Senator Lindsey Graham was sitting in the back of a Thai restaurant on Capitol Hill one evening a few years ago after the last votes of the day, tucking into his chicken satay and trying to explain how he had gone from one of President Trump’s most scathing critics to one of his closest allies.
It had been a head-spinning transformation. When Mr. Trump first took the national stage, Mr. Graham denounced him as a “kook” who was “unfit for office.” Then after Mr. Trump won the presidency, Mr. Graham was at his side on the golf course and going on television to say how outrageous it was for anyone to call him “some kind of a kook not fit to be president.”
Mr. Graham made no apologies for his shift. This was politics. “I’ve just made a conscious decision — you know, I’m still in the game,” Mr. Graham explained to me that night as he sipped a glass of wine. “There’s no way to get around Trump. He’s the most important figure in the Republican Party now — not me, not John McCain, not George W. Bush. Donald Trump. Let’s play the hand we’re dealt.”
Mr. Graham, the South Carolina Republican whose sudden death on Saturday night at age 71 shocked the nation’s capital, was nothing if not a player. He was a quintessential Washington figure who dealt himself into some of the most critical issues of his time. He could be cynical. He could be opportunistic. But he was never dull, and he was always at the table playing the cards the best way he knew how.
An unabashed national security hawk who supported the Iraq invasion long after others gave up on it, Mr. Graham was a player to the end, pressing his friend in the White House in recent days to stand strong against both Iran and Russia. He had just returned hours earlier from Kyiv, where he announced that he had secured Mr. Trump’s support for increased sanctions on Moscow, when he succumbed to an aortic dissection at his home in Washington.
I first got to know Lindsey (as he was called by everyone in Washington, friend and foe) in 1998. He had just burst onto the scene as one of the House Republicans prosecuting impeachment articles against President Bill Clinton for his lies under oath about a tawdry affair with a former White House intern. Mr. Graham was folksy and funny, an extemporaneous speaker with a Southern drawl, not always tethered to the official talking points or the party marching orders, but an overnight political star.
His journey from Clinton impeachment trial manager to John McCain wingman to Trump whisperer became one of the most fascinating and perplexing political stories of recent times. In some ways, it reflected the evolution of his party over the past three decades. He was the personification of a conservative political establishment forced to accommodate itself to a disruptive outsider who staged a successful takeover of the system.
Mr. Graham, though, went beyond the holding-their-tongue acquiescence of many of his Republican colleagues, not just going along with Mr. Trump but actively joining his circle at Mar-a-Lago, 9-iron in hand, red MAGA hat on his head. His wholehearted embrace of Mr. Trump at times befuddled and even alienated some friends, especially Mr. McCain, his onetime mentor who stopped speaking to him for a time before his own death in 2018.
While he understood Mr. Trump’s flaws, Mr. Graham was drawn to his commanding authority and saw a raw, unformed political neophyte he thought he could influence. He had long attached himself to other powerful figures like Mr. McCain, the Arizona senator, seeking out partnerships that would give him entree to the circles where big decisions were made.
With those outside Mr. Trump’s team, Mr. Graham projected a wink-and-nod, I’m-in-on-the-joke demeanor. When my wife and I ran into him on the street in Washington one night during Mr. Trump’s first term coming out of a dinner at the see-and-be-seen Palm restaurant, he stopped to boast about just getting off the phone with Mr. Trump even as he laughed about the president’s foibles.
“He’s a lying motherfucker,” Mr. Graham allowed with a shrug, but also “a lot of fun to hang out with.” Mr. Trump, he said, was so dominant within the party that he could do almost anything with impunity. “He could kill 50 people on our side, and it wouldn’t matter,” Mr. Graham observed.
He loved the access, the proximity to power. Even after briefly breaking with Mr. Trump over the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — “Count me out,” he said, “enough is enough” — he returned quickly to the fold.
For all of his early criticism, Mr. Graham told me that he grew to genuinely like his party’s bombastic leader and, perhaps more important, relished being welcomed into his orbit. “Donald Trump was president of the United States,” he said. “He allowed me into his world. That’s great.”
If Mr. Graham saw the alliance in transactional terms, so did Mr. Trump. He flattered the senator, treating him as his envoy to other Republicans and nicknaming him “The Broker” to his face. Behind his back, though, the president called Mr. Graham “Eighty-Five Percenter,” a term that serves as a reminder that almost no one is loyal enough in his eyes.
