By Nick Catoggio
Monday, July 13, 2026
Writing about the death of a politician for whom one
didn’t have high regard is tricky. You don’t want to pull your punches, but
neither do you want to kick the casket. The task is to be fair without tipping
into churlishness or mawkishness.
So let’s be fair to Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died
suddenly on Saturday at age 71.
It’s a testament to his immense personal charm that
Democrats who knew him didn’t try to conceal their affection for him in
remembrances this weekend. In an era where “good riddance” is the default
grassroots (and presidential!) response to a political enemy’s passing,
figures like Cory Booker, Amy
Klobuchar, and Al Franken gushed about the Graham they knew.
Political reporters plainly liked him as well, which
stands to reason given how much good copy he supplied them with. And the voters
of South Carolina seemed helpless to resist: Despite heresies on everything
from legalizing illegal immigrants to fighting climate change to supporting
Democratic Supreme Court nominees, Graham remarkably never had real difficulty
in a Republican primary.
To call him “the quintessential politician of this era” is as much a
compliment as an insult, recognizing his prodigious retail skill and genius for
schmoozing. No wonder Donald Trump, a huckster’s huckster, liked him so much.
Graham was also good to his sister.
If that sounds like I’m damning him with faint praise,
I’m not. I didn’t know the story of his upbringing until I read his obituary
and was moved by how admirably he behaved after his parents died when he was in
his early 20s. His 13-year-old sister was orphaned; Graham, a college student
at the time, promised to care for her and did so. He came home every weekend to be with her in her new home and
effectively raised her during the later years of her childhood, seeing her on
through high school and college.
Not all young men of uncommon ambition would have been as
conscientious. As a senator, he often betrayed the sense that nothing was more
important to him than the clout and relevance that his office had brought him,
but that seems not to have been true. There was at least one thing that was
more important. Graham had a heart, and his sister is lucky that he did.
Let’s say this too for him: Unlike most Republican
politicians in 2026, he believed in things. To the very end, for all his
presidential sycophancy, Graham’s policy preferences remained somewhat more
exalted than “whatever Donald Trump wants at this particular moment.”
It’s appropriate that his final trip abroad was a
visit to Kyiv, the 10th he’d made to show solidarity with its
cause. The gravitational pull of postliberalism at the top of the party never
kept him from siding with foreign populations menaced by authoritarian regimes,
whether in Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan, Cuba, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Sometimes that
was to America’s detriment—it’s true that Graham never met a war he didn’t
like—but it also ensured that there was always an advocate for freedom and
liberalism in the president’s foreign policy circle.
One might even say that, whereas most Republican
officials adapted their beliefs to serve Trump, Graham adapted his view of
Trump to serve his interventionist beliefs. By converting from an outspoken
critic in 2016 to a devoted presidential courtier later, he saw to it that his
policy preferences would continue to carry weight in a party turning against
Reaganism. Perhaps the United States would still be a member of NATO even if
Graham had never made that conversion, but perhaps not.
Being fair to Lindsey Graham requires us to admit all of
that. But it also requires us to ask whether America was better off for his
tenure in the Senate.
The Graham era.
The idea of a “Graham era” in Republican politics lands
awkwardly, not only because senators are one of 100 but because Graham’s time
in the Senate almost perfectly bisects two much more clearly defined eras. He
was elected to the chamber in 2002, at the height of George W. Bush’s post-9/11
“war on terror” popularity, and died 11 years after Trumpism supplanted Bushism
as the right’s dominant, uh, “ideology.”
There’s a Bush era and a Trump era, but was there really
a Graham era?
I think so. For one thing, every obituary written about
him this weekend (including
our own) zeroed in on his outsized influence in the Senate. Graham craved relevance
over policy and pulled every lever within reach to exercise it—scoring high
positions on key committees, wooing Trump, cultivating friendships with
Democrats, involving himself with various bipartisan “gangs” to support
legislation, and making himself ubiquitous in media. (He was scheduled to
appear on Meet the Press on Sunday morning for the 64th time.)
