in 2010’s Black Swan—moved the family to South Carolina about nine years ago. “This is home,” Dans tells me of his adopted home state. “I wasn’t born here, but we got married here, and I’ll end up dying here. So two out of three ain’t bad.”

The Graham campaign, though, has cast him as an outsider—a criticism Dans brushes off by noting the senator’s own unpopularity. “He is the odd character that is equally disliked by both sides of the aisle,” Dans says. Indeed, Graham—who first won election to the Senate in 2003, during a political era that seems far longer ago than some two decades—has performed poorly in polls, with one Palmetto State survey in May showing him with just 34% approval, behind other state Republican officials and Trump himself. (Another poll, conducted in June, suggested that nearly half of Republicans would at least be open to a primary challenger.)

One reason for this openness may be that back in 2016, Graham warned that Republicans would get “destroyed”—and “deserve it”—if they nominated Trump. Now, however, he’s the president’s groveling golf buddy. “He’s got a problem with the base,” as Chip Felkel, a South Carolina GOP strategist and ardent Trump critic, tells me. “He can’t be Trumpy enough for some of these people.”

Nowhere was that more apparent than in Pickens, South Carolina, where Graham was booed for about six minutes at a 2023 Trump campaign event—in his home county. “The choruses of booings are only going to get louder,” Dans predicts.

But Graham has proved himself largely reliable: watch the South Carolina senator tearfully solicit donations on television for Trump’s legal defense; look at his push for a special counsel probe into former president Barack Obama, with Trump openly fantasizing about prosecuting his predecessor. Graham may still diverge on MAGA orthodoxy from time to time—particularly in his hawkish foreign policy approach—but he has been fervent in his loyalty to Trump himself. (Would there be any meaningful difference in the subservience of the Senate were Dans to defeat Graham in next June’s primary and be elected to the Senate in the fall? “Unequivocally no,” Felkel tells me.)

The real fight in this so-called MAGA cage match, then, may be over efforts to institutionalize a movement that has been, for the last 10 years, a cult of personality. Graham is the poster child for the GOP establishment’s capitulation to Trump the man. Dans is institutional MAGA, having sought, in the Project 2025 plan on which he’s campaigning, to bake the movement’s principles—such as they are—into the government. It’s a MAGA product purer than what Graham is selling, perhaps. But it’s one that would seem to put him at odds with Trump, whose criticisms of Project 2025 during last year’s campaign seemed to go beyond concerns about how it could be wielded against him electorally: Trump, after all, conceives of himself as the big boss, relying only on his “very, very large brain” to make decisions—not some nerds at The Heritage Foundation.

Even as Trump consolidates extraordinary power in Republican-controlled Washington, some MAGA fault lines have been emerging recently—particularly over his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. “You must take down every enemy of The People,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted late last month. If not, “the base will turn and there’s no going back. Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”

Dans tells me he “agrees with those who are much more questioning” of the administration’s foreign policy interventions, and regards the failure to produce all files related to Epstein as a “major misplay by people in this administration.”

When I ask why he thinks the White House hasn’t been more forthcoming about Epstein, whose long, well-documented relationship with Trump has been under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks, Dans replies: “They have a lot going on. I don’t know. I couldn’t speculate.”

There is one area where Dans would suggest Trump has erred: in his endorsement of Graham. “He’s not infallible,” Dans says of the president. “Although I think he would have been a very interesting pope.”

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