Lindsey Graham Made Trumpism in His Own Image

Lindsey Graham, taken by a heart condition at 71 just after returning to Washington from Ukraine, was one of the most effective Republican politicians of the Trump era. What that description means, and what kind of moral assessment it should yield, is something that historians will be arguing about for as long as our strange era is remembered.

Calling Graham effective may itself sound strange. Doesn’t a man who denounced Donald Trump in 2015 only to serve him and flatter him for a decade thereafter merit an adjective like “pathetic” or “supine” instead? His long accommodation to Trumpism earned him a seven-part series by The Bulwark’s Will Saletan, “The Corruption of Lindsey Graham,” in which Graham’s desire to be “in the game” (as he once put it) was portrayed as a betrayal of all the ideals that once animated his career.

But if you watched Graham before Trump came on the scene, you knew that his fiercest commitment was to a vision of the United States as a crusading power capable of confronting authoritarian challengers from Moscow to Tehran to Beijing. And the reason to call Graham effective is that his long accommodation to Trump succeeded, sometimes modestly but often to a remarkable degree, in making Trump himself — the would-be isolationist, the scourge of neoconservatism, Mr. America First — into a hawk after Graham’s own heart.

If the South Carolinian sold his political soul, in other words, he could reasonably say that he received an impressive return on the transaction, in the form of all the policy victories won by Republican hawks across both of Trump’s two terms. In the first four years, those victories included big increases in U.S. military spending, new arms sales to Ukraine, a more pro-Israel and anti-Iran foreign policy. And the second term, which seemed poised to be more anti-interventionist given the administration’s personnel, has instead seen American efforts at regime change in both Venezuela and Iran, joined to American support for Ukraine that’s been grudging and grumbling but still ongoing, and playing a key role in Ukraine’s battlefield resilience.

The Ukraine story is particularly important to the case for Graham’s effectiveness, given how often his Never Trump critics have portrayed Trump’s desire for friendship with Vladimir Putin as the key to his authoritarian project, and the potential abandonment of Ukraine as the gravest possible betrayal of American values. If you start with that premise, then arguably nobody did more in practice to prevent the betrayal so feared by the Never Trumpers than Graham himself. And his tireless efforts to talk Trump into supporting Kyiv were arguably worth much more than anything available to him if he took the Never Trump path.

That last point was crucial, I suspect, to Graham’s understanding of what he was doing. He was a curious political character, a Republican who represented a deep-red state despite being regarded with suspicion by the conservative grassroots, a powerful politician whose influence was entirely based on Beltway maneuvering and charm rather than any powerful factional support.

As such, he had no real capacity to inflict damage on Trump via denunciation, because nobody was likely to listen to him, not movement conservatives and not swing voters. So in a world where he was consistently Never Trump he would have simply become politically irrelevant, trading his Senate seat for the talk show circuit. And while taking the path to irrelevance would have preserved his purity, it also would have empowered voices around Trump who hated Graham and everything he stood for — including the defense of Ukraine.

There was nothing meaningful Graham could do, on this theory, to put someone other than Trump in the White House. All he could do was decide whether he wanted to have influence on what Trump actually did, or leave that influence to his enemies. And the substantial influence he ended up wielding makes the case that he made the right choice.

That’s his record seen in the most favorable light. But there are two obvious reasons to be less favorable. The first is that Graham was not merely an important voice in Trumpworld during the periods when Trump was in power and there was no way to shape the world except to work with him. He was also a defender, an apologist and a rehabilitator during the days after Jan. 6 and the subsequent months when Trump prepared his comeback. Graham didn’t just accept the need to work with Trump when the voters put him the White House; he also decided that he preferred Trump 2.0 to other Republican possibilities before the voters did.

That is the strongest critique in Saletan’s long denunciation. There was a moment when Republican elites had an opportunity to end the Trump era with a Senate conviction or to possibly pre-empt a restoration by rallying around Ron DeSantis. And the fact that Graham refused those options seems like proof that he didn’t regard his own influence over Trump just as a work of patriotic necessity, but also as a power he loved and wanted to preserve.

Then, too, it matters that the actual use of that power, the real effects of Trump’s Graham-influenced hawkishness, include our reckless, stalemated Iran war as much as Ukraine policy or any other issue.

Should the Iran intervention be remembered as a debacle for the United States (and a disaster for the U.S.-Israel relationship), then the ironies of Graham’s career will thicken. In making moral compromises with Trumpism for the sake of a hawkish foreign policy vision, he will be responsible for the same kind of failed Middle Eastern regime change effort that helped bring Trump to power in the first place. And the crucial question for future understanding may not be how Trump tempted Graham, but how Graham tempted Trump.