Senator Lindsey Graham flanks US President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina (French)
Senator Graham is an inherent model of the composition of American leadership, albeit one of the most famous at this point. "The Editor"
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Afrasianet - Abd Al Rahman Ayyash - For those who don't know, the zemmor, or "guide fish", is a small marine fish that carnivores sharks and sea turtles, swimming in the layer around its host's body, saving itself the trouble of swimming, feeding on the crumbs of its prey and even parasites of its skin, and in return gaining the protection of a predator. The "guide fish" was named because of an old belief among sailors that it guides larger creatures to food sources, a belief that was later refuted by science, as it is the follower rather than the leader.
Senator Lindsey Graham has lived his entire life like this. This is not a compliment or a slander, but just a description of a man who has spent half a century looking for a shark to swim in. Lindsey Graham has had a long and busy political life, but he has spent most of it in the arms of more ferocious and more powerful whales and sharks.
The shark laments the zamor fish
On the afternoon of Friday, July 10, 2026, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham stood in the center of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in front of burned-out structures of Russian vehicles displayed in the heart of the city as war spoils, answering questions from reporters on his 10th visit to Ukraine since the start of Russia's invasion.
Graham met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the same day, announced an agreement to move forward with a new sanctions package on Russia, and said — in what would become the last public statement of his life — that there are "things we can do on the front to build on Ukraine's lethal ability to protect itself from Russian ballistic missile attacks" and that this is the best opportunity he sees [to defeat Russia] since he started coming to this city.
Nearly 24 hours later, at about 8:30 p.m. Washington time, paramedics responded to a report of a man complaining of chest pain at a home on Capitol Hill in the heart of the capital. At 3:21 a.m. on Sunday, the president wrote on his platform Truth Social: "Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and senators I have ever known, is dead! He was always working, and he was a true patriotic American. We will miss Lindsey very much!!."
Senator Lindsey Graham (right) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during their meeting in Kyiv, a day before the former's death (French)
With three exclamation marks at 3:30 a.m., the shark lamented the Zemmour, but Trump wasn't the only shark in Lindsey Graham's life. Eight years before that dawn, in the summer of 2018, Graham stood in the Senate chamber mourning the first shark that had swam alongside him for a long time, Senator John McCain, his closest friend, professor and travel companion, and the lesson stifled him in front of the cameras until he couldn't finish the sentence.
But Graham spent the next few years on the golf courses next to Trump.
The man who publicly mocked McCain's captivity in the Vietnam War, and who continued to mock him even after his death. What kind of man is this man whose policies and morals extend to both scenes?
"Trump wasn't the only shark in Lindsey Graham's life"
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The easy answer, repeated by his opponents until it lost its meaning, is political hypocrisy. But hypocrisy is a lazy explanation; the hypocrite knows where his interest is and denies it in public. Graham was a rarer and more worrying figure, a politician with no inner center of gravity, floating only tightly to a larger body than himself. This hypothesis – the zamor hypothesis – is not a prejudgment of the late senator; it is a pattern that has been repeated throughout his career, and the final judgment of this journey is not simple or easy.
The orphan runs the billiards hall
"I am saddened by the passing of Senator Lindsey Graham. His life has been an extraordinary adventure. Rise from humble beginnings... Until tomorrow one of the strongest statesmen of our time and the bravest of them".
By Tom Brock, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Special Envoy for Syria and Iraq
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The story begins in the town of Central, South Carolina, in one building that combined a restaurant, bar, billiards hall and liquor store called the Sanitary Café, run by Florence James Graham and his wife, Millie. Upstairs, Lindsay Evelyn Graham was born on July 9, 1955. He was 21 when his mother died, one year before his father's death.
The young man, still a college student, found himself the legal guardian of his 13-year-old sister, Darlene, and in charge of the shop that had been the source of the The family's only livelihood.
Graham had already enrolled in the Air Force's Reserve Officer Program, and when his mother and father died, he was tied up with his younger sister. Here came the military exception that would shape the rest of his life when the Air Force allowed him to finish his studies close to home at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, rather than send him away.
He graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1977, and then earned a law degree (jurisprudence) from the same university's law school in the same year 1981.
