Senator went from Trump critic to loyalist – obituary

Wednesday, 15 July 2026

Lindsey Graham, b July 9, 1955; d July 11, 2026

There was a time early in Lindsey Graham’s 23-year career as a senator for South Carolina when he was regarded as a conciliator – a rare Republican willing to make deals with Democrats and work across the partisan aisle.

He liaised closely with President Obama and sought to forge cross-party consensus on issues such as immigration and climate change. He was a friend of John McCain, the Republican who always put country before party, and Joe Lieberman, a senior Democratic senator (they were known as “the three amigos”), and he admired Ted Kennedy, another Senate Democrat, for his pragmatism. Hardline Republican commentators dubbed him “Obama Lite” and “Lindsey Grahamnesty” for his willingness to compromise.

When Graham, who has died aged 71, ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015, he was one of Donald Trump’s fiercest critics, calling his rival candidate a “jackass”, a “demagogue”, a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and “the most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican Party”. He warned that Trump would destroy the party and urged voters: “You know how to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell!”

Trump responded by calling Graham “one of the dumbest human beings” and giving out his personal telephone number at a campaign rally. On election day, unable to vote for Trump, Graham backed a third-party candidate instead.

Then, two months after Trump took office in 2017, everything changed.

The pair had lunch and played golf, and almost overnight Graham became one of Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers. He berated the media for “this endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president” and warned Republicans: “If you don’t stand behind this president, we’re not going to stand beside you.”

He insisted he had “never heard [Trump] make a single racist statement, not even close”. Only last month he quipped: “Mr President, you’re not far behind God.”

As a senior member and later chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he helped to ram through the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett in the final days of Trump’s first administration, despite having blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland for the previous eight months of Obama’s presidency on the grounds that vacancies should not be filled in an election year.

“I’m certain if the shoe was on the other foot, you would do the same,” he told outraged Democratic senators.

Graham also defended Brett Kavanaugh, the Trump nominee accused of sexual misconduct, telling his critics: “What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life.” He helped to reshape the US judiciary by confirming hundreds of conservative federal judges.

There was a brief wobble on his part after Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol following his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

“All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough,” he said at the time.

Yet soon he was actively supporting Trump’s efforts to overturn the election result and opposed his impeachment for inciting the riots.

“I'm not trying to be a fair juror here,” Graham said. “This thing will come to the Senate and it will die quickly, and I will do everything I can to make it die quickly.”

The impeachment effort was “driven by passion and hatred”, he said.

Once a moderate on immigration, he supported Trump’s erection of a wall along the Mexican border and later, as chair of the Budget Committee in Trump’s second term, played a leading role in implementing the president’s radical tax, immigration and spending agenda without any support from Democrats. He also backed Trump’s war against Iran.

His hawkish views on Iran were consistent with his staunch support for Israel over the years and were welcomed in the Trump White House.

Yet in other areas of foreign policy, notably over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he swam against the tide and his influence and expertise acted as a corrective to JD Vance, the vice-president, who had been ambivalent in his support for Ukraine.

Graham was one of a group of senators who struck a recent deal with the White House on legislation to tighten sanctions on Russia.

“I think we’ve got the best chance since I’ve been coming here in the last five years to get Putin to the peace table,” he said from Kyiv before boarding a flight back to Washington.

Having visited the country 10 times, he had forged a close working relationship with President Zelenskyy and liked to wear a lapel pin displaying the US and Ukrainian flags.

“He was a true defender of freedom and the values that make our world safer,” the Ukrainian president said. “He was here with our people when it was most needed.”

To his critics, Graham topped the list of those craven, supine Republican representatives and senators who sat on their hands while Trump usurped their powers, shredded democratic norms, packed the Supreme Court with ill-qualified cronies, subverted independent agencies and brazenly enriched himself and his family.

They noted that Graham represented one of the most pro-Trump states in the nation and depended on Trump for re-election. He “would seem to occupy his own distinct category of Trump-era contortionist”, declared a New York Times profile.

