❓WHAT HAPPENED: Former Trump White House and Heritage Foundation staffer Paul Dans who led the pro-America First Project 2025, is set to announce a primary challenge to Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Paul Dans, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), President Donald J. Trump, former South Carolina Lt. Gov. André Bauer (R-SC).
📍WHEN & WHERE: Dans is set to announce his primary bid at an event in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday, July 30, 2025.
💬KEY QUOTE: “What we’ve done with Project 2025 is really change the game in terms of closing the door on the progressive era. If you look at where the chokepoint is, it’s the United States Senate. That’s the headwaters of the swamp.” — Paul Dans
🎯IMPACT: The entry of Dans into the Republican Senate primary marks one of the most serious challenges Graham has faced since being elected to the seat in 2002. Dans’s America First bona fides draw a stark contrast to Graham’s pro-establishment history, especially regarding amnesty for illegal immigrants and foreign wars.
Paul Dans, a former Trump White House and Heritage Foundation staffer who oversaw the development of Project 2025, is set to announce he will challenge Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in the 2026 South Carolina Republican primary. Dans will officially announce the primary challenge on Wednesday in Charleston, South Carolina, joining the Senate race, which includes Graham and former South Carolina Lt. Gov. André Bauer (R-SC).
“What we’ve done with Project 2025 is really change the game in terms of closing the door on the progressive era,” Dans said in a recent media interview, adding: “If you look at where the chokepoint is, it’s the United States Senate. That’s the headwaters of the swamp.”
The former White House official and Heritage Foundation staffer emphasized that Graham has spent most of his career in Washington, D.C., being more representative of the political establishment than the voters of South Carolina. “It’s time to show him the door,” Dans declared.
Sen. Graham has served in Congress for over 30 years. The South Carolina Republican, best known for his aggressively hawkish neoconservative foreign policy, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994 as part of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution.” Subsequently, in 2002, Graham was elevated to the U.S. Senate, succeeding Strom Thurmond.
During his tenure in Congress, Sen. Graham became a close ally of the late anti-Trump Senator John McCain (R-AZ), and a staunch advocate for foreign interventionism in countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, as well as mass immigration policies, including amnesty for illegal immigrants. However, in recent years, Graham has attempted to reposition himself as an ally of President Trump—while continuing to push for U.S military intervention in the Middle East and the ongoing war in Ukraine.
For Dans, Graham is emblematic of the careerist politicians who have enabled the administrative state that President Donald J. Trump is working to dismantle. “To be clear, I believe that there is a ‘deep state’ out there, and I’m the single one who stepped forward at the end of the first term of Trump and really started to drain the swamp,” Dan said, noting entities like the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are now working to identify bureaucratic waste.
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