Lindsey Graham with his sister Darlene (left) in 2015 (Associated Press)
After graduating, he was appointed an officer in the Air Force's Military Justice Authority in 1982, and began his active service as a military defense lawyer at his home state military defense base. He was then transferred to Germany, to Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt, where he served for four years (1984–1988) in two contradictory capacities: at one time as chief prosecutor of the Air Force in Europe, and at other time as a defense lawyer.
The man who would spend his political career pleading on positions he did not choose, trained to plead both sides together in the same military court.
After his active service, he moved to the Air National Guard as a reserve, a service that spanned more than 33 years, at the end of which he retired with the rank of colonel in 2015. He never married, nor had children, which marked his personal life with ambiguity and sometimes with rumors of scandals about his tendencies.
When he announced his candidacy for president four decades later, it was Darlene who introduced him to the public, with a sentence that the press said at the time wanted to show his "tender side": "He is a brother, a father and a mother in one person." After his death, Trump publicly pushed for Darlene to inherit his Senate seat, which he did.
"The boy who lost everyone he protected in 15 months spent the rest of his life keen not to stand in the open again"
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This essay would not exercise psychoanalysis of Graham's character, but it would point to a fact that may have a great ability to explain his positions: the boy who lost everyone he protected in 15 months spent the rest of his life careful not to stand in the open again.
He was first under the wing of the military, then the party establishment, then one man, then another man who was the exact opposite. The shepherds changed, their principles changed, and even overturned, and the only constant remained is a need Graham to Shepherd. This is not a reading of his intentions; it is the sum of his long life that can be summed up in very short situations.
From the pool room to the courtroom, Graham learned two skills that will stay with him throughout his life: to read people, in humor and seriousness, and to defend a position he has not chosen or adopted before.
The military prosecutor, as the accused, is looking for how to win the case, and the question of whether the case is fair is often marginal. But the billiards room has taught him something third: personal charisma.
The boy who ran the tables of play and drink for small-town customers learned to make everyone laugh, and until his death, as his opponents testified before his friends, was one of the lightest senators and the widest friends across party lines; eulogies pouring in from both parties called him "the funniest man in the House."
This appeal is not marginal in Graham's story, it is the tool of the politician who has no fangs, he lives by his ability to be desirable to those who have them.
When he entered the House of Representatives in 1995, he gained fame from the role he mastered in military courts: a prosecutor, this time in the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in 1999, and when he entered the Senate in 2003, he carried this full kit with him, and he lacked only one thing: The issue itself. He soon found someone to give it to him.
The Era of McCain: The Metaphor
Graham entered the Senate in January 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq, with a blank page on foreign policy. He emerged from his first decade as one of Washington's most famous hawks. The title of that decade was Senator John McCain.
To understand what McCain did to Graham, it is necessary to understand who John McCain was. When they met, the man was a living legend in American politics: a naval pilot of the line of admirals, whose plane was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967, breaking his arms and legs, and spending five and a half years as a prisoner of war, including three and a half years in solitary confinement, beaten and tortured. When his captors discovered that his father was the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific and offered him an early release for propaganda purposes, he refused unless Those who preceded him shall be released in accordance with military law.
McCain was elected to the Arizona Senate in 1987, becoming the "Maverick" who is out of his party, and the Republican presidential nominee in 2008. McCain was the man whose entire personality was built on a moment when he refused cheap survival. Graham, who had built his entire life on avoiding any such moment, had found in him exactly what he had been looking for since the billiards hall: a shark swimming alone without fear.
Lindsey Graham (left) wearing a U.S. Air Force uniform during a visit to Iraq in 2007 (U.S. Air Force official website)
The two men, along with Senator Joe Lieberman, became a trio known in the city as "The Three Amigos": traveling together to Baghdad and Kabul, voting together, and appearing on Sunday screens together. Graham unhesitatingly supported the invasion of Iraq, became a staunch advocate of the war in its darkest years, pushing aggressively for a "surge of troops" in 2007, even serving his brief stints in reserve duty in Iraq itself.
When the Arab Spring broke out in 2011, Graham and McCain were at the forefront of pushing for intervention in Libya and the subsequent arming of the Syrian opposition.
