Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died suddenly over the weekend, his office announced on Sunday, and the political world is processing his legacy earlier than it ever expected to.
More than perhaps any senator — even the currently ailing Mitch McConnell — Graham embodied the transition from an older era of the Republican Party and Washington politics to the Trump era we live in now.
Graham was famously a vocal critic of Donald Trump, whom he ran against in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, but rapidly became a top ally after the election, to the horror of many of his longtime friends inside and outside the GOP.
But Graham’s career arc also showed why so many Republicans of so many different stripes were tempted to embrace Trump. The senator ultimately succeeded in steering an inexperienced, ideologically malleable, and easily flattered president toward many of his own lifelong priorities.
Take just one aspect of Graham’s considerable legacy: Foreign policy, where he was one of the most prominent hawks in American politics for decades.
At the time of Graham’s death, the US was engaged in a major military conflict with Iran that he had championed for decades and exercised de facto control of Venezuela’s government after arresting its leader, Nicolás Maduro, an operation Graham had also pushed for years earlier. The day before he died, Graham toured Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose forces are making military gains against Russia with US support after Graham helped him weather Trump’s early hostility — partly by advising the leader to humble himself before the president. Right up to the weekend, the senator was working to sell the president on a bipartisan sanctions bill against Russia.
If Graham made a Faustian bargain to sacrifice his pre-Trump reputation in order to advance his pre-Trump policy goals, then the terms were often honored.
But history is rarely so neat: What he gave up was also real, and other forces stirred up by Trump could one day erase those gains.
Graham’s career before Trump
Graham rose to prominence from small-town obscurity in Central, South Carolina, where he raised his younger sister after their parents died and ran their family restaurant. He served as a lawyer in the US Air Force and quickly climbed the ladder from the state legislature to the House, where he helped lead Bill Clinton’s impeachment, before winning an open Senate seat in 2002 after Strom Thurmond died.
But by the time of Trump’s rise in 2016, he was something of a fading relic within his party.
Graham was a close ally of the late Sen. John McCain, who jokingly called him “my illegitimate son,” and the two shared many habits and ideals that were being challenged by the then-ascendant Tea Party movement. They were both national security conservatives, they were known for their bipartisan dealmaking at a time of increased polarization, they promoted respect for Senate institutions at a time insurgents like Ted Cruz demanded procedural radicalism, and they were ubiquitous in the traditional Beltway press in the era of Fox News and social media (at the time of his death, Graham was scheduled for his 64th Meet the Press appearance).
Graham survived what many saw as a serious primary threat in 2014 over his repeated negotiations with Democrats. In President Barack Obama’s first term, he entertained becoming the decisive vote on climate and immigration bills, but ultimately disappointed the president when he withdrew from talks (he seemed like a movie spy “who double-crosses everyone to save his own skin,” Obama later wrote in his memoir). In Obama’s second term, Graham and McCain were part of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight,” a robust attempt at an immigration reform package that would have provided a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, expanded legal immigration, and added more border security. It passed the Senate, but never came up for a vote in the House after a right-wing populist backlash.
Nevertheless, Graham ran for president in the 2016 cycle, where he confronted conservative critics of his immigration plan head-on. He warned Republicans that they were repellent to Latino voters and were entering a “demographic death spiral” that could only be fixed by becoming a party more welcoming to immigrants. And he said that more extreme voices in the party were leading them away from what the median voter was willing to tolerate on any number of issues.
Naturally, he was critical of Trump, who seemed to represent everything he fought against, both in domestic politics and in foreign policy. It didn’t help that Trump derided McCain’s heroism as a POW in Vietnam, telling a conservative audience that “I like people who weren’t captured.” Graham called Trump a “jackass” shortly after; Trump gave out Graham’s personal cellphone number at a rally in response.
Like many in the party, Graham seemed to think Trump was a passing storm and that the best course of action was to shield the GOP’s reputation as much as possible from long-term damage after his inevitable loss.
Instead, Trump won — leaving Graham to once again figure out his place in a party that was moving further and further from his personal vision.
What Graham got out of Trump
Trump was not immediately embraced by his entire party after his victory. Especially in the Senate, he faced significant skepticism, including from Republicans who — like Graham — had publicly announced they would not vote for him in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton.
But while McCain and others continued to be a thorn in Trump’s side, and others offered only beleaguered cooperation, Graham quickly endeared himself to the president as an enthusiastic defender in the press and in Senate hearings. “I am like the happiest dude in America right now,” Graham said on Fox & Friends, the president’s favorite program, less than three months after his inauguration. “We have got a president and a national security team that I’ve been dreaming of for eight years.”
