Lindsey Graham obituary
Long-serving South Carolina Republican senator who was an ally of Donald Trump and an ardent supporter of Ukraine
Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, who has died suddenly aged 71, had just returned from Kyiv after a meeting with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It was Graham’s 10th visit since the 2022 Russian invasion; Zelenskyy, who came away with promises of the aid that had been on and off with the Trump administration, called him a “true defender of freedom”
It was a good demonstration of both Graham’s firm stance on US power overseas, and his opposition to Russia. “Putin will not stop in Ukraine,” he said. “To be weak in Ukraine means you lose in Taiwan.”
Graham’s four terms (24 years) representing South Carolina had made him a powerful figure on key senate committees, including foreign relations, judiciary (which he chaired from 2019 until 2021) and budget (which he had chaired since 2025). He was known as a pragmatic dealer within the Senate, where his hawkish foreign policy choices aligned with those of the 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain and the 2000 Democrat vice-presidential candidate turned independent Joe Lieberman – together they were dubbed the “Three Amigos”. He was also close to Joe Biden, with whom he was able to negotiate legislation that might cross the aisle.
A neoconservative, self-described “Reagan Republican”, Graham began working in 2009 with Lieberman and the Democrat John Kerry on a compromise climate change bill, though he eventually pulled out over a temporary failure of his bipartisan immigration control negotiations with the Democrat Chuck Schumer. Graham’s instincts were stoutly Republican, opposing gun control, healthcare, gay marriage and reproductive rights
But his greatest legacy might well be as an example of the sea-changes brought about by the era of Donald Trump. At first, Graham was anti-Trump. In 2015, as he contemplated his own presidential run, he called Trump a “jackass” for making denigrating comments about McCain’s time as a PoW in Vietnam. He also described Trump as a “race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot” and warned Republicans that if they nominated Trump the party “would get destroyed”
Most famously, he called Trump a “kook”, saying “I think he’s crazy. I think he is unfit for office”. Trump reciprocated, calling Graham a lightweight, and even giving out his private phone number so his followers could protest against his anti-Maga positions
Graham’s run was short-lived, and Trump was elected president in 2016, despite Graham’s personal vote going to neither him nor Hillary Clinton, but to Evan McMullin
All that changed, however, in March 2017 when Graham had lunch with Trump and emerged joking that he had given the president his new phone number. “Trump is committed to rebuilding our military, which is music to my ears,” Graham tweeted. “(He’s) in deal-making mode and I hope Congress is like-minded.” Trump turned on the charm, and they became golfing partners
From that point Graham walked a political tightrope between his reputation as an “institutionalist” and Trump’s version of his party, whose Maga followers often thought him too willing to compromise with the enemy Democrats. “There is a dark side to Trump … but I am sticking with him,” Graham told the BBC in 2023
It required flexibility. When Trump attacked Biden, Graham called the Democrat “one of the finest people I know”, but did nothing to rein in the personal slurs. More importantly, when the supreme court justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Graham, on the senate judiciary committee, played a key role in helping the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell stop any consideration of President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland, saying such nominations should never be made in an election year – even though the election was nine months off. He then said that, if a similar situation arose, “you can use my words against me”.
Of course it did, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020. By then chair of the judiciary committee, Graham hurried through Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, who was sworn in on 27 October, just over a week before the election won by Biden
The law and war were Graham’s political calling cards. He was born in Central, South Carolina, where his father, FJ (Florence James), and mother, Millie (nee Walters), ran a restaurant and bar called the Sanitary Cafe. He became the first member of his family to attend college, with a military ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) scholarship to the University of South Carolina. He gained his BA in psychology in 1977
A year earlier, his mother had died; soon after Lindsey graduated his father also died, leaving him as the guardian of his sister, Darline, eight years younger. The ROTC allowed him to remain at South Carolina, where he earned his JD law degree in 1981. He was commissioned a lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps of the US air force, as a military defence attorney. From 1984 until 1989 he was chief prosecutor in Europe, based at Rhein-Main airbase in Germany
Graham returned to South Carolina and went into private practice, then served as an assistant county attorney, and then city attorney of Central (1990-94). During the Gulf war he returned to active service as a judge advocate at McEntire Joint National Guard station in South Carolina
In 1992 he was elected a state representative in the South Carolina House; in 1994, with the backing of the conservative senator Strom Thurmond, and helped by the mid-term “Republican Revolution” that year, Graham replaced the retiring incumbent Democrat Butler Derrick. In his second term, he led a revolt against the House speaker Newt Gingrich, and also filed the first impeachment papers against President Bill Clinton
When Thurmond retired in 2002, just ahead of his 100th birthday, Graham was unopposed in winning the Republican nomination to succeed him. He was re-elected three times, always by comfortable margins; challenges within the Republican party for the nominations tended to be fractionalised among multiple candidates. In 2018 his impassioned defence of Trump’s supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who faced accusations of rape during his Senate hearing, led some to speculate that Graham saw himself as a successor to the former southern senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general, but Graham remained in place and won re-election easily in 2020.
In the Senate, the Three Amigos were fierce advocates of George W Bush’s second Iraq war, and Graham argued for permanent occupation of Afghanistan. He was, like Lieberman, a staunch defender of Israel, echoing the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s frequent calls for attacks on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and oil infrastructure
When legislators called for a cutback in military aid to Israel, Graham said the war in Gaza was one “they can’t afford to lose. This is Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids.” When Israel was accused of genocide, Graham, on a conference call in 2024 with the international criminal court prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan, told him: “This court is for Africa.”
Graham had recently won a six-candidate primary to stand for a fifth term in the Senate
He is survived by his sister
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