Sen. Lindsey Graham, Trump critic turned ally and foreign policy hawk, dies after a brief illness

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a longtime Republican lawmaker from South Carolina who went from being one of Donald Trump’s harshest critics to positioning himself in the front ranks of the president’s most deferential supporters, died Saturday. He was 71.

The senator had a remarkable political trajectory that included election to the House in the 1994 Republican takeover, a high-profile role as an impeachment manager against President Bill Clinton, a Senate career featuring foreign policy hawkishness and bipartisan collegiality, and a prominent position as a confidant of President Donald Trump who epitomized Trump’s capture of the Republican Party.

The cause of death was not immediately known, although Mr. Graham’s office cited a “brief and sudden illness.”

Over his more than three decades in the House and the Senate, Mr. Graham became nationally known because of a near-constant presence in the news media, where his folksy manner and talent for a good quote put a soft edge on his sometimes hard-line views. On Sunday, he was scheduled to have made what would have been his 64th appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, following his return from a trip to Ukraine.

The senator also had a talent for winning elections despite regular attacks from the right and the left. Last month, Mr. Graham won the South Carolina Republican nomination over five challengers in his pursuit of a fifth Senate term, avoiding what many had anticipated would be a runoff and placing him on a glide path to reelection in his deeply Republican home state.

In celebrating his primary win, Mr. Graham paid tribute to Trump, whom he had in 2016 called “a nut job” unfit to be commander in chief. “I want to thank the big guy, God. Trump comes later. Mr. President, you’re not far behind God, but we’re going to start with him,” he said in the June speech.

Although Mr. Graham was criticized throughout his political career as a shape-shifter and attention-seeking opportunist, there were some areas in which he was steadfast. Among them was his advocacy of a hawkish foreign policy, often as an ally of Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), a longtime friend.

Mr. Graham championed using the U.S. military and government money to support global allies and confront foreign adversaries, supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and condemning the withdrawal of troops from both countries.

Mr. Graham had also pushed both the Biden and Trump administration to provide greater support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion. A staunch ally of Israel, Mr. Graham had pressed Trump toward war with Iran and warned him against making a premature deal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking Sunday morning on Fox News, praised Mr. Graham as “a great friend” to Israel. “He was absolutely clear. He didn’t bend to fashion, the winds of fashion. He knew who the good guys were, and he knew who the bad guys were. He never confused the two,” Netanyahu said.

In a social media post written in the predawn hours Sunday, Trump also lauded Mr. Graham — among the few who managed to make it into the president’s good graces after having denounced him — as “one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known” and “a true American Patriot.”

Lindsey Olin Graham was born on July 9, 1955, in Central, S.C., a town in Pickens County that gets its name for being the midway point of a rail line between Charlotte and Atlanta.

The future senator grew up in the rooms behind the Sanitary Cafe, a pool hall, restaurant, bar, and liquor store owned by his parents, Millie and Florence James “F.J.” Graham. While his father, also known as “Dude,” tended bar for the millworker clientele, the son racked balls and answered phones.

He would later say jokingly that he learned everything he really needed to know about politics there, often having to tell a wife who called looking for her husband, “He says he’s not here.”

The first member of his family to attend college, Mr. Graham set his sights on a military career, joining the ROTC at the University of South Carolina, although a bad ear and his dismal math scores got in the way of his ambition to become a pilot.

He was still a student when his plans for the future suffered a bigger disruption. His parents died within two years of each other, leaving him to provide for his 13-year-old sister, Darline, who went to live with an aunt and uncle with Mr. Graham as her guardian. After graduating from law school, Mr. Graham legally adopted her, so that she would be eligible for his military benefits.

“You assume everything’s going to be like Ozzie and Harriet — that doesn’t mean it’s going to turn out that way,” he told the Washington Post in 1998. “So here I’ve got a teenager on my hands. She’s turned out great in spite of me. I was probably a nut. I never let her date. I smelled her clothes if she smoked. I listened in on her phone calls. I was probably pressing too hard, just ’cause I felt such responsibility for her.”

For her part, Darline Graham Nordone would later describe Mr. Graham as “a brother, a father, and a mother rolled into one.” She survives Mr. Graham, who never married.

As a newly minted lawyer in 1981, Mr. Graham joined the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General staff, spending four years as a prosecutor and defense attorney in Europe. His defense of an Air Force pilot accused of marijuana use brought him national attention when he was featured in a CBS 60 Minutes report on the Air Force’s faulty drug-testing procedures.

Upon leaving active duty in 1989, Mr. Graham returned to South Carolina and entered politics. After two years in the state legislature, he was elected to the U.S. House in the Republican wave of 1994, when the GOP recaptured the House after decades in the wilderness.

