The Lesson Future Generations of Americans Will Learn from Lindsey Graham

Students of Congress know there are different types of senators. Some are club members who crave popularity and the status that comes from belonging to one of the world’s most exclusive legislative bodies. Some are ideologues, while others are delegates focused on delivering for their states. And some are wheelers-and-dealers who throw themselves into the middle of every political dispute that arises, mixing it up with and collecting chits from their fellow members in order to both shape policy and remain relevant to the policymaking process.

Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who passed away last weekend, was one of those wheelers-and-dealers.

Wheelers-and-dealers often have a bad reputation among the public. They’re viewed as opportunistic, back-slapping pols with shit-eating grins who slip between backrooms cobbling together compromised legislation. Voters perceive them as less interested in doing good than with just getting something/anything done, which can make it seem like they’re mainly concerned with casting themselves as towering, indispensable legislators.

In truth, however, without wheelers-and-dealers, not much would get done in the Senate. Here’s something people don’t like to admit: Politics is a game. We deny that fact because we want to believe politics should exclusively be about the high-minded pursuit of the public good. I’m all for the public good, but people have different views of the public good, and if we expect legislators to pursue their honest, dispassionate view of the public good at the expense of all others, our legislative process would calcify. Politics is set up as a space in which we can debate and work through these differences and hopefully build some sort of coalition that will allow us to address public problems. No one gets to impose his or her will on everyone else; instead, they need to work with, persuade, and compromise with others to reach a solution that at least a majority can sign-off on.

Wheelers-and-dealers understand this is what they need to do to (as one of my undergrad political science professors would often say) “get things done” in politics. They have their own agenda, but realize that fulfilling that agenda means playing the political game. They gleefully throw themselves into the political process as both problem-makers and problem-solvers. By positioning themselves as problem-makers (roadblocks, if you will) they compel other politicians to deal with them if they hope to pass their own bills. By building up connections and relationships, they position themselves as problem-solvers, someone their peers turn to when Congress needs to pass legislation and who consequently gets to play an outsize role shaping that legislation. Because they’re always dropping themselves into the political mix, wheelers-and-dealers have the potential to exercise a lot of power and influence in Congress.

By all accounts, Lindsey Graham was a quintessential wheeler-and-dealer. You could see this last week in the remembrances of many senate Democrats, who shared stories of working alongside Graham on countless issues. They described him as someone they enjoyed working with and who took great joy in his work as a senator. It was game recognizing game, as they saw Graham not so much as an ideological opponent but a sparring partner, someone certainly motivated by his own conservative political goals but willing to go a few rounds to see if they could somehow work together. (South Carolina Republicans censured Graham in 2009 for his willingness to work with Democrats, but that censure didn’t result in a primary challenge when he ran for re-election in 2014, and that was even after refusing to “pander” to the Tea Party.) He was also beloved by the media for his willingness to appear on Sunday morning talk shows to stir the political punchbowl. (Perhaps too willing: Graham reportedly put off going to the doctor the day he died so he could appear on Meet the Press the following morning.) Graham’s passing is like losing the star of a TV drama.

But Lindsey Graham was far from a lion of the Senate. Perhaps he could have become one had he served in an earlier, less polarized time when members were more willing to work with one another across the aisle. As it stands, Graham has few major legislative accomplishments to his name. He helped shepherd Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill across the finish line, but that was party-line legislation. It was also bad legislation, as it exploded the deficit in order to carry out the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history. As for his wheeling-and-dealing, he couldn’t get major bipartisan climate change or immigration legislation to President Obama’s desk, although he did help pass a modest gun-control bill into law in 2022. Graham was instrumental in a number of deals made to avoid or end government shutdowns, but giving Graham credit for that is like praising a quarterback for convincing his team not to take another delay-of-game penalty.

Pundits have cited his efforts to confirm Trump nominees to the federal bench as a major part of his legacy, but I’m pretty sure that would have happened even if South Carolina had sent a sock puppet to the Senate in his place. My most vivid memory of Graham on the Judiciary Committee was his bilious defense of Brett Kavanaugh following Kavanaugh’s disqualifying self-defense following accusations of sexual assault during his confirmation hearing. That performance tore any remaining respect I had for Graham to shreds.

Graham left his biggest impression on foreign policy, but his hawkish record here (again) is not great. To his credit, he has been a supporter of Ukraine. But he was also a strong backer of the war in Iraq and was one of the main cheerleaders for Trump’s enormously stupid war with Iran. His steadfast support of Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas and Hezbollah not only looks worse and worse by the day but now feels like a years-long act of deception. Graham was so enamored with war and unconcerned with its human cost one has to wonder if he was simply bloodthirsty.

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But if history remembers Graham for anything, it will be as the politician who sold his soul not once but twice to Don Trump.

