Sen. Lindsey Graham, the prominent Republican from South Carolina who served in the Senate for more than two decades, died after suffering an aortic dissection, his office said Sunday.
Graham died unexpectedly Saturday night, his office announced, shortly after he had returned to Washington after a trip to Ukraine.
In a statement, his spokesperson said a preliminary report from the medical examiner for the District of Columbia found that the 71-year-old senator died of aortic dissection due to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. With aortic dissection, a tear occurs in the wall of the aorta.
According to the Mayo Clinic, aortic dissection is not very common, and its symptoms may be mistakenly attributed to other health conditions. It usually affects men in their 60s and 70s. If the blood from the dissection travels outside the artery, the condition is often fatal.
A former military lawyer who reached the rank of colonel in the Air Force, Graham ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2016. Initially a cutting, vocal critic of then-candidate Donald Trump during the election, Graham became one of the president’s staunchest allies after Trump’s election.
“Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, is dead!” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth, on Sunday. “He was always working, and was a true American Patriot.”
Graham was known as a C student in high school, and was the first member of his family to attend college. His mother died while he attended the University of South Carolina, and his father died of a heart attack during Graham’s first semester of law school.
He served as a judge advocate in the Air Force, eventually becoming the chief prosecutor for the Air Force in Europe.
He was first elected to serve as senator for South Carolina in November 2002.
In a social media post on X, Vice President JD Vance described Graham as one of the most powerful lawmakers, and recalled an incident where he and Graham got into a shouting match over a funding bill for the war in Ukraine.
Later the same day, he wrote in the post, Graham was advocating for rail legislation that Vance supported.
“That was Lindsey Graham,” he wrote. “He fought like hell for the things he believed in, and he was just as willing to go to bat for you when it counted.”
Graham had been scheduled to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday to discuss his trip to Ukraine. Instead, President Trump appeared in his stead, where he said the senator had been “like a member of the family.”
Trump called into several Sunday news programs to discuss Graham’s death, and said he had spoken to Graham on Saturday evening.
Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the South Carolina senator had said he was “tired.”
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