"Graham had a full version of McCain's political personality, including his rebellious tendencies within the party."
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In all of these situations, Graham's position seemed to be a "borrowed conviction" from others, and the clearest evidence was the man's transformations. In the McCain era, Graham was not only a hawk, he held a full version of McCain's political personality, including his "rebel" tendencies within the party.
He worked across party lines on climate legislation when it was a disbelief in the Republican Party, fought the sweeping immigration reform battle that nearly cost him his seat in a conservative state, and advocated for a ban on torture based on his military legal experience. All of these points were items in the McCain Project, and when he died in August 2018, his project was not just dead.
John McCain (left) and Lindsey Graham after meeting with Barack Obama at the White House to discuss U.S. intervention in Syria on September 2, 2013 (Reuters)
Climate legislation evaporated from Graham's speech, he began to demand that Gaza be bombed with nuclear bombs and sink boats of anti-genocide solidarity with Palestinians after he called for a ban on torture, and he turned a complete coup against immigration reform until he said of detainees in border detention centers in 2019 that he "doesn't care if they stay in these facilities for 400 days."
When we saw Graham next to McCain, he seemed convinced of every word he said, but the tree that seemed firmly established didn't hold up One season after McCain, perhaps because her roots were never in Graham's land.
It was also during this period that Graham's relationship with the Arab region was shaped as a chessboard for the expansion of the empire. He saw Iraq as a gateway to contain Iran, he saw Syria as nothing more than a front of attrition or a base to protect Israel, and his attitudes toward almost all the countries of the region fluctuated according to his "shark" project.
This was the same language as McCain's. Graham was such a noble student that no one thought to ask, what this man had to say if he was absent from dictating his ideas.
The Presidential Candidate No One Has Seen
In June 2015, on a stage in his hometown of Central, Graham announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, and was introduced by his sister, Darlene. The man marketed himself as one of the most experienced senators on foreign affairs, had fought Iraqis, jihadists, and Iranians from afar, and carried McCain's legacy.
But voters within the Republican Party did not see him as a serious candidate, sitting at the bottom of the polls at or below the 1 percent, never reaching the main debate podium, and six months later, Ahead of the primaries, he withdrew in December 2015.
In that campaign, a small incident occurred that alone would be a prophecy of all that was to come. When Graham called Trump an "idiot" in July 2015, Trump responded from a campaign rally in South Carolina itself, Graham's state, by pulling out a piece of paper and dictating Graham's personal phone number to the crowd, calling on people to call him. Graham's response to this "public humiliation" was a comic video in which he smashes his phone with a machete and a baseball bat.
There was no anger or confrontation in the response; It was a taming of humiliation and turning it into a pastime in what seemed like the first exercise of a muscle that a man would desperately need in the years to come.
This experience proved — to Graham above all else — that he could not be a shark. The man who had mastered swimming under McCain offered himself to swim in the open ocean before he realized he was no more than a fate. During that miserable campaign, Graham said of Donald Trump, the man who was swallowing his party in front of his eyes: "He's a racist, xenophobetic, religious fanatic," he told CNN as he withdrew from the presidential race in December 2015, followed by the following: "Do you know how you bring America back to its greatness [in a quote from Trump's slogan]? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell."
Lindsey Graham stands next to his sister Darlene after he officially announced his 2016 presidential bid (Reuters)
In February 2016, he described his party's state as "applied madness" and called Trump "a lunatic, a lunatic, and unfit for the presidency." On May 3, 2016, a day before Trump's run as the Republican presidential nominee, he wrote on his account, which he never deleted: "If we nominate Trump, we will be annihilated... And we will have deserved it."
"Graham called Trump in 2016 a lunatic, crazy and unfit for the presidency."
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Anyone who reads these texts out of context would think that they came from a man who took a tough stance against Trump and all that he represents. But it was all said and the old shark – John McCain – was alive leading the rejection front, when Graham was swimming in his shadow as usual. But the truth is that Graham borrowed not only his convictions from McCain, but also his courage. And when he died, Graham's convictions and courage died with him.
This year, politician Graham discovered that he was not electable outside his term and decided to return to his first base of his entire political career. He realized that he would not be the king, so let him be the closest to the king, whoever the king was. This functional self-definition is the key to understanding most of his positions.
