Late Saturday, it was announced that South Carolina’s senior Senator, Lindsey Graham (Republican) died after being taken to the hospital over a “brief and sudden illness.”
This was a genuine shock. Unlike Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell, Graham seemed pretty healthy and articulate last week. Sunday Graham’s office released a finding from a medical examiner saying that the cause of death was actually an aortic dissection, or sudden rupture of the heart. The same thing that got Lux Interior. Again, Graham seemed healthy enough, but he was 71 years old, the autopsy revealed hardening of the arteries, and he had just visited Ukraine, and it is possible for long plane flights to cause blood clots.
Sunday Graham had been scheduled to appear on NBC’s Meet The Press, where everyone (including fill-in guest Donald Trump) was fulsome in their tribute to his record and his character. I do not doubt much of this praise is sincere. If nothing else Senator Graham knew how the Washington game is played. He appeared on all the Sunday chat shows, and he was a fixture on Fox News and other places. A lot of the journalists at these shows thought that Graham was a great guest and they have good things to say about him as a person. Which is ironic given that since 2016, Lindsey Graham spent most of his career turning into a Mouth of Sauron – a once-human courtier who warped himself into a monster in order to serve as High Priest to a Dark Lord he saw as his God on Earth.
I do not exaggerate. Trump appeared in South Carolina June 2026, and Graham told him, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.” Graham said in regard to Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran, that he was even better than Ronald Reagan because only he has tried to enforce regime change on that government. (Ronald Reagan isn’t God, but prior to Trump, that comparison was as high as a Republican would make.) This even as Graham bashed Trump before his presidency, apparently not realizing videotape is a thing and that tweets can be photocopied. His own best epitaph is likely the social media post from May 2016: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”
The Guardian article has another couple of quotes that touch on Graham’s motives in becoming Trump’s servant. In 2019 he said, “I went from, ‘OK, he’s president’ to ‘How can I get to be in his orbit?’ to ‘How can I have a say in what’s going to happen today, tomorrow and next week?” He also said “I have never been called this much by a president in my life. It’s weird, and it’s flattering, and it creates some opportunity. It also creates some pressure.”
Most Senators are intensely vain creatures, obsessed with their status and influence, and Graham proved to be a much stronger example of this than most. If Trump has a talent for anything, it’s telling his marks what they want to hear. And if Graham had a talent, it was being in Washington long enough to be useful to other Republicans in hopes of getting what he wanted. He had previously been best friends with Senator John McCain (R.-Arizona) but McCain lost his presidential campaign in 2008 and succumbed to cancer in Trump’s first term even as the guy Graham called a “race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot” in 2016 gained more and more power. Trump spent much of his 2016 campaign bad-mouthing McCain and taunting Graham (who was also briefly a candidate) but while Graham sometimes defended Senator McCain such statements became less frequent as Trump took more control of the Republican Party. Graham could legitimately say that his proximity influenced Trump’s ostensibly isolationist, antiwar foreign policy towards the more traditional military intervention policy of other Republicans, and then some. It was Graham, along with influencers from Saudi Arabia and the Netanyahu government of Israel, who was pivotal in getting Trump to start a full-scale war with Iran, actually coaching Prime Minister Netanyahu on how to convince Trump.
The odd thing is that Graham’s remnant neo-conservatism also made him a strong supporter of Ukraine against Russia, which had to be a source of inner conflict, given his boss’ clear sympathies towards Vladimir Putin and against Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy. The last thing Graham did in public was to visit Ukraine in order to raise support for their military. And like all the other hawks in the former Party of Reagan, Graham had to act in public as though his foreign policy was not in direct opposition to the White House, hoping that he would get support for the things that he and Trump agreed on. As with other members of the Church of Trump, such remaining conscience and individuality as Graham had remaining was not so much as to let him commit heresy against his Master.
This death could not have occurred at a worse time for the GOP (Guardians Of Pedophiles). Mitch McConnell apparently got his wife to come back from China for a proof-of-life photo, but he’s still in no shape to come back to the Senate. Lindsey Graham was the sitting chair of the Senate Budget Committee. As of this week, the US Senate has a majority of 53 Republicans and with two of them out of action, the majority is 51. So much for Trump passing the SAVE Act. Unless he can rally his team to win just one more for the Skipper.
By South Carolina law, the Republican governor has to appoint a temporary replacement for Graham, and then stage a special primary election to determine the Republican nominee for the open seat. The regular primary has already been held and the Democratic nominee for the South Carolina Senate seat is Dr. Annie Andrews. The last polling before Graham’s death had Graham leading Andrews by only 3 points in a state Trump won by 18 points in 2024. And that’s WITH Graham’s incumbency and name recognition. Prior to this week things were not looking so good for Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate, with Graham Platner’s offensive sexual history destroying his campaign for the Maine Senate race but also taking away the Democrat who had the most popularity and name recognition. But as they say, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. (Note to professional Christians: ‘the Lord’ is NOT Donald Trump.)
So, goodbye Lindsey Graham. I would say, Rest In Peace, but as with your friend Benjamin Netanyahu, you were never a big fan of peace. So I will say, for your sake, you had better hope the God and the final judgment you claimed so loudly to believe in don’t really exist.