Lindsey Graham obituary

Summary

Long-serving South Carolina Republican senator who was an ally of Donald Trump and an ardent supporter of Ukraine Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, who has died suddenly aged 71, had just returned from Kyiv after a meeting with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It was a good demonstration of both Graham’s firm stance on US power overseas, and his opposition to Russia. “Putin will not stop in Ukraine ,” he said. “To be weak in Ukraine means you lose in Taiwan.” Graham’s four terms (24 years) representing South Carolina had made him a powerful figure on key senate committees, including foreign relations, judiciary (which he chaired from 2019 until 2021) and budget (which he had chaired since 2025). He was known as a pragmatic dealer within the Senate, where his hawkish foreign policy choices aligned with those of the 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain and the 2000 Democrat vice-presidential candidate turned independent Joe Lieberman – together they were dubbed the “Three Amigos”. He was also close to Joe Biden, with whom he was able to negotiate legislation that might cross the aisle. A neoconservative, self-described “Reagan Republican”, Graham began working in 2009 with Lieberman and the Democrat John Kerry on a compromise climate change bill , though he eventually pulled out over a temporary failure of his bipartisan immigration control negotiations with the Democrat Chuck Schumer. All that changed, however, in March 2017 when Graham had lunch with Trump and emerged joking that he had given the president his new phone number. “Trump is committed to rebuilding our military, which is music to my ears,” Graham tweeted. “(He’s) in deal-making mode and I hope Congress is like-minded.” Trump turned on the charm, and they became golfing partners. More importantly, when the supreme court justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Graham, on the senate judiciary committee, played a key role in helping the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell stop any consideration of President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland, saying such nominations should never be made in an election year – even though the election was nine months off. In 2018 his impassioned defence of Trump’s supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who faced accusations of rape during his Senate hearing, led some to speculate that Graham saw himself as a successor to the former southern senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general, but Graham remained in place and won re-election easily in 2020. In the Senate, the Three Amigos were fierce advocates of George W Bush’s second Iraq war, and Graham argued for permanent occupation of Afghanistan. This is Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids.” When Israel was accused of genocide, Graham, on a conference call in 2024 with the international criminal court prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan, told him: “This court is for Africa.” Graham had recently won a six-candidate primary to stand for a fifth term in the Senate.