By admin 
Sen. Lindsey Graham died on Saturday, and the main mystery of the last decade of his life is why he grew so loyal to—so enamored, even worshipful of—Donald Trump.
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Throughout his four terms as U.S. senator, Graham was an avid supporter of NATO and distrustful of Russia—while Trump has railed against allies and cozied up to Vladimir Putin. In the 2010s, Graham formed coalitions across the aisle for compromise legislation on climate change and immigration reform—while Trump has derided the former as a hoax and the latter as a danger. Perhaps most jarring of all, Graham was best friends with the late Sen. John McCain, often traveling with him on foreign trips (they and Sen. Joe Lieberman were known as “the three amigos,” in playful homage to the movie of that title)—while Trump repeatedly insulted McCain, even berating his war record, both before and after he died. (One of McCain’s last wishes was that Trump not be invited to his memorial service.)
In the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign, Graham denounced Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” and said, “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” He later said that he voted for third-party candidate Evan McMullin rather than cast a ballot for Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
But his tune changed after Trump unexpectedly won. Before and after, during Trump’s first and second terms, Graham stood by Trump constantly, defending his views even when they differed from his own. Even on Ukraine, which Graham has strongly supported in its fight against Russia’s invasion, Graham backed Trump’s switch from military aid to loans and even defended his conduct in the February 2025 Oval Office meeting in which Trump publicly blasted Volodymyr Zelensky for insufficient gratitude, saying he had “never been more proud” of his president and urged the Ukrainians to unseat Zelensky as their president.
How to explain all these twists and turns?
On one level, it’s no mystery at all. Graham himself clearly explained his reasons. In a February 2019 New York Times interview, reporter Mark Leibovich asked the same question—why this safe-seat senator, who had once been so critical of Trump, was now his most loyal ally. Graham replied: “Well, OK, from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it’d be odd not to do this.” He defined this as trying “to be relevant.”
And so, in coddling Trump, praising his judgment, dropping all criticism, offering him advice as a princeling to the king, and joining him on endless rounds of golf, where the flattery can be finessed as friendly conversation, Graham became a member of Trump’s inner circle. “I have never been called this much by a president in my life,” he said, in a tone of wonder. “I went from ‘OK, 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?’ ”
There’s another factor: Trump is popular in Graham’s home state of South Carolina. He lost little political standing by standing with the president. “If you don’t want to get re-elected, you’re in the wrong business,” he said in the Times interview.
But this leads to another question: Besides getting reelected (which probably would have happened in a predominantly Republican state anyway), what did Graham get out of his subjugation? How much did his “say” really matter in what Trump actually did from day to day?
Graham may well have influenced Trump now and then, not always for the better. By all reports, he certainly reinforced the president’s inclination to join Israel in attacking Iran this past February. (To the extent his lobbying mattered, it will remain among Graham’s most dreadful legacies.) He may also have kept Trump from abandoning Ukraine altogether; it seems one of his final deeds was to persuade Trump to support his bill to strengthen sanctions against Russia.
It could also be that Graham came to understand what sorts of arguments would most appeal to Trump. For instance, back in 2019, during Trump’s first term in the White House, Graham helped dissuade him from withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria not by outlining the geopolitical rationales, as the Cabinet secretaries had fruitlessly done, but rather by displaying a map showing all the oil that could flow through Syria. This was nonsense, and Graham knew it; oil played little role in anything concerning Syria at the time. Yet it sold Trump on keeping the troops.
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Then again, the ploy worked for only a little while. Not long after the map trick, Trump returned to his original stance and ordered the withdrawal—which was widely seen as a betrayal of the Kurds, who had been vital in the war against ISIS, opening them up to be crushed from the north by Turkey.
If Graham had been half as effective a Trump whisperer as he pretended to be, American support for Ukraine would be less equivocal, allies in Europe and Asia wouldn’t be justifiably worried about America’s reliability as a guarantor of their security, and maybe some professional diplomats—not Trump’s clueless son-in-law and real-estate chum—would have been appointed to negotiate in talks over Ukraine and the Middle East.
In their 2021 book Peril, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa uncover a broader angle on Graham’s ponying up to power. From their portrait, obviously based on many interviews with the senator, Graham is fully aware of the foolishness in so many of Trump’s words and deeds. But he keeps coming back for another phone call, another round of golf, another floor speech displaying the depths of his subjugation because, in his mind, the Republicans can’t win the next election without Trump—and yet they also can’t win unless Trump changes, so Graham keeps trying to change him.
“But,” Woodward and Costa write, as if paraphrasing Graham’s thoughts, “there was no changing him. You just kept the conversation going.”
Is this what Graham’s sellout was all about? Did he inhale too deeply the vapors of power? Was he too rapt by his proximity to the most powerful man in the world? (He wouldn’t be the first politician to swoon in response.) Or was his quest for power rooted in sheer petty selfishness? In his 2020 presidential memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama skewered Graham for his repeated betrayals and runarounds. “You know how in the spy thriller or the heist movie, you’re introduced to the crew at the beginning,” Obama wrote. “Lindsey’s the guy who double-crosses everyone to save his own skin.”
In any case, the sweep of his career reveals that Trump changed Graham more than vice versa. Graham’s delusion on this score was palpable. In his interview with the Times’ Leibovich, Graham noted that when his old friend McCain was facing reelection in 2010, he turned himself into “the most conservative member of the U.S. Senate.” Leibovich wrote: “That was the race in which McCain claimed that he never embraced the ‘maverick’ label, and people were asking, ‘What happened to John McCain?’ Graham chuckled at the memory.”
But Graham omitted the real punch line to this story—that, in the end, a year before he died, McCain cast the crucial nay vote against Trump’s measure to kill Obamacare. He rekindled Trump’s burning hatred for that vote—but also recovered a bit of his reputation as a principled politician.
Graham shuttles off this mortal coil with no such vindication. Many are asking “What happened to Lindsey Graham?,” but nobody is chuckling.
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