Armageddon Falcon
One can hardly count how many times Lindsey Graham has changed his positions, and how many times he has expressed contradictory positions toward many countries in the region, including Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Only one country in the region that Graham has shown no hesitation or contradiction toward is Israel.
For two decades in the Senate, the Palestinians have only existed in Graham's lexicon as a security problem for Israel. The position of those who see the Palestinians as a people with rights, who have always been a dependent variable in the equation of Israel's security, Iran's war, or the US elections, has never stood still. However, October 7, 2023 onwards, this absence has been transferred from negligence to the door of public theorizing, historian and televised, in order to exterminate more than two million people.
Benjamin Netanyahu (center), Lindsey Graham (right) and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman during their visit to the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights in 2019 (Associated Press)
In October 2023, as Israeli airstrikes pounded every inch of Gaza, Graham said on Fox News, and then reposted the clip on his account proudly: "We are in a religious war here, and I am with Israel. Do whatever it takes – for hell – to defend yourselves. They leveled the place with the ground."
The next day, U.S. human rights defenders called the phrase "incitement to genocide," and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote that this was "rhetoric of ethnic cleansing that cannot be accepted in any civilized society." Graham did not back down. Rather, he said at the end of the same month that no number of civilian casualties in Gaza would make him question the war.
In November 2023, he was no longer interested in separating Hamas from "Civilians," he said on CNN: "The most extreme people on the planet live in the Gaza Strip... They were taught from birth to kill people and hate Jews," and victims estimated at the time that children in Gaza accounted for about 40% of the dead. In March 2024, he said that "someone has to uproot and destroy the Palestinian education system."
Then came the spring of 2024, and with it came the metaphor that will stick with his name forever. On May 8, at a formal hearing, Graham shouted at then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Brown: "How do you hope Israel goes to war? Give Israel what it needs to fight the war.
These are Hiroshima and Nagasaki in double dose." Four days later, on May 12, he repeated the metaphor and made his full and undiminished argument: "Fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we have decided to end the war by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. That was the right decision. Give Israel the bombs it needs to end the war."
"Graham publicly called on Israel to strike Gaza with nuclear weapons, and called on the United States to give it what it needed to resolve the war."
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When the anchor tried to interrupt him, he answered his question: "Why was it acceptable for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end its existential war? I thought it was acceptable. O Israel: Do whatever it takes to keep the Jewish state alive. All that is needed."
The incitement came from Graham as the Israeli army advanced toward Rafah, the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip, where more than a million displaced people have gathered that the United Nations has warned that the invasion of their last refuge puts them "in imminent death danger."
The controversy that Graham attacked the Biden administration for was specifically about a shipment of 2,000-pound Mark 84 bombs, each capable of leveling an entire residential square, after Biden himself admitted that "civilians have been killed in Gaza as a result of those bombs," and days after the A report submitted by his administration to Congress concluded that Israel's use of U.S. weapons in Gaza violated international humanitarian law. Graham chose to call Hiroshima the "right decision" and to call the reticent generals "full of nonsense."
Lindsey Graham at a press conference in May 2024 to condemn the Biden administration's decision to withhold some weapons from Israel (his official website)
Japan's Nihon Hidankyō, the association of bomb survivors, which later won the Nobel Peace Prize, sent a letter of protest to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo demanding the retraction of the statements, mainly Hiroshima and Nagasaki, condemning Graham's remarks at separate press conferences on May 16. Graham, however, did not back down.
Indeed, when protesters demonstrated in front of his home in South Carolina in July 2024, he wrote on his account: "The Palestinians in Gaza are the most extreme inhabitants of the planet," he said, adding that when he hears the word "from the sea to the river" (the slogan that expresses the entire territory of Palestine), he immediately remembers the "Final Solution" (the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews).
These are not statements of an aberrant moment of rage, but rather a thread that can be traced back to years before Gaza. In August 2012, Graham summed up his theory of domestic American politics for The Washington Post with a sentence that became a parable in its racism: "We are losing the demographic race enormously. "We're not producing enough angry white men to stay in this business for the long term." This articulation between the angry white men and the rest of the world was the point from which his statements in Gaza about the religious war that must end with a nuclear bomb emerged.