Yet Graham was unashamed.

When asked to explain his transformation, he retorted: “It’d be odd not to do this. ‘This’ is trying to be relevant. I’ve got an opportunity up here working with the president to get some really good outcomes for the country … I have never been called this much by a president in my life.”

Lindsey Olin Graham was born in the tiny town of Central, South Carolina, in 1955. His parents, Florence (known as “the Dude”) and Millie (née Walters), ran the Sanitary Cafe, a bar with a pool hall whose customers mostly worked at a nearby cotton mill. The family lived in a back room and shared the bar’s kitchen and bathroom before later moving into a trailer home.

“It was a great place to learn about life,” Graham recalled. “I had wives call up wanting to know if their husband’s there and I’m answering the phone at nine years of age. And I’d say, ‘Well, he said he isn’t here.’ So I learnt the hard way about a little bit of diplomacy.”

He was the first member of his family to go to university, studying psychology at the University of South Carolina and joining the US Air Force’s Reserve Officer Training Corps.

When he was 21 his mother died of Hodgkin lymphoma; 15 months later his father succumbed to a heart attack and Graham was left to look after his 13-year-old sister, Darline.

After working his way through law school he began four years of active duty as a legal officer at a South Carolina Air Force base, where he gained notoriety by exposing shortcomings in the service’s drug-testing procedures.

In 1984 he was posted to the Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany as an Air Force lawyer, travelling across Europe prosecuting or defending rape, child abuse, drugs and murder cases involving US servicemen.

In 1989 Graham left active duty, though he remained a reservist until 2015, and returned to rural South Carolina to work as a small-town lawyer. Three years later he was elected to the state's House of Representatives, defeating a Democratic incumbent.

After a single two-year term he was elected to the US House of Representatives as a member of Newt Gingrich’s right-wing “Republican Revolution”, which ended four decades of Democratic dominance. He did so by going door to door with a rented baby elephant and handing out “Graham” crackers. He was the first Republican to win his rural district since 1877.

In all he spent eight years in the House, securing re-election three times and adopting increasingly hardline positions.

In 1997 he joined an abortive Republican coup against Gingrich over the House Speaker’s compromises with Clinton’s White House. Then, in 2002, Strom Thurmond decided to retire after 47 years as a Republican senator for South Carolina. Graham joined the crowded field to succeed him and won comfortably.

In Washington he lived in a sparsely furnished row house near Capitol Hill but was unmarried, had no children and did little more than sleep there. He denied suggestions that he was gay.

“I never found time to meet the right girl, or the right girl was smart enough not to have time for me,” he joked.

Outside politics, he said: “I don't have a life.”

In the Senate, McCain became his mentor, and Graham co-chaired McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008. They had a shared interest in defence and security and often travelled together to Iraq and Afghanistan in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As a reservist, Graham was called up to serve short stints in a legal capacity in both wars.

He worked to overhaul immigration law and open a pathway for undocumented immigrants to gain citizenship, and voted to confirm both of Obama’s first two Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. By 2014 he was viewed with suspicion by Republican hardliners and considered vulnerable to a Tea Party challenge.

In the event, Graham forestalled any challenge by working to ensure potential challengers stayed out of the race, raising a huge war chest and stressing his hawkish views on national security issues. He was preparing to seek a fifth six-year term this November.

In 2015, standing across the road from his parents' bar in South Carolina, Graham announced that he was joining the following year's presidential race. However, his campaign failed to gain momentum and he dropped out before the first primary. He threw his support behind the Florida governor Jeb Bush and then the Texas senator Ted Cruz.

After Trump won the nomination, Graham voted for Evan McMullin, a third-party candidate, saying Trump was unfit to hold office.

But two months after Trump’s inauguration the two adversaries had lunch at the White House. Very soon Graham had reinvented himself, in the words of The New York Times, as “Trump’s most prominent Senate defender and whisperer”.