U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who passed away this weekend at age 71, was a pivotal figure in the transformation of the modern Republican Party over the past decade. While he wasn’t exactly the architect of the Trump era, that era likely doesn’t happen without a few Lindsey Grahams in the mix.
As many have noted, Graham was among Donald Trump’s harshest critics — and also a competing candidate — at the beginning of the 2016 Republican nomination cycle. He was fairly genteel toward most of the other 15 candidates running, but he singled out Trump for an especially harsh assessment. As he memorably warned in May of 2016, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it.”
Like much of the rest of his party’s leadership, Graham proved powerless to prevent Trump’s nomination, and he vowed not to vote for Trump in November of 2016. But Graham found his way to befriending Trump in 2017 and soon became one of Trump’s staunchest defenders and advocates in Congress.
This was a fascinating transition for Graham. Over the decades, even while maintaining a conservative voting record, he had developed a reputation for maintaining friendships across party lines and generally being one of the more congenial members of the Senate. He maintained long friendships with the likes of Joe Biden and John McCain. There’s a reason so many elected officials are speaking of him this week with such affection. And Graham even cast the occasional bipartisan vote while working with Democratic friends. As I demonstrate in my book, Lindsey Graham holds the record for the most censures by local Republican organizations — mainly for working with Democrats.
In that light, Graham’s turn toward Trump in 2017 was especially jarring. People have offered all sorts of theories to explain why that happened — his search for a new best friend once McCain fell ill, perhaps some sort of blackmail or Russian kompromat, etc.
Honestly I find all these theories a bit silly and needlessly complicated. Graham’s transformation was the same as that of most Republican elected officials, just perhaps a bit more visible. Graham, like many others, had legitimately tried to prevent Trump’s takeover of the party. When that failed, he waited to see if the broader electorate would stop Trump. When that didn’t happen, he waited to see if the larger institutional party would freeze Trump out once Trump was in office. That obviously didn’t happen, either. So Graham recognized that Trump was simply in charge of the country’s majority party. And he faced the simple choice: be Trump’s friend and try to stay in the limelight and get some policy goals done, or retire.
Graham’s befriending of Trump was instructive in a number of ways. For one thing, while Graham certainly took on many of Trump’s policy goals, the conversion was far more stylistic than substantive. Indeed, Graham is part of the reason the United States is still providing some aid to Ukraine, even while the President openly spouts Russian propaganda.
Graham’s befriending of Trump also demonstrated how cheaply Trump’s backing could be bought. Graham had described Trump as “unfit for office” and likened his nomination to “being shot in the head.” His tweet about Trump destroying the Republican Party is still up on X. Trump surely knows all this. But when Graham was willing to bend the knee, say nice things about Trump, and viciously attack the people Trump hated, Trump was more than happy to accept him as one of his most celebrated lieutenants.
I find Graham’s journey following January 6, 2021 to be one of the most useful stories for understanding the modern Republican Party. The night of the January 6th riot, Graham famously spoke in the well of the Senate declaring that this relationship was at an end: “Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. I hate it being this way. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”
Yet within a few months, Graham was starting to take trips to Mar-a-Lago to visit his friend in exile. This was noticed by journalist Jonathan Swan (then of Axios), who interviewed Graham and asked him why he was embracing Trump after so explicitly denouncing him just a few months earlier. As Graham responded:
There’s something about Trump. There’s a dark side and there’s some magic there, and what I’m trying to do is just harness the magic. To me, Donald Trump is sort of a cross between Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan, and P.T. Barnum. It’s just this bigger than life deal. He could make the Republican Party something that nobody else I know can make it. He can make it bigger, he can make it stronger, he can make it more diverse, and he also could destroy it.
That quote contains so much insight. You hear a mainstream leader of the party welcoming the populist because he can deliver victories while assuming that the worst of Trump’s authoritarian instincts can be kept in check (even after an insurrection attempt!). You hear Trump described as a combination of a legendary bigot, a celebrity politician, and a master entertainer/bullshit artist. And you hear the concession that Trump has the power to destroy the party and thus has absolute control over it.
Graham and his compatriots were key for giving Trump access to the broader Republican Party and making his takeover look like a friendly one. However Graham ends up being remembered, and however this era ends up being recalled by history, Graham is one of the reasons it happened.
Excellent job presenting Graham not as some unique evil or saint, rather your average GOP politician in a party that went off the deep end. However, I will say that I have less sympathy for him as he was in a position of power long enough where he is in part responsible for the conditions which led to the rise of Trump (i.e. Wars in the middle east, slow recovery following 2008 recession, general gridlock and inability of the Senate to pass anything). As you also note, he went back to Trump after January 6th, and the quote from him that you highlighted is that of someone purely opportunistic. In the end, Graham is a political creature that amounted to a paper mache man that stood up for nothing. A better America would be one where we have higher standards for US Senators than people like Graham.
One of the tragedies of our time is that at almost any point four or so GOP senators could have shut so much down. But the incentives as Graham demonstrates ran the other way