US senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and stalwart ally of president Donald Trump has died. He was 71.
He died of a “brief and sudden” illness Saturday evening, his office said in a statement. The office did not immediately respond to an inquiry on the cause of death.
Graham was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 1994, before being elected to the Senate in 2002. He was re-elected to the Senate in 2008, 2014 and 2020.
Last month, Graham won the South Carolina Republican primary in a bid to serve a fifth term in the senate, fending off five challengers.
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“Senator Graham’s family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period,” his office said in a statement.
Governor Henry McMaster of South Carolina, a Republican, said in a statement that Graham was “the fiercest of fighters for South Carolina and America”. McMaster can immediately appoint a temporary replacement to fill Graham’s Senate seat. According to South Carolina law, an election for a full-term successor would be held in November.
Graham, who sought the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, built a reputation in Washington and abroad as one of the Senate’s most forceful advocates for an interventionist US foreign policy. Throughout his career, he consistently argued for the use of American military power overseas, including most recently supporting aggressive military action against Iran. He also maintained close ties with Israel, making numerous visits there during his time in US Congress.
There had been no known concerns over the health of Graham, who last week visited Ukraine. On Friday, its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, wrote on social media that they had a “good meeting”, adding: “I’m grateful to Lindsey for recognising our warriors.”
Over his Senate career, Graham led two influential committees, judiciary and budget.
As head of the judiciary committee, he oversaw the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the US supreme court following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He also played a critical role during the 2016 fight over president Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the court, aiding in Republicans’ success in blocking the pick.
More broadly, Graham was instrumental in advancing Trump’s effort to reshape the federal judiciary. During his tenure at the helm of the committee, the Senate confirmed more than 200 federal judges, including Barrett, cementing one of the defining conservative judicial legacies of the Trump era.
As chair of the budget Committee, Graham played a central role in translating Trump’s domestic agenda into legislation. He oversaw the budget resolution that allowed Republicans to advance much of the president’s sweeping tax, immigration and spending package without support from Senate Democrats.
The effort required months of negotiations among warring factions within his party before the tax package became law last year. Graham, along with Republican leaders and the Trump administration, embraced budget reconciliation as the party’s primary vehicle for enacting Trump’s agenda at a time when Republicans lacked the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
Those efforts became a defining accomplishment of Trump’s return to Washington with a Republican-controlled legislature, and highlighted not only the growing influence of Graham within his party but also his transformation from Trump critic into a steadfast and outspoken ally.
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As Trump was rising in the 2016 presidential campaign, Graham lambasted him as a “demagogue” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”
“You know how you make America great again?” Graham asked during a 2015 CNN interview: “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”
A decade later, he was regularly and effusively lauding him. In a speech celebrating his primary victory last month, Graham joked, “Mr president, you’re not far behind God.”
Graham was born in Central, South Carolina, a town in the western part of the state, on July 9th, 1955. His parents operated a cafe that he and his sister grew up working in.
“My home was a bar,” he recalled in his 2015 memoir My Story. “I was loved. Inside those walls, as much as any child could be loved, by two devoted parents.”
His life changed while in college, when his parents died 15 months apart. His mother died of Hodgkin lymphoma and his father later died of a heart attack. After their deaths, Graham became the legal guardian of his 13-year-old sister, Darline, later adopting her so she could receive his military benefits.
“Lindsey was always my parent,” Darline Graham Nordone told The New York Times in an interview at the bar their family once owned at the launch of Graham’s presidential campaign. “There was no doubt in my mind or anyone else’s mind that Lindsey was my guardian.”
After earning undergraduate and law degrees from the University of South Carolina, Graham served as a lawyer in the US air force before beginning his career in politics. After serving as a judge during the Gulf War, Graham was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1992.
He won a US House seat in 1994 and served four terms, then spent more than two decades in the Senate following his election in 2002.
Graham’s military career continued throughout much of his time in Congress; he remained in the air force reserve and was briefly deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan as a senator. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