Much of what came out of the Senate since 2003 had his
fingerprints on it to some extent. “In South Carolina, Washington and
especially overseas, he wielded enormous influence over federal spending, the
courts and national security,” Politico’s Jonathan Martin correctly observed.
You tell me: Is America better or worse off with respect
to spending, national security, and the rule of law than it was 23 years ago?
To say that Graham doesn’t bear primary responsibility
for our steep national decline is true, but it’s also true that he either
accelerated or did little to try to reverse the trends that led to it. For
instance, the national debt has more than tripled since he entered
the Senate in 2003. Do you recall him putting up a determined fuss about
unsustainable spending? Even at the height of the Tea Party era, when shrinking
government was all the rage, he wasn’t a vociferous Freedom Caucus-style
deficit hawk or crusading Paul Ryan-esque entitlement reformer.
His passion was foreign policy. He and his friend John
McCain were the Senate’s most reliable and outspoken hawks, a good thing to be
at the start of the war on terror and an increasingly less good thing to be
with every year that followed. By 2019, majorities of Americans (and veterans)
agreed that neither the Afghanistan or Iraq wars that Graham championed had
been worth fighting. On Saturday, the day the senator died, the war in Iran
that he likewise supported was polling at 36.1 percent.
To war skeptics on the left and right he became a poster
boy for knee-jerk kill-’em-all interventionism, the sort of militarist who
would subordinate anything—including First Amendment rights—to the fight. The ironic
legacy of the many Middle East misadventures that he favored might well be a
strong bipartisan tilt toward isolationism in the post-Graham era, replete with
a lasting rupture in America’s alliance with Israel.
What about the rule of law? How did Graham do there?
In some ways, not bad. He was one of a few Republicans to
vote to confirm Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and
Elena Kagan, reasoning that a president from the other party is owed some
deference when his candidates are obviously qualified. That was a small gesture
toward protecting the court’s prestige by declining to impose a raw partisan
litmus test for a seat on it.
He also helped put hundreds of talented conservative
lawyers on the bench, some of whom ended up ruling against his buddy Donald
during the coup plot of 2021. That includes Brett Kavanaugh, for whom Graham
famously (or infamously, depending on your politics) went to bat in 2018 when
Kavanaugh was accused on thin evidence of a sexual assault decades earlier.
Yet as Trump began adding political flunkies to the mix
of Federalist Society types who typically fill judicial seats during Republican
presidencies, Graham rolled with it. He was the de facto deciding vote in confirming Emil Bove to the 3rd
Circuit despite Bove’s
disqualifying conduct at the Justice Department. And he was gearing up to spearhead the confirmation of Todd Blanche, a man who
should have been impeached
two or three times already, to become attorney general.
The Graham era ends at a moment when populist Republicans
are spoiling to nominate hacks to the bench instead of Amy Coney Barretts because
the hacks will reliably vote the right way. Is there any reason to believe
the senator wouldn’t have gone along with that had he lived?
And here we arrive at the elephant in the room.
The betrayal.
On Monday, the president phoned into Fox News to
memorialize his friend.
Surprisingly, his thoughts turned to the floor speech
that Graham delivered hours after the insurrection on January 6. “Trump and I,
we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. I hate it being this
way,” the senator memorably said at the time, broken glass still strewn across the
floors of the Capitol. “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”
It seemed like a weird thing for Trump to reminisce about
at this moment—but he had a reason. “He had one bad moment,” the president said of Graham on Fox. “That was the January 6 thing when
he stood up, ‘Alright, now I’ve had it, that’s it, I can’t do it anymore.’ And
then he called me 40 minutes later and said, ‘Did I really say that? I can’t
believe it!’ and he took it back. So I give him 99 instead of 100.”
Do I believe that Lindsey Graham phoned Trump to make
nice less than an hour after declaring on national television that his
relationship with the architect of a failed coup was over? I sure do. One
hundred percent.
