Lindsey Graham and the passing of an era

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I’m not really into dunking on people when they’re dead, but I do think that the passing of prominent politicians gives us a good opportunity to reflect on what they represented. It lets us understand better what has changed over their lifetimes and careers, which in turn allows us to understand our own futures better.

South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham just passed away unexpectedly. At a time when we were all waiting for a news alert about Senator Mitch McConnell, who has been mysteriously hospitalized for weeks, Graham’s sudden death came as something of a shock.

Graham was a pretty famous senator - not exactly a household name, but the sort of person that interested news consumers have probably heard of, even overseas. He was very much a creature of Washington, his influence depending on his positions on Senate committees and his national media megahorn. There was no grassroots movement of Lindsay Graham fanatics, and when he tried to run for president in 2016 he had to drop out during the invisible primary.1

Graham was mostly known for his hawkish views on foreign policy, which is a polite way of saying that there were a lot of countries that he wanted to bomb. He was one of the most outspoken hawks in the GOP even when it was a party of hawks. His priorities were the containment of Russia and China and imposing regime change on countries like Iran and Venezuela. He and Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman used to be known as the “Three Amigos” and would travel the world together advocating for various interventions.

Before Trump ran for the presidency in 2016, this is where Graham was: a senator known mostly for his hawkish foreign policy views, otherwise lacking much national influence, and never having chaired a Senate committee. Then everything started to change for him.

The fact that Graham decided after 2016 to suck up to Trump despite bitterly denouncing him during the campaign is often remarked upon. But this was only the most visible way that Graham changed direction. He also changed the things that he was interested in, and the sorts of things he tried to do in the Senate.

Out was bipartisan immigration reform, of which he had previously been a champion. Out also was relying mostly on his foreign policy views to get him attention - Trump 1.0 was, after all, fairly dovish. Graham instead started to become involved in nuts-and-bolts aspects of implementing the Republican agenda in the Senate. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he helped to steer Brett Kavanaugh through his shocking confirmation hearing to become a Supreme Court justice. He also played a major role in Trump’s tax cut bills both in 2017 and in 2025, latterly as chair of the powerful Senate Budget Committee.

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In this guise, Graham was helping keep Trump’s trains running on time, albeit on matters on which there is broad consensus among pretty much all Republicans. This meant going along with the general chaos and maliciousness of the Trump era, and being an enabler of it. Graham obviously thought this was worth it because of the influence it gave him with Trump.

That influence was strange, and I think it’s one of the most revealing things about what Graham represented. Prior to 2016 he was, in almost every way, a representative of tendencies within the GOP that Trump rejected. He was a foreign policy hawk and an immigration dove. He was part of the old establishment that Trump wanted to take on. But he could also clearly offer Trump something that he wanted, which I think was to have that establishment ultimately see the light and embrace him.

Do a thought experiment: of all of the major political figures who Trump is known to actually listen to and respect, how many of them are old-school and how many of them are MAGA Johnny-come-latelies? I don’t think that Trump ever calls up Josh Hawley or Tommy Tuberville and asks them what to do. Frankly, I don’t even think he calls up J.D. Vance. But he did call up Graham. He played golf with him, talked to him often, and seemed to be swayed by him when making decisions, at least sometimes. Something within Trump was drawn to this older establishment, to men he could regard as peers even if he had also once defeated them.

Unfortunately, the advice Graham gave Trump was often been very bad. Graham pushed very hard for this current war with Iran, and the world - including Trump - would have been better off if the president hadn’t listened. This isn’t really a story of the “adults in the room” influencing Trump for the better: in fact, quite the reverse.

But Graham’s passing is still significant. Slowly, the ranks of senior Republican Party politicians who were shaped by a different era are fading away. Future crops will never have even experienced a more bipartisan Senate or a media environment defined by CNN and The New York Times rather than Newsmax and TikTok. They will likely be flexible and cynical like Graham often was, but their starting points will be very different. They will care about different things, and have different priorities and hatreds. Trump won’t be around much longer either, and so they’ll be appealing to a different president - one of their own, perhaps J.D. Vance.

It will be a very different world. Graham’s passing hastens its arrival.