The television credits had hardly finished rolling on Joe Biden’s shattered presidential debate performance on the hot night in June 2024, when Republican boosters took to the spin-room floor to elaborate on what they had just witnessed. They were cock-a-hoop. A huge cluster of media gravitated towards South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who was at his most puckish and cordial that night, shaking his head in mock sympathy at Biden’s monumental collapse. Or: was there a scintilla of buried empathy for a former Senate colleague breaking through?
For by then, it was accepted that there were two versions of Lindsey Graham: the man who existed before the age of Donald Trump, and the one who morphed into one of his most staunch advocates over the past decade. Suddenly from the crowd came an accusatory question delivered with Etonian hauteur and accent. Biden’s performance was shocking but the overall quality of the discourse between two elderly, cranky men had been dismal.
“Is this the best that America’s got, Mr Graham?” The easy smile faded from Graham’s face and so too the pronounced honeyed Carolinian tone from his voice.
“Where you from?” he retorted.
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“Britain? You’re talkin’ to me about how a country [is doing], the government you’ve got? I think we’re doin’ just fine.”
On Sunday morning, phoning in to Meet the Press, President Donald Trump sounded as remorseful as he ever has done when talking about the death of Graham. The senator was taken ill at his home in Washington on Saturday night and pronounced dead at the age of 71. Graham had just returned from his latest visit to Ukraine to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and to demonstrate his support for the ongoing war effort. Trump divulged that Graham had telephoned him to discuss the trip.
“He sounded a little bit tired. We thought we might even meet today. And that was it, around the time, it couldn’t have been much longer – it could have been his last call. I don’t know exactly. I can’t believe it. He was like a member of the family to me, it’s very tough actually.”
For a few hours, anyway, a degree of bipartisan decency was restored to Washington politics as Graham’s colleagues remembered a sharp humour, a pronounced foreign policy hawk with a strong grasp of international diplomacy and a 71-year-old veteran senator who smoothly made the transition from Bush-era Republicanism to the Trump-controlled party.
Graham was among the crowded field of Republican presidential candidates who ran in the 2015 primary under the grave misapprehension that Trump was a joke candidate. His own campaign, which was framed around his foreign policy agenda, got very little traction. He was incensed with Trump for mocking the war and military record of John McCain, one of his closest friends. He memorably described Trump, as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” as he left the race and by the spring of 2016 issued a warning, via Twitter that if Trump won the nomination, the Republican Party “will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it”.
What happened? In a summation published in The Atlantic on Sunday, historian and author Anne Applebaum recalled meeting Graham in the spring of 2016 at a security conference in Europe, by which time Trump’s grip on the party was tightening.
“He seemed too depressed to speak,” she wrote.
After Trump’s 2016 presidential win, Graham publicly abandoned his pre-2016 stance and became one of Trump’s golf buddies, doling out praise and support, never criticising, refusing to vote to convict Trump in 2021. Despite his deep belief in Ukraine’s cause, he never once publicly countered the president’s belligerent and demeaning treatment of Zelenskiy.
“Graham’s motivations remain a mystery,” Applebaum wrote.
“Perhaps he craved proximity to power. Perhaps he feared losing his Senate seat, and with it any claim to relevance. Deep down, though, he must have known he was betraying the ideals of his younger self.”
Of those possibilities, the Senate seat would seem the most likely explanation, and outright terror, rather than fear, the primary motivator. Graham did not rise to prominence through familial power or wealth. His parents ran a cafe in 1960s Georgia. Both died young, from illness, and Graham returned from military school to become legal guardian to his 13-year-old sister.
He qualified as a lawyer, he remained in the military and, after advancing from the state legislature to a four-term congressman on Capitol Hill, he made his name as the most vocal of the House Republicans leading impeachment charges against then president Bill Clinton. Within eight years, he was running to replace Strom Thurmond, who represented South Carolina in the Senate from 1954 to 2003.
“The graveyards are full of people in this state wanting to be Strom Thurmond’s heir,” Graham said during that campaign against Alex Sanders, a former president of Charleston college. Sixty Minutes featured the race in a fascinating profile: both candidates are such southern archetypes that they might have stepped out of a James Dickey poem. It was a different era: courtly, ironic, more relaxed. The confederate flag flew in the state house in South Carolina. It feels longer than 23 years ago. Graham joked that he would follow the example of Thurmond, who, at the age of 66, had married Nancy Moore, 22 and a winner of the 1968 Miss South Carolina beauty pageant.
Graham never married, but he was Thurmond’s heir, maintaining his seat through the two decades when he switched from bipartisan pragmatist to Trump cheerleader in chief. His political nous would have alerted him to Trump’s merciless attitude towards primarying, and defeating Republican politicians who did not march in step with his views.
So, he marched.
When John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate against Barack Obama, died in 2018, Graham said that his friend “had a romantic view of our nation to his last breath. Literally almost the last thing he said to me was: ‘I love you. I have not been cheated.’ He was not cheated.”
Of Trump, who had mocked McCain’s record of extraordinary military valour and was criticised for peremptorily raising the White House flag back to full mast from half mast during the week of his death, Graham said only: “It is all over now. The flag is down. When the president mentioned John, he got applause. I hope he’ll remember how people feel about John.”
But the political climate has deteriorated further since then. With Graham’s sudden death, another connection to old Republicanism is lost. Already, the jockeying to fill his seat has begun. It’s a brutally lonely game.
Among the video clips circulating of Graham on Sunday was his trenchant denunciation of his Democratic colleagues during the incendiary Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court, labelled by many on Sunday as his “finest hour” on Capitol Hill, and a performance that facilitated the Trump nominee’s passage.
Another clip, arguably more vital and revealing of the private compromises Graham embarked upon over the past decade, shows him sitting in the back of a car and discussing Joe Biden. The year is 2015.
“If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, then you got a problem. You gotta do some self-evaluation. Because what’s not to like? Here’s what I can tell ya. Life can change just like that. Don’t take relationships for granted. I called him just after Beau [Biden, the president’s son] died and he basically said: ‘Well, Beau, was my soul.’
“He came to my ceremony and said some of the most incredibly heartfelt things that anybody has ever said to me. And, uh, he’s the nicest person I think I’ve ever met in politics.”
The journey from that moment to the man who issued verbal bouquets for Donald Trump is one that Lindsey Graham never could bring himself to share.
