U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) addresses the crowd during a 2024 election campaign event in Columbia, South Carolina, in 2023.LOGAN CYRUS/AFP/Getty Images
Lindsey Graham often shocked the American political world when he was in the Senate. Even more so by his sudden death Saturday.
The veteran senator of South Carolina − a foreign-policy hawk, protégé of one Republican presidential nominee (John McCain), critic of another (Donald Trump) and finally a Trump loyalist − was 71.
Though regarded as a Republican leader from a conservative state, Mr. Graham was in a broader sense a barometer of both modern conservatism and the 21st-century Republican Party. And, like a barometer, Mr. Graham, who flourished in the sealed chamber of insider Republican politics and whose last telephone call may have been with Mr. Trump, responded to the atmospheric pressures of the time.
His death has important implications for his state, the Senate, Mr. Trump and the Republicans’ prospects for retaining control on Capitol Hill.
The Senate Republican caucus, in an uneasy majority that at Mr. Graham’s death could not afford four GOP defections in votes along party lines, had already been hampered by the long, unexplained absence of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who was a Republican loyalist in his years as party floor leader but who veered into ardent Trump skepticism after the Capitol insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.
U.S. Republican Senator and close Trump ally Lindsey Graham dies at 71
Mr. McConnell’s empty seat reduced the GOP majority to a precarious level, and the absence of another Republican, temporary as it may be, diminishes the party’s power even more. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster almost certainly will swiftly appoint an interim replacement − the eventual Republican nominee for the fall election will be chosen in a special primary on Aug. 11 − but the departure of Mr. Graham’s stentorian pro-Trump voice in Senate debates will be apparent.
Like the other states of the Old Confederacy, South Carolina moved from reliably Democrat to just as reliably Republican in the last generation, at least in statewide and presidential contests. As the state where the secession movement of the early 1860s began, it has a tradition of vocal lawmakers who, even as Democrats such as senator Strom Thurmond, who later became a Republican, were strong conservatives.
Mr. Graham began his career in the state legislature and, as a member of the House of Representatives, was one of the managers of the impeachment of president Bill Clinton.
In nearly a third of a century on Capitol Hill, Mr. Graham flirted with the rump of Republican liberalism and then hardened his views into conventional conservatism before adopting the tenets, spirit and rhetoric of the MAGA movement, first with grudging acceptance, then in enthusiastic embrace.
Mr. Graham’s journey from the McCain circle to the Trump movement was no horizontal line. Indeed, it was marked by political zigs and zags that were even more extreme than those of the large majority of his colleagues − though at his death he and those GOP colleagues had settled firmly in the Trump camp.
Mr. Graham was a barometer of both modern conservatism and the 21st-century Republican Party, David Shribman writes.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images
He was so closely identified with Mr. McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, that he, along with Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, constantly seemed to be at the hip of the Vietnam-era prisoner-of-war. “From the time he and Dad met, they were fast friends and political comrades,” Meghan McCain wrote in a Washington Post essay Sunday. “There are few memories I have of my father’s political career and my life accompanying it that don’t somehow involve Lindsey.”
Mr. Graham ran for president himself in 2016 and was a prominent critic of Mr. Trump, so much so that the New York billionaire, whom Mr. Graham had called a “jackass” for disparaging Mr. McCain’s ordeal in the “Hanoi Hilton” prison, expressed his contempt for his nomination rival by calling him an “idiot” and reading aloud Mr. Graham’s private cellphone number, urging Trump supporters to hector him.
So affronted by Mr. Trump, Mr. Graham − who once asked, “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell” − announced that he would vote neither for his party’s nominee nor for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. “I think Donald Trump is going to places where very few people have gone,” he said, “and I’m not going with him.”
But Mr. Graham, who tended to be attracted to political mavericks such as Mr. McCain, eventually did go with him, becoming, to cop a term from the left, a fellow traveller on the MAGA political highway.
Whether by convenience or conviction, he took up the Trump agenda and adopted the Trump brand of muscular language. The two often played golf together, and on Sunday the President characterized him “as a true American Patriot … one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known.”
The early alliance between the two had come to an abrupt but temporary end after the riot at the Capitol. Mr. Graham reacted to the rebellion by saying of Mr. Trump and his supporters: “Count me out.” In a Senate speech, he said he had “never been so humiliated and embarrassed for the country” − a view that he, like many of his colleagues, later moderated. Eventually, like nearly all of them, he wandered back into the Trump camp.