That’s who he was. There’s no way around this: Graham, a
champion of democracy and liberalism abroad, betrayed democracy and liberalism
in America to preserve his own clout as authoritarians consolidated power over
his party and, to a lesser degree, the country.
That’s another reason why I think a “Graham era” in
politics is coherent. It’s useful shorthand for how the Republican
establishment navigated its party’s devolution from a conservative party into a
postliberal one. Graham wasn’t the only Reaganite in Washington who learned to
love (or pretend to love) Trumpism—Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and especially Marco
Rubio are other obvious examples—but those three each entered Congress during
the Tea Party era, after populism had already ignited.
Graham was a true old-guard conservative, a refugee of
the Bush era, and therefore someone like Mitt Romney or (to a much lesser
extent) Mitch McConnell whom one might have expected to evince chronic
discomfort with the Trumpist project. Except for rare moments like the evening
of January 6, he never did. He’s a (literal) case study in how the “respectable” right
reconciled itself to a fascist project.
You can rationalize that if you like as the least bad
option in a very bad situation. That’s what Graham himself did when reporter Mark Leibovich asked him in 2019 why he had become a
dependable ally of a man whom he had rightly deplored three years earlier. To “try to be
relevant,” the senator replied. What’s the wiser course for a lawmaker worried
about America sinking into autocracy? Fighting a fruitless civic-minded battle
against the autocrat and landing in obscurity, as Liz Cheney did? Or cuddling
up to him and steering his thinking in a better direction, as Graham supposedly
tried to do?
We can debate that, I suppose. The problem is, the
senator rarely seemed terribly worried about the whole “sinking into autocracy”
thing.
If you want to believe that Graham selflessly maneuvered
his way into becoming a presidential golf partner through gritted teeth because
he cared just that much about protecting America from Trump’s worst
policy impulses, feel free. I lean toward the simpler “Graham relished being a
bigshot and knew he’d be primaried into oblivion if he didn’t kiss Trump’s ass”
theory myself.
But even under the first theory, we’re left with a
politician who valued policy wins more highly than he valued the constitutional
order. Trump turned the DOJ into a
Department of Retribution, turned ICE into a masked
goon squad, turned Congress into
a Duma by seizing power over
tariffs and refusing to enforce federal statutes, and turned the
pro-democracy foreign policy vision Graham supported into a sleazy shakedown racket. He did it all amid a stupendous
orgy of personal corruption. And Graham tolerated every bit of it because,
in the end, he got the big bombing campaign against Iran that he always dreamed
of.
That’s how he earned a 99 out of 100 on the loyal-crony
scale, a test no American patriot should—or should want to—ace.
That’s also what makes him “the quintessential politician of this era,” to borrow Anne
Applebaum’s apt phrase again. Graham’s political journey was the conservative
movement’s journey: Forced to choose between a leader who offered them power
and policy wins on the one hand and Founding ideals like democracy and
separation of powers on the other, conservatives were clear and shockingly
untroubled in their choice. Not since 2016 did Graham or most of the Reaganite
remnant writ large ever seem particularly troubled by the supposedly wrenching
decision Trump had thrust on them.
We’ll never know how Lindsey Graham might have reacted to
the president trying to meddle in this fall’s midterms to overturn Democratic
victories. But based on how he, and movement conservatives, reacted the last time Trump tried something like that, we
can guess. We’ll also never know whether he had moments of remorse about his
decision to accommodate Trumpism rather than oppose it, but that’s a pretty
easy guess as well. By choosing as he did, Graham maximized his chances of
being remembered now that he’s gone. How many of the president’s critics can
say the same?
There were many days over the past 10 years when I would
have told you that, between his rabid hawkishness and his betrayal of patriotic
values in relentlessly normalizing Trump, he was the worst senator in
Washington. But I don’t think we need to be that harsh. We can leave it at
this: No politician embodied the soul of modern conservatism quite like Lindsey
Graham did. Rest in peace.
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