Lindsey Graham Was The Most Effective Political Operator Of The Past Decade
Benjamin Netanyahu reminisced today that when Congress was deliberating the size of a pending Israel appropriations package, Lindsey Graham would often astonish him by “outbidding the Prime Minister of Israel” — that is, by demanding an even larger pro-Israel sum than Netanyahu himself had the temerity to ask for. “I’m not getting a single vote in South Carolina for that,” Graham explained, according to Netanyahu. “Because, you know, there are very few Jews in South Carolina.” So unwavering was Graham’s pro-Israel conviction, he ultimately didn’t care if it conferred him with any political advantage or disadvantage.
Graham once made a similar argument to me regarding Ukraine; I’d asked how many Republican voters he figured would agree with his stated conviction that sending Ukraine enormous amounts of weaponry is emphatically in America’s national interest. Do average heartland Republicans really believe this? “In my state they do, overwhelmingly,” Graham said.
You’ll notice this logic appears to slightly contradict what he’s purported to have told Netanyahu. Because there are also “very few” Ukrainians in South Carolina. And yet, Graham had no trouble declaring South Carolina Republicans to be in overwhelming agreement with the supreme national imperative of subsidizing Ukraine for indefinite attritional warfare against Russia.
His logic becomes a bit more internally consistent once you get down to its utilitarian essence, which is that Graham would say or do whatever he found necessary to advance his sincerely-held ideological convictions, whether that be in relation to Israel, Ukraine, or the many other initiatives of American interventionism he championed over the decades. Projecting unified GOP support for generous Ukraine war subsidies, whether grounded in empirical reality or not, was what he deemed politically necessary at the time to get done the only thing that really matters in the end: getting the dang appropriations bill passed. Likewise, I’m sure a more thorough obituary than this one could find plenty of quotes in which Graham projects certainty that his strident support for Israel would in fact garner him lots of votes in South Carolina, contrary to what he reputedly told Netanyahu in private.
Because when you get down to it, Graham was a resolutely conviction-driven politician. He was pure ideology — that of muscular American primacy, no matter the cost, and without a whole lot of concern for whatever machinations or tradeoffs might be needed to advance that overriding objective. John McCain, his former best “amigo,” basically adhered to the same ideological paradigm, although he and Graham ended up taking slightly different tactical paths — most glaringly in the “era of Trump,” when McCain, at the twilight of his career and life, just couldn’t stomach all the performative sycophancy required to remain in good personal standing with Trump. Graham, however, was willing and eager to play another decidedly gainful role, and become arguably the single most effective Trump ingratiator of the past decade or more.
When I was covering the colossal Ukraine/Israel/“Indo-Pacific” war funding bill barreling through Congress in April 2024, I spoke to several individuals involved in the behind-the-scenes process by which Trump came to provide the crucial political backing needed to get the measure passed, as it had been otherwise stalled in complex legislative wrangling, and would require some external political heft to get across the finish line. Particularly with a restive GOP House caucus that was wary of supporting any funds at all sought by the Biden Administration. Trump, who at that point had just effectively secured the Republican presidential nomination for the third consecutive time, was the only figure in the country with the requisite political “pull” to give certain Republicans the cover they needed to hustle the bill to passage. Indispensable in this effort was Lindsey Graham, who Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) described to me as the undisputed “Trump Whisperer” of the Senate Republican Conference. In this capacity, Graham was able to seamlessly facilitate Trump’s sign-off, in part by incorporating some supposed Trump policy preferences, such as structuring a portion of the Ukraine funding in the form of a “loan” (which never had to be paid back). Whatever methods were necessary to achieve Trump’s backing, Graham knew precisely how to utilize them, and the bill was eventually passed thanks to some ingeniously crafty maneuvers by “MAGA Mike” Johnson. Indeed, that gigantic April 2024 appropriations package is almost certainly still underwriting Ukraine-bound expenditures to this day.
So how did Graham attain this stature as “Trump Whisperer”? Raw political acumen, first and foremost, driven by what was undoubtedly Graham’s core ideological commitment: untrammeled American primacy. Trump was more than amenable to becoming the vehicle through which Graham could further this agenda, despite the nominally existential stakes of the 2016 GOP primaries, when Graham and others who ran against Trump had professed to be so very distraught that he was going to destroy the Conservative Movement, doom the Party’s electoral fortunes, and most importantly, undermine American power abroad. But soon enough, when political reality set in, Graham thereafter set about assiduously ensuring that his most doom-and-gloom forecasts did not come to pass. Instead, he and others of his ilk realized that Trump could in fact be a priceless opportunity to actually reinvigorate their cherished American hegemonic project, since Trump had managed to convince lots of voters that he was ushering in a bold new era of “America First.” Which, functionally, could just be treated as little more than a clever re-branding exercise. “Democracy promotion” of the kind Graham had championed during the Bush/Cheney years was no longer going to sell, so it was actually a Godsend that Trump burst on the scene and introduced a new rhetorical strategy for selling much the same product, albeit with some Trump-specific adjustments around the edges, which Graham was more than happy to accommodate.