Graham’s shift generated numerous theories as to his motives. Obviously, many saw political survival as a factor: There was virtually no chance Graham would have won another primary had he gone “Never Trump.” Others took a more psychological tack: Steve Schmidt, a former McCain adviser, called him a “pilot fish” who instinctively attached himself to a larger predator and lived off their reflected glory — first McCain, who died in 2018, then Trump.
But Graham, who loved nothing more than narrating his personal journey in real time, offered plenty of detail as to his thinking. In his telling, he had one clear motive: to be in the room where it happens.
Trump, he told the New York Times Magazine’s Mark Leibovich in a 2019 profile, could “change his mind in a New York minute” on major decisions — especially foreign policy, where the stakes were high, the president’s views were not well-developed, and the range of outcomes was very wide. That meant that insinuating himself into his inner circle gave him unique influence in a way that wasn’t true for other presidents.
“I went from, ‘O.K., he’s president’ to ‘How can I get to be in his orbit?’ to ‘How can I have a say in what’s going to happen today, tomorrow and next week?’” he said.
After Trump’s 2020 loss and the January 6 Capitol riot, when some conservatives who had been playing a similar game finally turned on the president, Graham made a similarly pragmatic argument that Republicans who wanted to win elections and advance their issues needed to stick with Trump or become irrelevant. “If you tried to run him out of the party, he’d take half the party with him,” he told Bloomberg News.
Importantly, Graham wasn’t the only one playing this game. At any given moment, he faced competition from his ideological nemeses — like Sen. Rand Paul, a non-interventionist, and, later on, media figures like Tucker Carlson — who also recognized the opportunity to lobby Trump. On one side, libertarians and isolationists seized on Trump’s criticism of the Iraq War and sympathies toward Vladimir Putin and argued for withdrawal from the world and from institutions like NATO. On the other side, hawks like Graham would seize on his instinctive saber-rattling toward Iran and his desire to demonstrate dominance to argue for a more active military role. In each case, Trump’s allies praised the president’s judgement and argued that their framework was the true MAGA foreign policy that fit his desires.
Trump handed alternating victories to different sides in his first term, while avoiding larger military conflicts. But, especially in Trump’s second term, Graham and other pre-Trump hawks began to win out with a vision that appealed to Trump’s ambitions to leave a grandiose legacy at home and abroad, even as they struggled to keep the same instincts from blowing up NATO. Many of the relevant figures involved, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, were also once harsh Trump critics who made peace with the president and were rewarded with greater responsibilities in his administration.
And while Graham is best known for his advocacy in world affairs, a similar arc occurred in the Senate on domestic priorities.
As a member and later chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he played a critical role in confirming Supreme Court justices and federal judges — who were often, like Graham, more closely associated with pre-Trump movement conservatism than the MAGA right.
As budget chair, he helped craft the massive package of tax cuts and health-care spending reductions in 2025 that expanded on the similarly giant tax cuts of Trump’s first term. And once again, many of the policies — tax cuts for individuals and businesses, spending cuts to social programs — were consistent with the old pre-Trump, and even pre-Obama, era he came from.
Graham’s legacy is uncertain
Graham died with a budget, a judiciary, and an entire world order that were all shaped in part by his influence over Trump. But he also leaves behind a deeply unsettled party as Trump enters his lame-duck period.
On foreign policy, the Iran war failed to achieve its goals, and many hawks have been disappointed in Trump’s efforts (currently imperiled) to negotiate a ceasefire and potential peace agreement with the regime they hoped to permanently remove. The war’s unpopularity and its close association with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu have also helped fuel an ongoing bipartisan backlash to America’s close relationship with Israel — another cause Graham championed.
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance, another former Trump critic who amassed power after an about-face, has close ties with many of the MAGA leaders most critical of Graham’s perspective. It’s possible he, or someone like him, inherits the party instead of more old-school conservatives like Rubio, who share more of Graham’s worldview. That extends to domestic policy, where Graham’s vision for a more demographically inclusive party, which he never fully abandoned, has run up against a resurgence of open white nationalism empowered in part by Trump’s destruction of political taboos and establishment guardrails. And then there’s the threat to American democracy — free speech, fair elections, impartial justice — that Graham believed was manageable under Trump while so many of his former colleagues feared otherwise.
It would be ironic if, in finally achieving the apotheosis of his personal vision for Trump, Graham discredited it for a generation of conservatives and empowered successors who loathed him and everything he stood for. But that’s a problem for the next generation of leaders, who will have to make their own decisions about what red line they’re willing to cross in the never-ending pursuit of power that is politics. Graham made his own choice, and now “leading Trump ally” will be splashed across obituary headlines to summarize his 71 years on Earth for newsreaders today and for historians yet not born.