The junior member of the House Judiciary Committee enjoyed a star turn as a House manager in Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial in the Senate chamber. “Where I come from,” he drawled as he described a phone call the president had made to White House intern Monica Lewinsky, “You call somebody at 2:30 in the morning, you’re up to no good.”

Meanwhile, his military career had continued. He was a member of the South Carolina Air National Guard, called to active duty stateside during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He joined the U.S. Air Force Reserves in 1995, retiring 20 years later as a colonel. During that time, he did numerous stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was the first sitting member of the Senate in decades to do military duty in a combat zone.

Mr. Graham’s growing celebrity helped propel him when a South Carolina Senate seat opened up in 2002 with the retirement of 100-year-old Strom Thurmond. Mr. Graham won it, in what became the most expensive Senate race in state history.

Once in the Senate, Mr. Graham became known for working across the aisle and developed a friendship with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D., N.Y.) — an unlikely one, given his recent history as one of her husband’s impeachment managers. The two traveled together frequently and co-sponsored legislation.

Mr. Graham’s independent reputation was boosted by his closeness to McCain, whose presidential candidacy he supported during the bitter 2000 South Carolina GOP primary against the eventual winner, George W. Bush. McCain, the ultimate political maverick and one who shared Mr. Graham’s interventionist foreign policy views, referred to his colleague as “my illegitimate son.”

As a result, Mr. Graham, like McCain, periodically found himself at odds with the Bush administration. When a scandal broke over torture allegations at Abu Ghraib, a prison run by the U.S. military in Iraq, he demanded accountability up the chain of command. “What are we fighting for?” Mr. Graham asked at a hearing. “To be like Saddam Hussein?”

On Sunday, Bush issued a statement lauding Mr. Graham as “a knowledgeable Senator who understood how the world works and how important America’s international engagement is to resist tyranny.”

Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ 2016 presidential nominee, would later express dismay over Mr. Graham’s transformation during the Trump era. In 2019, she told radio host Howard Stern that he had been someone she “admired and liked enormously” before he became a devotee of Trump, whose bullying, name-calling approach to politics was abhorred by Democrats.

“I saw him as somebody who, you know, had been working to try to figure out what he believed and how he could do things,” Clinton said. “It’s like he had a brain snatch, you know?”

In 2015, Mr. Graham announced what would become a quixotic campaign for president.

Outside of his views on foreign policy, he was seen as a moderate Republican. A year before, he had survived an effort by the tea party movement and right-wing commentators to force him out of office. They branded him “Flimsy Lindsey” and “Grahamnesty” over such apostasies as working with Democrats on climate change and immigration, where he supported widening a path to citizenship for undocumented people.

“I want to be president to protect our nation that we all love so much from all threats foreign and domestic,” Mr. Graham said in announcing his candidacy. “So, get ready. I know I’m ready.”

He and Trump, who was running his first and ultimately victorious presidential campaign, clashed often on the debate stage, and Trump at one point gave out Mr. Graham’s personal cellphone number on television, after Mr. Graham called him a “jackass.” As it turned out, the senator was the wrong candidate for the moment in a party that was turning toward Trump’s brand of nativist populism. Mr. Graham left the race in December 2015, before the first votes were cast.

He subsequently endorsed former Florida governor Jeb Bush and, later, Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), only to see their campaigns go down in flames against Trump.

Once Trump was in office, Mr. Graham’s began cozying up to the new president, looking past Trump’s demeaning of the Vietnam heroism of Mr. Graham’s friend and idol McCain, who had been a prisoner of war for 5½ years and was diagnosed with deadly brain cancer in 2017.

Mr. Graham insisted his evolution on Trump was based on acceptance, not opportunism. “I said he was a xenophobic, race-baiting religious bigot,” he told CBS News in 2018. “I ran out of adjectives. Well, the American people spoke, and they rejected my analysis.”

He and Trump bonded over golf outings, and Mr. Graham constantly fed the president’s famous appetite for flattery.

“I think Lindsey likes the president a lot more than he thought he would,” Steve Largent, a former congressman and confidant of Mr. Graham, told New York Magazine in 2018. “I think Lindsey feels a little bit like the adult in the room, speaking with the president. … There’s something about, I’m not going to say innocence, but the president’s affability as well as his naiveté that Lindsey is drawn to.”

Mr. Graham wavered after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, after Trump did little to stop the violence.

“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, but today … all I can say is count me out. Enough is enough,” Mr. Graham said at the time.

Still, Mr. Graham did not join seven other Republican senators the following month in voting to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection after he was impeached by the House.

With the resurrection of Trump’s political career during the 2024 election cycle, Mr. Graham quickly made his way back into the fold. Last month, with his primary approaching, the senator made his pitch to South Carolina voters by noting that he had Trump’s endorsement: “If you want somebody who can go to Washington to help him, I’m your best choice.”