\n<\/p>\n
Paul Dans<\/strong> speaks in a mash-up of movie references. In discussing the primary campaign he just announced against longtime South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham,<\/strong> he quotes Casablanca.<\/em> When I saw him during an event<\/a> held alongside the Republican National Convention last summer, he used The Matrix<\/em> as an analogy for the deep state. And to describe himself? \u201cI\u2019m kind of a MAGA Rambo, if you will,\u201d he tells me when I get him on the phone this week. \u201cAnd now it\u2019s my time to come out of the jungle.\u201d<\/p>\n Dans, who is 56, came to the public\u2019s 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,<\/strong> who distanced himself from the document. (As soon as he was in office, he began to follow it closely.)<\/p>\n Now that Project 2025 is on its way to becoming the law of the land, Dans has come to believe that Graham isn\u2019t sufficiently committed to the president\u2019s agenda. The race, he says, is a \u201csteel-cage match for the future of MAGA.\u201d In one corner, there\u2019s Dans, who boasts of being \u201cone of President Trump\u2019s top fighters,\u201d 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 \u201c70-year-old childless warmonger with no stake in the future of this country\u201d and a \u201cMAGA pretender,\u201d as Dans describes him.<\/p>\n At first glance, the race seems set up to be yet another Trump-era purity test\u2014an 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 \u201cgo to hell<\/a>\u201d if it truly wanted to make America great. \u201cHis act is over. It\u2019s Sunset Boulevard<\/em> for him,\u201d Dans tells me.<\/p>\n But is it? Graham received the president\u2019s coveted \u201cComplete and Total Endorsement\u201d for his reelection campaign this spring. \u201cLindsey has been a wonderful friend to me,\u201d Trump posted<\/a> in late March, \u201cand has always been there when I needed him.\u201d Dans tells me he views Trump\u2019s endorsement as \u201cpremature.\u201d (Trump \u201cendorses what I stand for on a daily basis,\u201d Dans says.) But a White House spokesperson told me this week that Trump stands by his Graham endorsement. And Chris LaCivita,<\/strong> Trump\u2019s 2024 co-campaign manager and a current senior adviser to Graham\u2019s reelection effort, has accused Dans of having \u201cparachuted\u201d<\/a> into the race, telling Vanity Fair<\/em> that he\u2019s attacked \u201cone of the key GOP Senate leaders responsible for passing the lion\u2019s share of President Trump\u2019s key campaign promises\u201d: \u201cPaul Dans thinks South Carolina Republicans are dopes,\u201d LaCivita adds. \u201cNot only is Dans the dope, but he\u2019s the antithesis of common sense.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, 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<\/em> loyal Congress would look like.<\/p>\n But Dans believes the MAGA movement has yet to reach its full ascendancy\u2014and he wants to get it there, whether he has Trump\u2019s explicit permission or not. \u201cWe can\u2019t afford to have [Trump] flip the keys to Lindsey for the next generation,\u201d Dans tells me. \u201cSometimes you just have to go and take the car without asking.\u201d<\/p>\n Dans served in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Office of Personnel Management in the second half of Trump\u2019s first term. He and his wife\u2014the fitness influencer and former professional ballet dancer Mary Helen Bowers,<\/strong> who trained Natalie Portman<\/strong> for her Oscar-winning turn in 2010\u2019s Black Swan<\/em>\u2014moved the family to South Carolina about nine years ago. \u201cThis is home,\u201d Dans tells me of his adopted home state. \u201cI wasn\u2019t born here, but we got married here, and I\u2019ll end up dying here. So two out of three ain\u2019t bad.\u201d<\/p>\n The Graham campaign, though, has cast him as an outsider\u2014a criticism Dans brushes off by noting the senator\u2019s own unpopularity. \u201cHe is the odd character that is equally disliked by both sides of the aisle,\u201d Dans says. Indeed, Graham\u2014who first won election to the Senate in 2003, during a political era that seems far longer ago than some two decades\u2014has performed poorly in polls, with one Palmetto State survey<\/a> in May showing him with just 34% approval, behind other state Republican officials and Trump himself. (Another poll, conducted in June, suggested<\/a> that nearly half of Republicans would at least be open to a primary challenger.)<\/p>\n One reason for this openness may be that back in 2016, Graham warned<\/a> that Republicans would get \u201cdestroyed\u201d\u2014and \u201cdeserve it\u201d\u2014if they nominated Trump. Now, however, he\u2019s the president\u2019s groveling golf buddy. \u201cHe\u2019s got a problem with the base,\u201d as Chip Felkel,<\/strong> a South Carolina GOP strategist and ardent Trump critic, tells me. \u201cHe can\u2019t be Trumpy enough for some of these people.\u201d<\/p>\n Nowhere was that more apparent than in Pickens, South Carolina, where Graham was booed<\/a> for about six minutes at a 2023 Trump campaign event\u2014in his home county. \u201cThe choruses of booings are only going to get louder,\u201d Dans predicts.<\/p>\n But Graham has proved himself largely reliable: watch the South Carolina senator tearfully solicit donations on television<\/a> for Trump\u2019s legal defense; look at his push<\/a> for a special counsel probe into former president Barack Obama,<\/strong> with Trump openly fantasizing about prosecuting his predecessor. Graham may still diverge on MAGA orthodoxy from time to time\u2014particularly in his hawkish foreign policy approach\u2014but 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\u2019s primary and be elected to the Senate in the fall? \u201cUnequivocally no,\u201d Felkel tells me.)<\/p>\n 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\u2019s capitulation to Trump the man. Dans is institutional MAGA, having sought, in the Project 2025 plan on which he\u2019s campaigning, to bake the movement\u2019s principles\u2014such as they are\u2014into the government. It\u2019s a MAGA product purer than what Graham is selling, perhaps. But it\u2019s one that would seem to put him at odds with Trump, whose criticisms of Project 2025 during last year\u2019s 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 \u201cvery, very large brain\u201d<\/a> to make decisions\u2014not some nerds at The Heritage Foundation.<\/p>\n Even as Trump consolidates extraordinary power in Republican-controlled Washington, some MAGA fault lines have been emerging recently\u2014particularly over his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. \u201cYou must take down every enemy of The People,\u201d Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene<\/strong> posted late last month<\/a>. If not, \u201cthe base will turn and there\u2019s no going back. Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.\u201d<\/p>\n Dans tells me he \u201cagrees with those who are much more questioning\u201d of the administration\u2019s foreign policy interventions, and regards the failure to produce all files related to Epstein as a \u201cmajor misplay by people in this administration.\u201d<\/p>\n When I ask why he thinks the White House hasn\u2019t been more forthcoming about Epstein, whose long, well-documented relationship with Trump has been under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks, Dans replies: \u201cThey have a lot going on. I don\u2019t know. I couldn\u2019t speculate.\u201d<\/p>\n