It was a surprising turn for Graham, who had spent the first sixteen years of his senate tenure playing Goose to John McCain’s Maverick, the conductor of the Straight Talk Express, a man known for his patriotism and willingness to defy his party. With McCain as his model, Graham entered the 2016 Republican presidential primary to bring some sense to the debate stage. He never stood a chance of winning, but once Trump descended that escalator and began gaining momentum, Graham shifted his fire to take the insurgent candidate he considered “unfit for office” down. After Trump declared McCain wasn’t a war hero because he’d been captured, Graham slammed Trump as a “jackass.” Trump responded by calling Graham a “lightweight” and an “idiot” and then read off Graham’s private cell phone number during a press conference. Before the year was out, Graham ended his campaign, but before doing so, he appeared on CNN to say, “[Trump’s] a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for….And you know how to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” In May 2016, Graham announced he would vote for neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton, stating, “I think Donald Trump is going to places where very few people have gone and I’m not going with him.” He ultimately voted for third-party candidate Evan McMullin.

Within two years, however, Graham experienced a change of heart. In January 2018, Graham announced, “I said [Trump] was a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot. I ran out of adjectives. Well, the American people spoke, and they rejected my analysis,” as if Trump’s actions had not proven Graham’s prophecy true, as if public opinion can erase the facts on the ground, as if the American people had actually rejected his analysis. (Not only did millions of Americans vote against Trump because he was a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot, but millions of Americans voted for Trump despite of or precisely for those reasons.) Graham had realized he wouldn’t be able to play the game he so dearly loved if he stood up to Trump, so he sucked up to him instead, even if that meant selling out his core principles.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Graham became one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders. When Trump began to falsely claim the election had been stolen from him, Graham went on television to defend Trump’s subversion. He went so far as to call Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to encourage him to reject all mail-in ballots from counties with high rates of questionable ballot signatures. A grand jury would recommend indicting Graham for election interference over that call, but he was never charged.

Trump’s deceit culminated in the January 6 insurrection. After order had been restored, Graham broke off his love affair with Trump on the floor of the Senate. “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” he said, “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” Even though Graham would vote “not guilty” during Trump’s second impeachment trial, it seemed like Graham had finally disowned Trump.

Within months, however, Graham had returned to Trump’s camp. “Can [the Republican Party] move forward without President Trump? The answer is no,” Graham said just four months after January 6. “I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.” Apparently, Graham never asked himself if a Republican Party commandeered by a “xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot” deserved to grow or if it ought to be chopped down. When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, Graham became Trump’s main conduit to the Senate. After Graham won his primary this year with Trump’s endorsement, Graham’s gratitude for Trump fell just short of the praise typically reserved for the divine: “I want to start with a bunch of thank you’s. I want to thank the big guy, God. Trump comes later. Mr. President, you’re not far behind God, but we’re going to start with Him.”

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Perhaps Graham concluded the most principled thing he could do as a senator was to not sacrifice his career by defying Trump but to stay in the game in order to manage Trump. If that’s the case, however, he failed. Trump is far more reckless now than when he first became president, and far more reckless the more Graham’s influence in Trump’s circle has grown. Even though Graham foresaw exactly the kind of president Trump would become as far back as 2015, his loyalty to Trump only deepened as Trump lived up to Graham’s expectations. Graham’s great passion as a senator was foreign policy, but Trump’s support for Ukraine has been anywhere from lukewarm to hostile while his posture toward NATO threatens to destroy the United States’ most important foreign alliance. Maybe Graham got exactly what he wanted from Trump when it came to Iran and Israel, but that doesn’t recommend Graham’s foreign policy judgment. If Graham wants some credit for Trump’s foreign policy accomplishments, then he also bears responsibility for severely diminishing the United States’ stature and prestige on the world stage and perhaps even setting in motion the United States’ fall as the world’s dominant power.

Here’s the damning thing, though: If Lindsey Graham was such a great wheeler-and-dealer, why didn’t he use his political gifts to play against Trump rather than with Trump? That’s what a man of great integrity and patriotism would have done—even one as devoted to the conservative agenda as Graham—and he would have done so even if that meant fighting and losing the good fight. Graham could have put country ahead of party and found a way to lead a Republican charge against Trump. He could have ended Trump’s political career once and for all after January 6 by rallying his colleagues behind an impeachment vote and a criminal investigation into Trump. At the end of the day, however, whatever principles Graham brought to the job were washed away by his desire to be politically relevant, to play the political game, to become one of Washington DC’s great wheelers-and-dealers. It didn’t matter one bit if the United States was a democracy or a despotic regime, just so long as Goose had himself a piece of the political action.

American politics needs wheelers-and-dealers, but it also needs those wheelers-and-dealers constrained by moral lines they won’t cross. Graham crossed those lines. That’s an awful legacy.

Years from now, Lindsey Graham will not be remembered for the little amount of major legislation he had a hand in passing or for the many times he appeared on political talk shows. He won’t be remembered as a great legislative wheeler-and-dealer since his wheeling and dealing accomplished nothing that was great. No, once we put this terrible era behind us and come to terms with how close we came to democratic collapse in this country, Graham will be remembered as an object lesson in what Americans should not do when confronted by a demagogue with authoritarian aspirations. Trump has secured his spot as the great villain of our time, but he’s the person future generations will be told to be on the lookout for. We can’t prevent that from happening, but we can control how we as individuals respond to such a development. If someone like Trump should arise again, hopefully Americans will have internalized this lesson: Don’t be a Lindsey Graham.