(CNN) — In December 2015, when Donald Trump was still a long-shot candidate in the GOP’s sprawling primary field, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham offered a brazen assessment of the political outsider.
“You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell,” Graham, who was also among the dozen Republicans running for the 2016 presidential nomination, declared on CNN. Then, he pilloried Trump’s proposed ban on all Muslims from entering the country: “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”
It was the unlikely beginning of what would become one of Washington’s key political relationships. The Graham-Trump alliance — which at first flummoxed many in both men’s inner circles — steered two terms of presidential foreign policy across multiple continents, and the GOP’s agenda on Capitol Hill.
Graham, the ultimate Washington power player, had spent years dealmaking with Democrats, including President Barack Obama. In his 30-plus years in politics, he refused to ascribe to party-line ideology, which he made clear with his frequent attempts to fix the US immigration system, or his disgust of the tea party movement.
Then came Trump — and his stunning 2016 win. Within months, Graham had transfigured himself from Trump’s most prominent primary foe into one of his most critical partners — his closest ally in Congress, a fierce TV surrogate and frequent golf partner.
Beginning with a March 2017 lunch that brokered peace between the two men, Graham persistently worked his way into Trump’s inner circle through frequent phone calls and golf outings. (Graham joked afterward that the meeting went so well that he gave the president his “new cell phone number,” after Trump gave out the senator’s number at a campaign rally.)
“Lindsey used to be a great enemy of mine, and now he’s a great friend of mine,” Trump marveled during one meeting with Senate Republicans in 2018. “I really like Lindsey. Can you believe that?”
In response to Graham’s unexpected death over the weekend, Trump called him “one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known.”
For Trump’s second term, Graham put himself at the center of the president’s biggest ambitions, including the Iran war and a massive modernization of the Pentagon. He would have been a critical voice in multiple looming issues on the Hill — such as a bipartisan push for Russian sanctions, a deal on which Graham had announced just 48 hours before his death, and the confirmation of Trump’s new attorney general pick.
“He was one of those guys, just like Marco [Rubio], just like Jeb Bush, who didn’t understand the Trump phenomenon,” one longtime Trump adviser said of Graham’s initial resistance to Trump’s rise within the GOP. “But eventually Lindsey Graham figured it out. He saw that Donald Trump was where all the energy and the passion was in the Republican Party.”
Graham over the last decade morphed into one of Trump’s most trusted counselors on high-stakes geopolitical matters, the adviser said, earning the president’s confidence even as they often disagreed on key strategic issues, including the extent of US support for Ukraine and the White House’s efforts to negotiate an end to the Iran war.
“He looked at Lindsey as one of his foreign policy experts,” the adviser said. “He didn’t always agree with him, but I think he respected him.”
Unlike some other MAGA loyalists in Congress, Graham did not abandon his own strongly held beliefs when he linked political forces with Trump; instead, he picked his battles and threw his weight around with the president when necessary.
He did not support eliminating the filibuster (though Trump told CNN after Graham’s death that he was “coming aboard” to the idea). He remained fiercely loyal to his longtime friend and mentor, the late Sen. John McCain, who was a frequent subject of Trump’s ire. And he found ways to avoid directly criticizing the president on matters of disagreement, including the pardoning of Capitol rioters and Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about diplomatic allies.
Despite his sharp opposition to Trump’s rise, Graham almost immediately began working to establish a relationship with his former rival following the 2016 election. The two golfed together frequently, with Graham eventually establishing himself as a key conduit between the wary Republican establishment and a novice president unaccustomed to the ways of Washington.
The South Carolina senator later described his abrupt transformation as a pragmatic decision aimed at remaining relevant within a changing Republican Party, even as he faced criticism from other lawmakers for cozying up to a man he’d once warned would destroy the GOP.
“It’s evolved because he is the president of the United States. He beat me like a drum and I want to help him where I can,” Graham said of his relationship with Trump in a 2018 CBS News interview. “The American people spoke, they rejected my analysis and he is now my president.”
On Sunday, Trump and others in his orbit specifically cited Graham’s ardent defense of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a pivotal moment in their relationship. During a 2018 congressional hearing focused on sexual assault allegations made against Kavanaugh, Graham berated Democrats on the panel, accusing them of trying to derail the nomination for political purposes.
“This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics,” he said at the time.
The speech helped galvanize GOP support for Kavanaugh, ultimately delivering Trump a crucial Supreme Court appointee after one of the Senate’s most tense confirmation battles in history. For some of Graham’s onetime Democratic allies in Congress — particularly those on the Judiciary Committee — it represented a point of no return.
“I think it was a top 10, maybe a top-five moment in the history of the Senate,” Trump told CNN on Sunday. “He did it from the heart and it turned that whole thing around. He was really amazing.”
Legacy abroad
Long one of the Senate’s most prominent Iran hawks, Graham played a central role in convincing Trump to strike Iran earlier this year, setting off a monthslong war that the president is now struggling to bring to an end.
The senator lobbied Trump for months to more aggressively confront Iran, portraying the nation as an increasingly dangerous threat to Israel and the rest of the region and openly calling for the White House to fulfill his yearslong goal of regime change.
“I want to be clear when they write the history of these times: Expecting the ayatollah to change his ways would be like expecting Hitler to change his ways,” Graham said in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum earlier this year. “The only answer now is to end this regime by standing behind the people.”
Speaking weeks before the president ordered attacks on Iran — despite the misgivings of some of the president’s senior aides — Graham described appealing to Trump’s fixation on his presidential legacy to sway him toward war, portraying it as a Reaganesque opportunity to come to come to the aid of Iranian protesters and to alter the trajectory of the Middle East.
“I think this is his place in history,” Graham said. “Ronald Reagan said, ‘Tear down this wall.’ Not, ‘Could you please lower it?’ … You’ve got people out in the streets thinking help is on the way. They believe in President Trump.”
Graham was also seeking to influence Trump’s involvement in another foreign conflict: Russia’s war with Ukraine. Trump has been largely apathetic toward Ukraine since the 2022 invasion — at times, publicly deriding its leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky — while baffling allies by occasionally praising Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Graham, meanwhile, has been one of the few remaining GOP champions of US intervention on behalf of Ukraine, pushing to supply arms and other military aid. It was Graham’s focus at last week’s NATO summit in Turkey. And the South Carolinian had just returned from his 10th trip to Ukraine, where he met twice with Zelensky.
“At a private dinner at the Ambassador’s residence, he was working every Senator on a strategy to end the war in Ukraine. Typical Lindsey,” Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said of the recent NATO summit.
Graham encouraged Trump to put his stamp on a variety of issues, pressing him to maintain pressure on Russia, endorsing his demands for US ownership of Greenland, and seeking fresh ways to advance the president’s top domestic priority: a stalled federal elections overhaul bill that’s driven a rift between the White House and Senate GOP leaders.
Once so fearful of a Trump presidency that he warned in 2016 that “if we nominate Trump we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it,” Graham spent the final stage of his political life working to expand and shape Trump’s powers.
“They’re concerned when they get up and when they go to bed,” Graham said earlier this year, dismissing the rising anxieties over Trump being expressed by US allies. “If you’re concerned about Trump, get a beer. See a therapist.”
The-CNN-Wire
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