Lindsey’s Journey

He consistently traded honesty for influence

You’re reading a lot of highly polemic obituaries for Lindsey Graham. He was polarizing: Senator Graham was either a horrible person, or he was a great person. There are enough opinions, pro and con, to fill the national media, not to mention those in the Palmetto State. He seems a complicated and mercurial man who had a long enough record of public service for both sides to find reasons to either laud or disparage him.

But his mercurial nature is not that complicated. It is in fact, remarkably simple. As he himself put it when he shocked so many by switching allegiance from John McCain to Donald Trump, he just wanted to be “in the room where it happens”—a phrase he used often, referencing the Hamilton lyric, to describe his belief that it was more effective to have a seat at the table with presidents and policymakers to influence them rather than opposing them from the outside. To Lindsey Graham, relevance was the coin of the realm, and if a little shape-shifting was required, he was, as the popular vernacular goes, down.

Back when he was John McCain’s best friend, I loved Lindsey Graham. It was the year 2000, and Senator McCain was running against George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. McCain, who was called a “maverick” primarily because he was his own man, and far too honest and ethical to be a denizen of political DC, was being vilified—crucified might be the more apt term—by the W opposition research machine.

W’s people started a whisper-campaign in South Carolina. They falsely and cruelly suggested that the McCains’ adopted Bangladeshi daughter, Bridget, was John’s illegitimate daughter from an affair with a Black woman. These racially charged, sleazy rumors were used to damage his reputation. We were so angry that we “maxed-out” on campaign contributions for McCain.

To his everlasting credit, Representative Graham (he was not yet senator) stood shoulder-to-shoulder with McCain, and denounced the dirtier-than-usual whisper campaign. They became close, and McCain, often referred to Graham as “my illegitimate son” in a funny reference to both the dirty trick and to the close, father-son-like mentorship that developed between them.

In 2016, Senator Graham, who like every senator, saw a future POTUS in the morning mirror, decided it was his time, so he entered the fray with numerous other hopefuls, including Donald J. Trump.

“You know how you make America great again?” Graham asked rhetorically. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell ... He’s just generally a loser as a person and a candidate. You can’t nominate a nutjob and lose, and expect it doesn’t have consequences ... What I see is a demagogue, somebody that has solutions that will never work, that is playing on people’s prejudices and the dark side of politics.”

As you may have heard, Trump beat the odds—and the evens too—and was elected. Because he demanded relevance, Graham wanted—needed—to be in the room where it happened. The only way to stay relevant was to become Donald Trump’s friend. So he did.

This, even though Graham opposed the whole America First thing. He hated the isolationism inherent in that Republican movement, and lobbied Trump to leave American troops in a rapidly disintegrating Syria. Perhaps above all else, Lindsey Graham was a hawk.

Then January 6^th happened and the senator from South Carolina needed to distance himself from the president.

“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

With that, he seemed to have turned yet another corner, but his conversion couldn’t outlast his need for relevance, and when Trump was elected again in 2024, Graham became cheerleader-in-chief, no mean feat considering the way the Trump Cabinet debases and humiliates itself publicly to stay in the boss’s good graces.

Senator Graham had just returned from Ukraine the night he died. He had been lobbying the administration to heavily sanction Russia, and to bolster Ukraine’s depleted air defenses. He was a nonstop supporter of Ukraine, and NATO.

The way he hated Putin while Trump loved him is but another piece of the Lindsey Graham puzzle.

Regarding his sister, Darline Graham Nordone, who will serve out his term ending in January, Graham told C-SPAN, “Of all the things that have happened in my life, her turning out so well is the highlight of it by far.”

You often hear it said that you can define a person by the company they keep, but when you look at a portrait of Lindsey Graham in this context, there are just too many contradictions. The picture is more Abstract than Realist.

©2026 Jon Sinton