Mr. Graham’s life story could hardly be more different from that of the New York billionaire. He grew up in an apartment in the back of a pool hall owned by his parents in the small town of Central, S.C., where he spent hours after school playing pinball, sneaking beers and cigarettes and learning the skills of a good bartender. Nicknamed “Stinkball,” he later wrote that “I was expected to entertain folks.”
The first in his family to go to college, Mr. Graham lost both of his parents to natural causes within 15 months of each other and ended up raising and even adopting his sister, who was nine years younger. He went to law school, enlisted in the Air Force and became a lawyer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, remaining in the reserves for years to come, including through most of his congressional career.
He won a House seat in the Republican sweep of 1994, but was an independent thinker and eventually helped lead a failed intraparty coup against his own speaker, Newt Gingrich. His political career was turbocharged by his Matlock-style speeches during the Clinton impeachment (“Where I come from, you call somebody at 2:30 in the morning, you’re up to no good,” he said of the president’s attention to Monica S. Lewinsky), and he won a Senate seat in 2002.
While a staunch conservative, particularly on the use of force overseas to advance U.S. interests (critics called him a warmonger), Mr. Graham positioned himself for years as a maverick who would work across the aisle on certain issues like overhauling immigration. He was, in the era before Mr. Trump came along, the favorite Republican for many Democrats, at least personally if not always politically.
Despite the impeachment of her husband, Hillary Clinton forged friendly relations with Mr. Graham after she was elected as a senator, even hanging out in a bar with him and other senators during a trip to Estonia. He was so fond of Joseph R. Biden Jr. when they were both in the Senate that he took it upon himself to intervene with the military to fly Mr. Biden’s son Beau Biden back from an overseas deployment to attend his 2009 inauguration as vice president.
Mr. Graham never married or had children, and seemed to seek out others who would fill the void, most notably Mr. McCain. They spent holidays together, and Mr. Graham called their close friendship a “political marriage.” Together with their fellow senator, Joseph I. Lieberman, a hawkish Democrat from Connecticut, they became known as the Three Amigos.
But they fractured when Mr. Trump came to power. Despite his past harsh words, the new president began wooing Mr. Graham, inviting him to play golf and ride Marine One with him. “It was awesome,” Mr. Graham gushed to a White House aide after a round with the president. Mr. McCain did not approve, seeing Mr. Trump as a dangerous buffoon. “Do you have to play golf with him so much?” Mr. McCain asked him at one point, a person close to the senator told me, which Mr. Graham confirmed.
“It bothered John, and John spoke to Lindsey about it, and it affected their relationship for a while,” Mr. Lieberman told me before his death in 2024. As Mr. McCain was dying from brain cancer and receding from the stage, Mr. Graham turned increasingly to Mr. Trump. When Mr. McCain died, Mr. Trump at first refused to lower the flag to honor him and was not invited to the memorial service at Washington National Cathedral. Mr. Graham was asked only to read a couple of lines from Scripture rather than deliver a eulogy at the televised event.
“You get a lot of amateur psychiatrists who will tell you Lindsey got closer to Trump because McCain was leaving earth and I had left the Senate,” Mr. Lieberman told me. “It’s possible it had something to do with it. But I think this was Lindsey trying to find a place where he could be most productive.”
Mr. Graham became Mr. Trump’s most important ally in the Senate. When Mr. Trump’s nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was threatened by allegations of sexual misconduct as a teenager, Mr. Graham roared to his defense. With red-faced rage, he lashed out at Democrats at a hearing, accusing them of trying to “destroy this guy’s life” and rallying Republicans to back Mr. Kavanaugh. A Democratic senator later said that speech may have “single-handedly” saved the nomination.
Mr. Graham dismissed the kind of criticism of Mr. Trump that he himself used to voice. In fact, he said that night in the Thai restaurant, the president was “really smart” and more strategic than people understood. “There’s a method to the madness,” he said. “He consciously plays the erratic card.”
There were times when Mr. Graham disagreed with Mr. Trump. He urged the president not to fire the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during the first term, warning that “that would be the end of your presidency.”
How much Mr. Graham really influenced Mr. Trump was always an open question. He described their relationship in sardonic terms. “I will play to his vanity,” he said. “He’ll play to mine.” But as he saw it, at least he was in the room.
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