"Graham's relationship with Israel was not only a stated doctrine, but also a funding structure."
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Graham's relationship with Israel was not only a professed doctrine; it was also a funding structure. AIPAC, the U.S.-Israel Public Affairs Committee, was not just a platform on which he preached annually, but was part of the network that funded his 23-year stay in office.
In 2025-2026 alone, Graham received more than $444,000 from AIPAC and associated individuals and organizations, according to OpenSecrets.
Lindsey Graham during a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Washington (Associated Press)
In fact, this pattern has been prominent almost throughout his career: in the 2020 election cycle alone, Graham's fiercest electoral battle, donations to him reached classified pro-Israel" about $460,000, most of which came from individuals rather than organized committees. The Republican Jewish Alliance was the largest single source of campaign donations ever in that cycle.
But the most striking figure in that campaign is not Israel's. Out of a $55 million campaign coffers, 86 percent of Graham's donations came from outside South Carolina. That is, the guy representing a state in the Southeast was basically funded from somewhere else, maybe for something else.
Not only was he required to serve his constituents in his state's cities, he was required to remain a voice in the files of interest to his New York funders Washington and Los Angeles on Israel, Iran, and military spending.
Graham, a U.S. senator who chairs committees and receives presidents of royalty, has spent the last years of his life openly and systematically constructing legal and moral arguments justifying the annihilation of a population trapped under a brutal occupation, by repeatedly measuring the largest mass killings of civilians in the history of modern warfare, and by stripping the entire population, their children before their adults, of innocence and humanity in preparation for this.
The verdict here may seem too harsh and categorical, but the texts, with their abundance, dates and insistence on them, do not allow for a reading Thinner than these.
Counter-Evidence
Syria is another example of Graham's commitment to Israel, and a final proof of his political upheavals at the same time. Over the course of a decade of the revolution, Syria has emerged in Lindsey Graham's speech as his high-pointing issue, bringing together the two issues that Atheer has carried throughout his career: Israel's security and the Iran war.
For years, Graham has been urging U.S. administrations to topple Bashar al-Assad. He demanded this under the Obama administration and under Trump, and attacked both parties for their complacency. But the tragedies of the Syrian people have not gone away. You are nothing but a pawn in Graham's war on the Middle East.
All of his statements are proof of this. In 2015, he said that Assad should not stay because he is "a puppet in Iran's hands." In his official statement in March 2017, when the Trump administration was reported to have abandoned the goal of toppling Assad, he warned that his stay was "a great reward for Russia and Iran." In 2018, he summed up his doctrine in northeast Syria that the U.S. presence there was an "insurance policy" that guaranteed that "Iran would not march from Tehran to Beirut." In all of these texts, Syrians appear as a theater to be run over The battle to contain Tehran, and they do not appear once as the owners of the issue.
"The tragedies of the Syrian people were nothing but a pawn in Graham's war on the Middle East"
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The most conclusive proof of this was provided by Graham himself in the last week of his life. In January 2026, while the Syrian government was imposing control over areas controlled by the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Graham vowed to do "everything in his power to revive the Caesar Act penalties and make them even more bone-crushing" and introduced legislation that would punish the Syrian government and reclassify Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham as a terrorist organization.
Then, three days before his death, on July 8, 2026, on the sidelines of the NATO summit, he sat face down in Ankara He met with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa as part of a bipartisan delegation of lawmakers, on the same day that the Trump administration informed Congress of its intention to revoke Syria's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Graham came out of the meeting with a statement saying that it was in the U.S. national security interest to work with al-Shara and "give him a chance to see if he is able to build a functioning permanent government in Syria," and that al-Sharia "represents the best chance for a united, functioning Syria." With what excuse did he justify the recent coup in his political life? "I fully understand Israel's concerns, but the legitimate president was a real thorn in Iran's side. Iran's influence in Syria has been drastically reduced... It's time to admit what he did about Iran."
The only constant in his interest in the Syrian file, from Assad to Sharia, is that Syria has never been the subject.
