Lindsey Graham’s Career of Contradictions

Lindsey Graham had reached the end of his rope on the night of Jan. 6, 2021, declaring his alliance with Donald Trump over.

“Trump and I, we’ve had a helluva journey. I hate it to end this way. Oh my god, I hate it,” the South Carolina Republican senator said during a floor speech after the Capitol riot had been subdued.

“All I can say is, count me out, enough is enough,” Graham concluded.

Except no journey with Lindsey Graham was ever really over. In more than three decades in Congress, Graham constantly maneuvered across the political spectrum in search of relevance and influence.

True to form, he returned to Trump’s side later in 2021 and was an early endorser of his 2024 presidential campaign, at a time when Trump seemed beatable. That ingratiation led Graham to an influential role as an informal adviser on national security. On Saturday he spoke by phone with the president to discuss the senator’s trip to Ukraine and his long effort to pass tough new sanctions against Russia.

The call took place, according to Trump, not long before paramedics were called to Graham’s Capitol Hill home. His aides announced Graham’s death in an early Sunday morning social media post.

“If I had a problem, a real problem, I wouldn’t often ask. But if I had a problem with a Democrat, he could work it out,” Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “He was a great, he was a great politician, actually.”

It’s debatable how much Graham could work out with Democrats in his last few years in the Senate. His ideological maneuvering left him increasingly isolated when it came to the sort of dealmaking he’d learned as a sidekick to John McCain (R-Arizona) in his first 15 years in the Senate.

The former Air Force prosecutor could drive his colleagues to a frenzy during negotiations. Graham spent months in late 2023 and early 2024 working with Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) on a bill to tighten up border security and send $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, only to abandon the deal once Trump, running to return to office, decided he didn’t want the Biden administration to get wins on the issue.

Sinema developed her own private moniker for Graham: “Chaos monster.”

He responded to Trump’s decision by opposing the deal he helped negotiate, denouncing European leaders critical of Republican isolation, and abandoning his annual leadership of a Senate delegation to the Munich Security Conference, nicknamed in McCain’s honor. He eventually supported the final version of Ukraine funding and remained Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s loyal Trump whisperer, meeting him in Kyiv just last Friday following discussions the two presidents held last week at the NATO summit in Turkey.

It was Graham’s 10th visit to Ukraine since Russia invaded in 2022. “Lindsey was a true defender of freedom and the values that make our world safer,” Zelenskyy wrote in a social media post a few hours after his death.

In Graham’s final months, he had a security detail provided by the U.S. Capitol Police and South Carolina officers, while back home, as threats against him rose, especially after his forceful support for the war in Iran.

“At least they used a good photo of me,” he wrote Monday on social media after seeing pictures of Iranian posters of him with a bullet target across his forehead. “Judge me by my enemies.”

In the Senate, Graham believed in never having permanent enemies. Everyone was a potential ally on some issue, from immigration to trade to judicial nominations.

No matter how many times Graham might have disappointed some Democrats, they never turned against him.

“We talked at all hours of the day or night, and traveled through all kinds of weather, meeting dictators and democracy defenders,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), the co-author of the Russian sanctions bill Graham had been trying to pass, said in a statement.

And they all loved his humor. Blumenthal recalled a Munich appearance that Graham “filled with expletives” that brought “uproarious laughter” at the security conference.

Graham arrived in Washington as a rabble rouser willing to overthrow the establishment. He won a House seat as part of the Republican wave in 1994, the first non-Democrat to represent that northwestern corner of South Carolina since the end of Reconstruction in 1877. He linked arms with other conservative rebels and launched a failed coup against then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia.) in 1997, then helped push Gingrich out in late 1998.

He won bipartisan acclaim for his presentation as an impeachment manager in the 1999 trial of President Bill Clinton.

Graham broke with party leaders when he endorsed McCain’s 2000 bid for the Republican nomination over the Texas governor, George W. Bush.

He moved to the Senate when he replaced Strom Thurmond, the longest-serving Republican senator, in January 2003 and fully joined McCain’s orbit in the first of a few Batman-and-Robin bonds Graham formed.

When McCain helped lead a 2005 compromise to settle a dispute over confirming Bush’s judicial nominees, Graham was at his side. When McCain helped lead bipartisan immigration negotiations, Graham was there again in several failed attempts in 2006, 2007 and 2013.

“I do fear our failure to act will only allow the problem of illegal immigration to grow worse and the anger felt by some Americans will grow more intense,” Graham said after the 2007 effort collapsed.

He jumped aboard McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign against then-Sen. Barack Obama, and, during some dark days in late 2007, Graham and then-Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) served as campaign roadies helping cheer up McCain.

They dubbed themselves the “Three Amigos,” and while McCain lost the general election, Graham cruised to a 15-point margin in his reelection bid in 2008, his largest-ever victory.

He voted to confirm both of Obama’s nominees to the Supreme Court and worked on a 2013 immigration deal, drawing the ire of some from his state’s far-right flank who would go on to help propel Trump to the White House.

This year he spent nearly $20 million to win the Republican nomination against a neophyte candidate, despite having Trump’s forceful backing. He won with less than 57 percent of the vote, barely avoiding what could have been a troublesome runoff.

“Lindsey Graham didn’t back down. He stood firm. He fought and he delivered,” a narrator said in one of Graham’s campaign ads, citing his September 2018 effort to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

That moment might have been what clinched his bond with Trump, who was troubled by how soft Republicans had been in questioning Christine Blasey Ford, a witness who testified that in high school Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her. Graham delivered a fiery speech railing on Democrats that shifted the momentum in those hearings.

Just two years earlier, Graham had refused to support Trump. In February 2016, after his own brief presidential campaign, he delivered a stand-up roast at a Washington dinner party saying Republicans had gone “batshit crazy” because Trump had taken the lead in the early Republican primaries.

By 2018, however, McCain — a staunch Trump opponent — had returned home to Arizona in his battle with brain cancer, dying that August. Graham started playing golf with Trump during his first term, and the metaphor played out: Robin had found a new Batman.

The alliance grew strong enough that the president gave Graham a strong endorsement in his 2020 reelection campaign — something Trump took credit for often.

Graham’s final official role during Trump’s second term was chair of the Senate Budget Committee, which helped cobble together the massive domestic policy bill last summer. But Graham was much more focused on national security and regularly worked, along with a former Senate colleague, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to nudge Trump toward their hawkish views on Iran and Russia.

He applauded Trump’s full-scale war against Iran this year. He grew fearful that Vice President JD Vance had negotiated a poor initial deal to end the fighting last month, demanding he present his case to Congress.

At a news conference in Kyiv on Friday to announce Trump’s support for the Graham-Blumenthal Russia sanctions bill, the senator appeared more confident than ever this was the right time.

Upon greeting Graham, Zelenskyy asked the senator how he was doing, a day before he would die.

“Good,” Graham replied. “Older, older, but no wiser.”