Growing up in Massachusetts in the 1990s, we had our own “lion of the Senate.” Since Ted Kennedy’s death, Senate lions have become an endangered species. A few years ago, we lost John McCain. Then Orrin Hatch and Harry Reid. And then Dianne Feinstein and Joe Lieberman.
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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of the last old-school, multidecade masters of legislation and statesmanship, joined them. He died suddenly at his Washington home at 71, two days after his birthday and hours after returning from a trip to Kyiv. Graham’s office called it a “brief and sudden illness,” and sudden it was: he’d spoken by phone with President Donald Trump that evening and was scheduled to appear on NBC’s Meet the Press the next morning.
Graham was born in Central, South Carolina, where his parents ran a restaurant and a pool hall. The first in his family to attend college, he saw tragedy strike while he was there: His father died of a heart attack, and his mother of cancer within 15 months of each other. At 22, Graham became legal guardian of his 13-year-old sister, Darline, raising her while finishing his degree at the University of South Carolina and, later, its law school. In 1982, he joined the Air Force as a lawyer, serving 33 years across active duty, the reserves, and the South Carolina Air National Guard, retiring as a colonel.
Elected to the House in 1994 and to Strom Thurmond’s old Senate seat in 2002, Graham built his career on foreign policy, forging a famously close, cross-party alliance with McCain and Lieberman — a trio that traveled the world together and needled the Senate’s isolationist wings. He later chaired both the Judiciary and Budget Committees, defending Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and helping steer Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett through the Senate as well.
Then there was the Trump of it all. In 2016, Graham was one of the future president’s loudest Republican critics, calling him “a kook” and “unfit for office” and warning that if the party nominated him, “we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.” When Trump retaliated by publicly releasing Graham’s cellphone number, the senator responded with a viral video in which he destroyed a series of flip phones with a meat cleaver, a golf club, a blender, and a toaster oven — a stunt that previewed the theatrical, oddly good-humored rapport the two would eventually build over a hundred-plus hours on the golf course. By his final years, Graham had become one of Trump’s most trusted allies, a key hand steering the president’s tax and budget priorities through Congress as Budget Committee chairman, pushing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and championing the SAVE America Act. Trump’s tribute upon Graham’s death — calling him “one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known” and ordering flags nationwide to half-staff for an entire week, a rare honor even by presidential standards — suggested a friendship that had, whatever its detours, arrived somewhere real.
Few senators of the last 30 years were better political athletes — reading the room, counting votes, and working every angle to get a Republican priority or a Trump nominee across the finish line. It’s hard to imagine him not already sizing up what his absence will mean for the Senate map, the president’s unfinished agenda, and the Republicans’ ability to maintain control of Congress. He wouldn’t have been able to help himself.
His sister, fittingly and poignantly, will provide the bookend for the shelves of political accomplishments that he had begun stacking decades ago. On July 14, Darline Graham Nordone was sworn in on the Senate floor to serve out the rest of her brother’s term. It was the same sister he’d raised as a 22-year-old law student after their parents’ deaths. He once said her success was “the highlight” of his life, “by far.” Whatever else one makes of his career, for those of us who have siblings—and even (or perhaps especially) for those of us whose siblings have chosen, for whatever reasons, to remove themselves from our lives — it’s hard not to be touched by this part of his story.
Graham’s bond with Trump was never straightforward. After the events of Jan. 6, 2021, an emotional Graham took to the Senate floor and declared himself finished with the man. “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” he said. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it.” Fortunately for the South Carolina senator, it didn’t end that way. Weeks later, they were golfing together at Mar-a-Lago, and the journey resumed for another five years, ending only when Graham himself took his leave from us.
Daniel Ross Goodman (@DanRossGoodman) is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and teaches theology and religious studies at St. John’s University. His next book, Dante’s Guide to Life: How The Divine Comedy Can Change Our Fortunes, Our World, and Ourselves, will be published this fall by Angelico Press.
