The things Lindsey Graham must have told himself to get by are many. That deep down, Donald Trump’s heart was in the right place. That he was helping the country. That his old friend John McCain would have understood. That he was the same Lindsey Graham he’d always been.
The late GOP senator from South Carolina died suddenly on Saturday evening at the age of 71 due to an aortic dissection, a death that would have mercifully been fast. The more poetic among us might find a metaphor there; the major artery to Graham’s heart was literally torn in two.
But that was not the only division he encountered. There existed two Lindsey Grahams: a pre-2017 version who consistently placed himself at the center of bipartisan dealmaking that no longer really exists on Capitol Hill, and the one who came after — who plotted his political troth to a man who regards compromise as weakness, and whose anti-democratic instincts sometimes seem to resemble the very autocrats Graham often pushed to overthrow.
The first Graham showcased how the ability to compartmentalize in politics can be a great gift — a nod to the old maxim that today’s enemy might be tomorrow’s friend. Five years after his election to the House in 1994 as part of the so-called Gingrich Revolution, Graham made his name as an impeachment manager during the 1999 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. But that didn’t stop him from teaming up with Democratic New York Sen. Hillary Clinton after his election to the Senate in 2002.
Together he and Clinton cofounded and cochaired the Senate Manufacturing Caucus, traveled abroad together on congressional delegations, and partnered on climate policy and healthcare initiatives. “Lindsey was good company,” Clinton told Howard Stern in 2019, “he was funny, he was self-deprecating. He also believed in climate change back in those days.”
Graham also famously attached his star to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and together with Democrat-turned-Independent Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, they became known as the “three amigos,” often working to find bipartisan compromises to address climate change and pass a comprehensive immigration package that included a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Graham’s support for the latter earned him the nickname “Lindsey Grahamnesty” from conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.
This Graham, while still conservative, had guts. When he ran against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2016 election cycle, the senator referred to the political neophyte as a “kook,” a “nut job” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” Graham prophesied that the GOP would be “destroyed . . . and we will deserve it” if Trump won the nomination. In a 2015 CNN interview, Graham offered a memorable rebuttal of Trump’s emerging MAGA brand: “tell[ing] Donald Trump to go to hell,” he said, was the way to make America great again.
But then something changed. In Clinton’s words, “it’s like he had a brain snatch.”
After Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Graham began inserting himself into the new president’s orbit. It was around this time that McCain announced he was fighting terminal brain cancer, and Graham’s bond with Trump seemed to grow in direct proportion to McCain’s precipitous decline. At first it seemed a straightforward Machiavellian move; Graham wanted influence in the new administration. But Trump’s entrance fee of complete fidelity soon became clear, and Graham quickly paid up, becoming his staunchest defender.
The senator’s ability to compartmentalize, once his political superpower, became his ruin, morphing into outright denial. Country-over-party was relegated to the ash heap, and in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss, Graham was working behind the scenes to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a phone call to throw out thousands of legally executed mail-in ballots. (The senator denied this was his intention.)
After the Jan. 6 insurrection, Graham famously denounced Trump on the floor of the Senate, saying that although he and Trump “had a hell of a journey . . . All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”
But of course it wasn’t enough. Graham quickly caught the scent of the winds coming from the far-right and came crawling back to Trump’s side, and since returning, he has stayed there through it all: the gutting of civil and voting rights; the inhumane immigration agenda and deadly shootings by federal immigration agents; attacks on NATO and America’s traditional allies; the dismantling of public services; trade wars that continue to cause economic pain; unprecedented grift; and attacks on the democratic norms, institutions and values that Graham professed to cherish and promoted on the global stage.
It is this second version of Graham that will be remembered by history. A weak man with few principles, save for a commitment to American interventionism; an enabler because he found Trump’s attention “flattering.” (“I have never been called this much by a president in my life,” he told the New York Times’ Mark Leibovich in 2019.) Although Trump has shouldered much of the blame for his war of choice against Iran — which is now raging again after the memorandum of understanding between the countries was broken — it likely would not have happened without Graham whispering seductive promises of historical greatness in the presidential ear.
Arguably more than any other senator, Graham helped make Donald Trump’s America a reality. From functioning as his Senate “whisperer” — which consisted of whipping votes, soothing egos, pressuring holdouts, talking to Democrats and relaying all the intel back to the White House — to ramming the Supreme Court nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett through the Judiciary Committee he chaired, in many ways Donald Trump’s America is also Lindsey Graham’s.
“What happened to me?” Leibovich recorded Graham asking rhetorically at a rally in Greeneville, South Carolina, about rumors he had changed. “Not a damn thing,” the senator said.
But something had. The ability to compartmentalize, a coping skill that is often learned young, can be beneficial. It can also be deeply damaging when it becomes a means of evading the truth.
There has long been speculation that Graham’s capacity for compartmentalizing also extended to his personal life. Never married, publicly partnered or linked romantically with a woman, the senator consistently denied he was gay in the face of barbs, jokes and speculation. (Only a few weeks ago, a photograph circulated online that showed Graham posing on the White House lawn between two shirtless men at the UFC fight. As it turned out, the image was digitally altered.)
Whatever the truth was about his orientation, what cannot be denied is that Graham consistently opposed LGBTQ+ equality. He also courted strong and straight — and unavailable — alpha men to whom he appeared happy to play the beta role of political ingénue. In 2019, he even referred to his relationship with McCain as “a political marriage.”
From the outside, he seemed to be attempting to fill an internal need. Perhaps it stemmed from having lost his parents in quick succession when he had barely entered his 20s, or maybe it was from being drawn to older men and finding safety in both their proximity and unavailability. With McCain, and even with Lieberman, this seemed natural. Both were mavericks, and Graham 1.0 had an independent streak.
But in attaching himself to Trump, Graham revealed he was eager to debase himself. In the end, that became his downfall.