Because what did Graham get? What was the return on his investment? War with Iran — check. That was a dream Graham probably never could have imagined would be realized with the likes of Bush, Romney, or perhaps even McCain at the helm. No, it would take a “circuit-breaker” like Trump to ignore Congress, definitely ignore the United Nations, and just go right ahead and launch a dead-of-night sneak attack, in full military coordination with Israel, to kill the Supreme Leader and impose regime change. Such a thing was hardly a glint in Graham’s eye back during the 2016 primary mania, when the pundit and operative consensus agreed that Trump would unleash a frightening wave of “isolationism,” causing America to surrender its hard-won rightful place atop the post-war international order.
But what a difference a decade can make! 100+ hours on the Golf Course together can really go a long way. It also didn’t hurt that Graham and Trump seemed to genuinely come to like and admire one another. (How the hell else could you tolerate spending so many friggin’ hours hittin’ the links one-on-one, sometimes in the sweltering heat?) Seriously, though — did these two fall in love? Does anyone care to speculate if Trump has spent 100 hours total with Melania? (“I love you,” Graham once said to Trump.) By the time Lindsey became the first US Senator to endorse Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, nearly three years in advance, he didn’t have to do this out of some shot-in-the-dark gambit to potentially influence his dear friend Donald, but because he and Donald’s political and policy interests had been shown to be demonstrably aligned. Any lingering upset from 2016 was just a distant memory, relevant only for amusing trivia questions at Capitol Hill watering holes. Because by 2024, with Trump’s enthusiastic blessing, Graham had appointed himself to grandiloquently expound on the true meaning of “America First.”
Arguably only Marco Rubio has been more adroit at merging his fortunes with Trump’s, after the carnival-like rancor of the 2016 primaries, which were widely assumed at the time — foolishly it turns out — to be an existential showdown between starkly divergent visions of US foreign policy. The term “neocon” could once have been reasonably said to capture the essence of both Rubio and Graham, but as I’ve argued, that term is long overdue for retirement. Because most of the time, it only gets fallaciously used to set up some figmentary contrast between Trump and his supposed “neocon” adversaries — the dark saboteurs always scheming against him, or tricking him into compliance despite his true “instincts,” which are supposedly not at all congruent with the “neocons.” Time to retire that tedious little pet theory too. Because let the record show that there is really no grounds for doubting what Trump said today on his impromptu TV tour honoring Graham in memoriam: “Essentially we agreed on almost everything.” Such “agreement” can come about through a great multiplicity of political and interpersonal routes — Graham clearly mastered all of them.
On a different note, as I remarked earlier today, it’s always been strange that so many naysayers on both Right and Left have given Graham such a hard time for his private life — or lack thereof. With the Right this is doubly strange, because when it comes to gay men who are simply and unalterably gay — of whom there are lots, it should go without saying, in right-leaning political orbits — what would the Rightoid Taunting Squad have these men do, exactly? Take up with a woman under false pretenses? Graham appears to have led a life of long-term celibacy, or perhaps he was asexual. Whatever! “Gay” was never made part of his public identity. Did this mean he was “closeted”? Perhaps. But it could also have meant he voluntarily decided to forego any interest or investment in that particular area of life, which is what some minority of humans have always done, and instead he chose to immerse fully in public service. (I personally detested much of that public service on the merits, but it was public service all the same.) So again — what else could (presumably) gay men such as Graham possibly do to satisfy the Right-Wing “anti-gay” jeering brigades? Kill themselves? Sheesh. Congress essentially became his priesthood, and he didn’t even violate the clerical vows (that we know of) in contrast with many priests.
As to the Left snarling at him for his perceived sexual hypocrisy, given that he also supported conservative social causes, including around LGBTQIA++ or whatever — hey, there’s no hypocrisy if Graham was not actually doing anything in private which in public he would’ve condemned. Maybe it’ll come out that he really was running around having gay hookups in bathhouses, or had a prolific burner account on Grindr, but I’ve never seen any credible indication of that, and intuitively it seems implausible. Regardless of whether he theoretically had some traces of same-sex attraction extant somewhere in his psyche, this was clearly not something he ever evinced any desire to foreground, or apparently act upon. And… so what? It doesn’t make him a betrayer of some cause he never supported. If anything, there are reassuring lessons to be gleaned in how immutable identity traits do not inherently destine any particular individual to embrace any particular set of political beliefs. But neither Right nor Left tend to sit comfortably with that revelation.
As for the circumstances of Graham’s death — sure, let’s see the pathology report. He was 71, but seemed to be in decent enough health, and had just returned from yet another energetic trip to Ukraine. Who the hell knows why Kash Patel found it necessary to X-post that the FBI is involved for some reason. Trump said he spoke on the phone with Graham yesterday evening at around 6:30pm EST, and then by 8pm, he was gone. One could say — only half-jokingly — that if this was really Graham’s time to exit stage left, there could be no more fitting sendoff than to check out right in the middle of doing what he absolutely did best: expertly sweet-talking Trump to approve the latest round of American hegemonic expansion.
Another friendly reminder: I will be doing this Epstein Debate on Tuesday, July 14, in NYC
This is almost tender, Michael.
Well done.
Graham was an awful, terrible person and along with people like Rumsfeld and Limbaugh, the world is a better place with him gone. We still live in hell but one more demon is gone now.