A photo from a previous meeting that brought Senator Lindsey Graham (4th from left) together with a delegation of Syrian-American activists and officials. Mohammed Alaa Ghanem, advisor to the Syrian American Council, posted the photo with the text of Graham's statement announcing his shift from his previous stance towards Damascus (Mohammed Alaa Ghanem's account on X)
The exception to Graham's career is Ukraine. To be honest, the late senator's conviction to confront Russia preceded Trump by years, challenged the isolationist base of the MAGA movement at its peak, and lasted literally until his final hours.
The man visited Kyiv ten times during the war, carried the sanctions against Russia bill through Congress and before the president, and announced a deal with the administration a day before his death to move forward. Zelensky inherited him as a man who "was here with our people when he was needed most," and the president of the European Commission said he "fought to the end to support Ukraine's fight for freedom."
This is an authentic conviction that he inherited from McCain, yes, but he carried it eight years later in a hostile partisan climate. The latest sanctions bill against Russia was the last appearance of the McCain specter in Graham's lifetime.
Geopolitical analyst Michael Horowitz told NBC in his obituary, "In the Trump era, Graham's influence has shifted from crafting broad consensus in the Senate to forging Trump's own instincts, using loyalty and adulation to keep hardline positions on Iran, Ukraine, and Syria present in the room." Graham may have had a sincere conviction about Ukraine, for example, but in the end, this confirms rather than negates the rule: in Trump, the zamor found a shark swimming in the direction it wanted.
There was one night in Graham's life when it looked like the rule would be broken.
January 6th: The Last Surrender
To understand what happened that night, we have to go back to the moment when Graham bought his membership in Trump's world. At home, Graham's power was not in the laws themselves but in his seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the gateway for federal and Supreme Court justices.
On this seat, he had built his old reputation alongside McCain, voting for Obama's two Supreme Court nominees on the pretext that competence trumped ideology. Then on September 27, 2018, just three weeks after he tearfully said goodbye to McCain, Graham burst into tears at the confirmation hearing of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was being accused of sexual assault, yelling at Democrats: "This is the most immoral play I've seen since I entered politics. You want power, and I hope you never get it." Graham's intervention made him a star in Trump's long-suspicious base, which Trump posthumously described as "his greatest moment."
On the evening of January 6, 2021, hours after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden's victory, the joint session resumed, and Graham, Trump's allie for four years, stood up from the Senate floor to deliver a five-minute speech in which he said: "Trump and I have had a hellish journey together. I hate it to end like this. Oh my God, how I hate that. In my view, he was an important president, but today... All I can say is: get me out of your accounts. Enough means enough."
He went further: "I prayed to God for Joe Biden to lose. He won. He is the legitimate president of the United States... Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are legally elected and will become president and vice president on January 20." At a press conference the next day, he blamed his friend: "It breaks my heart that my friend, an important president, allowed what happened yesterday to happen. He went too far."
"If Graham's biography had stopped on the night of January 6th, it would have been the mark of his end at best."
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In the 2018 film Vice, which tells the biography of former US Vice President Dick Cheney, director Adam McKay resorts to a stunt right in the middle of the film. After Cheney retires from politics in the 1990s and into a quiet life, the end badge actually begins to appear on the screen, and the moving lines tell us that the Cheneys lived happily away from Washington. Then a phone rings. On the other end, George W. Bush is offered the vice presidency, the false badge is torn apart, and real history resumes.
If Graham's biography had stopped on the night of Jan. 6, his ending badge would have gone up in the most beautiful way: a man who found his moral compass in the fall of his life, and stood up to his entire party to say, "Get me out of your accounts." But in Graham's story, as in McKay's, the badge was a hoax with one exception: in the film, it was the power that called Cheney. Graham, according to Trump's account, was the one who picked up the phone and called the authority to apologize. After his death, Trump recounted that Graham called him The speech was followed by a quick apology for the "only bad moment" in their relationship.
