Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who spent 24 years building influence across the Senate's most consequential committees while navigating the turbulent politics of the Trump era, has died. He was 71.
Mr. Graham had just returned from Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during his 10th visit since Russia's 2022 invasion. Zelenskyy praised him as a "true defender of freedom" and credited him with securing renewed American military aid commitments.
The trip encapsulated Graham's enduring worldview: an unshakeable belief in American military strength, deep skepticism of Russia, and conviction that weakness abroad invites disaster at home. "Putin will not stop in Ukraine," he declared. "To be weak in Ukraine means you lose in Taiwan."
His transformation from fierce Trump critic to reliable ally stands as perhaps his most significant legacy, a microcosm of the Republican Party's own upheaval over the past decade.
In 2015, as he mounted his own presidential campaign, Graham called Trump a "jackass" for disparaging Senator John McCain's military service, labeled him a "race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot," and warned the party would be "destroyed" if it nominated him. Trump responded by releasing Graham's private phone number to his followers and dismissing him as a lightweight. When Trump won the 2016 nomination, Graham cast his ballot for independent Evan McMullin.
Everything shifted in March 2017 when Trump invited Graham to lunch. The senator emerged joking that he had given the president his new phone number. "Trump is committed to rebuilding our military, which is music to my ears," Graham tweeted. They became golfing partners.
From that moment forward, Graham inhabited a narrow political space between his reputation as a serious institutionalist and Trump's reconstruction of the Republican Party. "There is a dark side to Trump," he told the BBC in 2023, "but I am sticking with him."
The balancing act required constant recalibration. When Trump attacked President Joe Biden, Graham called the Democrat "one of the finest people I know" while remaining silent as Trump unleashed personal attacks. When the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia's death in 2016 presented itself, Graham played a crucial role in blocking President Barack Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, arguing that such appointments should not occur in an election year. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, Graham, by then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, rushed Trump's nominee Amy Coney Barrett through confirmation in just over a week, before the election that Biden won.
Graham's influence stemmed from his positions on the Senate's most powerful committees. During his four terms, he served on Foreign Relations, Judiciary (which he chaired from 2019 to 2021), and Budget (which he chaired beginning in 2025). Colleagues knew him as a pragmatic negotiator capable of reaching across the aisle, a reputation earned through work with Democrats like Joe Lieberman and John Kerry on climate policy and with Biden on bipartisan legislation.
His hawkish foreign policy placed him squarely in the camp of Lieberman and McCain, the trio dubbed "The Three Amigos." He was a fierce advocate for George W. Bush's Iraq War and argued for permanent occupation of Afghanistan. He became one of Israel's most vocal defenders in Congress, echoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's calls for military action against Iran's nuclear program. When accusations of genocide in Gaza arose, Graham told International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan that the court "is for Africa."
Lindsey Olin Graham was born in 1955 in Central, South Carolina, where his parents ran a restaurant called the Sanitary Cafe. He attended the University of South Carolina on a military ROTC scholarship, earning a degree in psychology in 1977 and a law degree in 1981. After his mother died shortly after his undergraduate graduation and his father died soon after law school, Graham became guardian of his younger sister, Darline.
He served as a Judge Advocate General officer in the Air Force, including a posting as chief prosecutor in Europe from 1984 to 1989. Returning to South Carolina, he worked as a private attorney before serving as assistant county attorney and city attorney of Central. During the Gulf War, he returned to active duty.
Graham entered electoral politics in 1992, winning a state House seat. In 1994, backed by conservative Senator Strom Thurmond and riding the Republican Revolution wave, he defeated Democrat Butler Derrick for a U.S. House seat. In the House, he led a revolt against Speaker Newt Gingrich and filed the first impeachment papers against President Bill Clinton.
When Thurmond retired in 2002, Graham won the Republican nomination unopposed and easily succeeded him in the Senate. He won re-election three times by comfortable margins. His 2018 defense of Brett Kavanaugh during the Supreme Court nominee's confirmation hearing, when the judge faced sexual assault allegations, brought speculation he might position himself as a successor to Jeff Sessions as attorney general, but he remained in the Senate. He had just won a contested primary to secure a fifth term.
He is survived by his sister.
Author James Rodriguez: "Graham showed that political transformation in the Trump era was less about ideology than survival instinct, but his decades championing American power abroad remained unwavering."
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