In his way, the late Lindsey Graham, who unexpectedly died Saturday evening, was the consummate politician of our time. The Republican senator from South Carolina was the epitome, the poster child, the quintessence of our era.
Graham’s background and biography made him, during the first part of his career, a fervent American patriot, with a special devotion to the cause of American leadership in the democratic world. Born and raised in a small town in South Carolina, he got himself and his younger sister through college after his parents died while he was still in his 20s, with the help of an ROTC stipend and then an Air Force salary. He became a military lawyer, served in West Germany during the Cold War, and stayed in the Reserves for two decades, traveling to work in Iraq and Afghanistan even while in the Senate. “The Air Force has been one of the best things that has ever happened to me,” he said in 2015. “It gave me a purpose bigger than myself. It put me in the company of patriots.”
Like his close friend John McCain, Graham believed that America should stand at the center of a broad democratic alliance. The few times I met him were in that context, at the Munich Security Conference or at other European-American gatherings, which he once attended with great regularity. He also took seriously the practice of American democracy at home. In a 2014 conversation with The Atlantic, he described himself as a pragmatic politician who eschewed populist slogans. “I know Washington is broken, but what’s broken about it is everybody yelling and nobody trying to fix it,” he said. “I’m trying.”
When Donald Trump first appeared in U.S. politics, Graham recognized him immediately for what he was: the spokesman for an alien ideology, one radically different from the idealistic patriotism that Graham had practiced and preached since childhood. Trump privately mocked the military that Graham loved as nothing but “suckers and losers.” He put falsehoods, cynicism, and personal greed at the center of his politics, while expressing disdain for transparency, accountability, and democracy itself. In 2015, Graham described Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who should “go to hell.” Also as a “nutjob.”
When Trump won, Graham understood, as did so many others, that he would have to make some important choices. For a while, he went silent. In the spring of 2016, I saw him at one of those conferences in Europe. He seemed too depressed to speak.
But then, like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experience radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator. Graham went out of his way to telegraph his closeness to the president. He played golf with Trump, made excuses for him on television, and supported him as he slowly destroyed the alliances that Graham had defended all his life, even as he undermined the institutions of democracy at home. In 2021, Graham refused to vote to convict Trump, even after he assaulted the Capitol and tried to reverse the results of the election.
Graham’s motivations remain a mystery. Perhaps he craved proximity to power. Perhaps he feared losing his Senate seat, and with it any claim to relevance. Deep down, though, he must have known he was betraying the ideals of his younger self.
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Graham’s position has only grown stranger. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Graham—in line with his earlier beliefs in America’s role as a leading defender of democracy—supported Ukraine and advocated for the transfer of American weapons to Ukraine. His advocacy had little impact on Trump, who bullied the Ukrainian president and stopped the transfer of weapons, hoping to force Ukraine to surrender. Unlike Graham, Trump has for decades identified with autocratic leaders, not democratic allies, and has long-standing business and personal relationships that have given him deep ties to Russia.
Graham surely knew this. Nevertheless, he made 10 trips to Ukraine; he returned from the last one the day before he died. He repeatedly proposed legislation to sanction Russia, doing so with such frequency that his bill became a kind of joke, the Waiting for Godot of Congress, always proposed and never accepted by a president who did not want to make trouble for his Russian friends.
Perhaps Graham understood, at some level, that he had betrayed the ideals of the old Republic, the moral code that he grew up with. Perhaps that was why he maintained his attachment to the cause of Ukraine. But now he is gone, and one of the few voices in Trump’s orbit had any connection to the old Republic falls silent.
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