The republic lost a giant when Lindsey Graham dropped dead on Saturday night at the age of 71. The four-term Republican senator from South Carolina was a throwback and an enigma: a Donald Trump loyalist who maintained friendships with the president’s Democratic opposition, an interventionist inside a party that had grown wary of foreign wars, and one of the Senate’s great orators, capable of summoning elegiac emotion and wry humor with his aw-shucks Southern drawl.
Just watch Graham’s 2018 eulogy for his close friend and fellow senator John McCain. “He was a difficult man. He could be tough,” Graham said as he held back tears. “But the joy that you received from being with him will sustain you for a lifetime. And I am so lucky to have been in his presence.”
Graham was also one of those politicians loathed by the passionate factions that have defined the Trump era. For the “Never Trump” former Republicans, Graham was a Judas. After running against Trump and bitterly opposing him during the 2016 Republican primary, Graham eventually bent the knee along with other unsuccessful candidates, even as McCain remained a thorn in the new president’s side. Former McCain adviser Steve Schmidt offered no eulogy for Graham, calling him “a simple, tragic man” in a post on X on Sunday. “He lacked a moral core.”
