{"id":404,"date":"2026-07-14T12:08:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T12:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=404"},"modified":"2026-07-14T12:08:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T12:08:15","slug":"lindsey-graham-finally-had-exactly-what-he-wanted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=404","title":{"rendered":"Lindsey Graham Finally Had Exactly What He Wanted"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lindsey Graham would have been pleased to know that he would never spend a second of his life as an ex-senator. No one needed to be a senator like Graham, who suddenly died over the weekend, and no one savored it more. In his 2016 presidential run, Graham would campaign about how he, a bachelor with no kids, had no life and would be purely focused on the work. His friends and foes alike\u2014most fell somewhere in between\u2014already knew that well enough. He was exhausting.<\/p>\n

Read more How the Safest Advice in Democratic Politics Fell Apart<\/a><\/p>\n

Graham\u2019s presidential run went nowhere. That was all fine for Graham: He got his fix with bonus cable-news bookings and participated in some debates, and then\u2014phew!\u2014was able to return to being a busybody in the Senate. Graham knew well, unlike a lot of self-deceiving senators, that he was never destined for the presidential game. He was not, to use his own term, an \u201calpha dog.\u201d For most of his career, he found his relevance by attaching himself to those who were. But by the time he left office, he was finally achieving something unlikely: becoming a power center of his own.<\/p>\n

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To simplify things a bit\u2014though not by much\u2014there were two distinct eras of Lindsey Graham\u2019s almost quarter-century in the Senate: the John McCain era, and the Trump era.<\/p>\n

For most of the first 16 years of Graham\u2019s Senate career, McCain was the most famous senator in the United States. The two had a deep and enduring friendship, as both were storytellers and bullshitters with a shared interest in overseas military adventurism. Graham didn\u2019t share McCain\u2019s star-making knack for stabbing his own party on high-profile occasions. He didn\u2019t vote against the Bush tax cuts or take the lead on campaign finance reform or kill the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. But Graham joined McCain on some lighter apostasies, such as his dedication to comprehensive immigration reform\u2014a position that saw Rush Limbaugh nickname the senator \u201cGrahamnesty.\u201d<\/p>\n

The difference in approach between the two was slight but important. Both, we should say, were conservatives who mostly voted with their own party and against the Democrats. But McCain would make sharp, dramatic breaks with his party on key issues as a means of building the \u201cmaverick\u201d image central to his presidential ambitions. Graham just liked\u2014or demanded\u2014being in the mix in the Senate. If there was a \u201cgang\u201d put together to solve a problem, he wanted in on the action, whatever it was. One small but vintage Graham episode I\u2019ll never forget was after the Obamacare repeal failed in 2017, thanks to Graham\u2019s dying friend McCain; the South Carolina senator spearheaded a last-ditch effort to resurrect it despite knowing and confessing that he didn\u2019t understand healthcare policy. Any action was good action.<\/p>\n

2017 was Graham\u2019s transitional year. Despite an outright hostility to Donald Trump during the 2016 election\u2014Graham voted for third-party candidate Evan McMullin that year\u2014he recognized quickly that Trump\u2019s susceptibility to flattery and ideological flexibility made him someone he could do business with. Plus, they got along. That made for some tension within the Graham-McCain relationship. The Arizona senator, unbound by political concerns after having been given a fatal cancer diagnosis, refused to ego-stroke the president in the debasing manner Graham would.<\/p>\n

Read more The Supreme Court Gave Trump a New Way to Break the Government<\/a><\/p>\n

When McCain died in 2018, Graham delivered a tearful remembrance of his friend on the Senate floor and then came up to the press gallery for a question-and-answer session with reporters. I asked him how he had balanced his longtime friendship with McCain with his growing relationship with Trump, considering that McCain and Trump hated each other. Graham acknowledged it had been \u201cchallenging,\u201d then shared what McCain told him of Trump: that Graham should help Trump \u201cwhere you can, just don\u2019t get sucked into all of his bullshit.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be generous: That advice was not often heeded. Graham became one of Trump\u2019s most mocked sycophants. Graham knew he wasn\u2019t fooling anyone in Washington when he would describe Trump as the second coming. Everyone knew the game he was playing, and he knew they knew. He just didn\u2019t care. His fawning over the president and mastery of managing Trump\u2019s mood won him vast influence over policy. It saved his political career, too. It\u2019s remarkable, in the Tea Party and then MAGA environments, that Graham\u2014who had supported various paths to citizenship for immigrants, had put his name on climate change legislation, had voted for Democratic Supreme Court nominations, and had faced persistent rumors about his sexual orientation\u2014was coasting to his fifth Senate term. But Trump\u2019s good graces will do remarkable things in Republican primaries.<\/p>\n

It all paid off for Graham this year, when he successfully converted Trump to a military interventionist. (How well this has worked for everyone else is a separate question.) But few have ever been more hyped than Lindsey Graham was on Air Force One after the capture of Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, as he fantasized over escapades to come in Cuba, Iran, Colombia, and wherever else he could steer Trump.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s interventions have Lindsey Graham\u2019s fingerprints on them as much as anyone else\u2019s. As Sen. Rand Paul, Graham\u2019s Senate Republican foreign policy foil, said following the Venezuela operation, \u201cThere should be a law that Lindsey Graham can only go to the White House every other week.\u201d Graham spent the months leading up to the Iran invasion flying, of his own volition, between Israel and the Gulf states, where he knows everyone, getting the pieces in places and coaching actors on how to manage Trump. He performed a similar role of coach to the Ukrainian government and to NATO countries as he worked to maintain some semblance of an interest in maintaining the Trump administration\u2019s support for the country.<\/p>\n

Graham, for better and worse, had built up a fiefdom for himself in foreign policy, similar to the way McCain or other old Senate lions had. Leaders of other countries went to him, a well-recognized fact of life in the United States Senate, when they needed something. It wasn\u2019t, and still isn\u2019t, clear that it was in Trump\u2019s policy or political interest to start a war with Iran. Graham convinced him to do it anyway. Graham was, rhetorically, almost pathetically in Trump\u2019s thrall, heaping flattery onto a president who\u2019d once posted Graham\u2019s phone number online for mass harassment. But in the most consequential foreign policy decision of Trump\u2019s presidency to date, it was Graham who held sway. Who, then, was the sidekick in that relationship?<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s Latest Iran Escalation Comes With a Corrupt New Twist<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He got the war with Iran he’d pursued for years, and something he wanted even more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":403,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10,203,202,45],"class_list":["post-404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-donald-trump","tag-john-mccain","tag-lindsey-graham","tag-senate"],"yoast_head":"\nLindsey Graham Finally Had Exactly What He Wanted - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=404\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lindsey Graham Finally Had Exactly What He Wanted - Home Move Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"He got the war with Iran he'd pursued for years, and something he wanted even more.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=404\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Home Move Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-14T12:08:15+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=404#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=404\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/75d86f25dbb870f24983ccc831d1ec4e\"},\"headline\":\"Lindsey Graham Finally Had Exactly What He Wanted\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-14T12:08:15+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=404\"},\"wordCount\":1157,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=404#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/2fdc8acdb07b22b2e49ea4e2af5f6acc.avif\",\"keywords\":[\"Donald Trump\",\"John McCain\",\"Lindsey Graham\",\"Senate\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=404#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=404\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=404\",\"name\":\"Lindsey Graham Finally Had Exactly What He Wanted - 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