US President Donald Trump (right) speaks as Lindsey Graham listens on the presidential plane "Air Force One", a scene repeated on more than one occasion: Graham is in his usual place, close to the source of the decision, listening more than he speaks (French)
What followed was a "total surrender." Weeks later, Graham was repairing bridges with Trump, the same man he had asked to be taken out of his accounts, moving between Florida's golf courses and Trump's defense corridors, back to his old position: the closest to the king. When, on the first anniversary of the storming, Biden delivered a speech blaming Trump, Graham — Graham himself, the author of "Enough Means Enough" — came out attacking Biden for "politicizing" Jan. 6.
Perhaps if we go back to the hypothesis of the hummingbird and the protector shark. In January 2021, McCain had been in his grave for two and a half years, and the old Republican Party establishment in which Graham had sheltered for three decades had been swept away from its foundations by Trump and his movement, and he had a primary election in a state whose base had become Trump's sole property.
For the first time since 2015, Graham was faced with the choice he had terrorized his entire life since he was 22: the open.
The U.S. press has been preoccupied with the mystery of his transformation for years, until a conspiracy theory that Trump "has something" to blackmail Graham. But journalist William Salitan, who wrote a biography of his transformation titled "The Corruption of Lindsey Graham: A Case Study of the Rise of Authoritarianism," concluded that there was no secret or victim, but a man who "abandoned his principles in order to stay close to the center of power and fend off Trump's rivals in the primaries."
Graham explained his shift toward Trump by saying, "When you play golf with someone for three or four hours, you know them better."
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Graham had already explained the logic of this shift when asked in 2018 about the secret of his first coup against Trump, to which he replied with rare candid realism: "First, I got to know him. I played golf with him. When you play golf with someone for three or four hours, you know them best. He added that the president was doing what he had asked for in his campaign, and that he was satisfied. Golf here is not a sport in the traditional sense; it is the movement that a guidefish performs when it reattaches to the shark's skin.
Graham chose to tax on fears of isolation, and he made the same choice every day for the next five years. In Washington, under Trump, who is back again, he reaped the full price of loyalty by chairing the Senate Budget Committee, the seat of the president's unofficial adviser on Iran and Russia, and a permanent seat on the presidential plane.
According to the Wall Street Journal, he has become so integrated in his role that he is training Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on "how to co-opt President Trump" into striking Iran. The guide fish guides the other fish to the shark's mood. When that war actually broke out, Graham said on Fox News in March 2026 a sentence that expressed the "principles" he is espousing at the moment: "When this regime falls, we will have a new Middle East, and we will make a ton of money." At that point, we have the right to ask: would he have made this statement under McCain?!
A legacy of ashes
In his final days, Graham seemed at the peak of what a guidefish could reach. The chairman of the Budget Committee who managed the passage of the largest fiscal management legislation through the "reconciliation" mechanism, the winner of the primaries for a fifth term, the traveler who gathered in one week the NATO summit in Ankara, the Sharia meeting, a visit to Kyiv, the wreckage of Russian tanks on the battlefields, and the sanctions deal.
Then came Saturday evening. At about 7 p.m., Trump's phone rang, and Graham was calling from Washington, just returning from Kyiv, to check on the president and tell him about his trip. Trump later recounted that his friend's voice sounded "great" but said he was "tired" from traveling. That was, probably, the last call in Lindsey Graham's life: Even in his last hour, the last thing he did was check on the shark.
About an hour and a half after the call, paramedics were called to his home on Capitol Hill for a man complaining of chest pain. The initial forensic report identified the cause: an aortic dissection caused by atherosclerosis, one of the deadliest deaths known to medicine: the inner wall of the body's largest arteries ruptures and blood rushes hard between its layers, described by the few survivors as "a sudden, ruptured pain that cleaves the chest to the back." This pain lasted for more than 20 minutes in Graham's case, before he died.
Senator Lindsey Graham is leaving alone after spending his political life inseparable from the powerful (Reuters)
In the morning, his lamentations roamed the globe, Zelensky from Kyiv bidding farewell to a "true defender of freedom," Netanyahu from occupied Jerusalem declaring that "Israel has lost one of its greatest friends," Reza Pahlavi from Washington saying he was sad to lose a "loyal friend of the Iranian people," the foreign ministers of the Baltic states were paying tribute to each other, and Trump himself was writing his eulogy at 3:30 a.m. with three exclamation marks. In people's accounts, his death was a celebratory moment for hundreds of thousands of people on social media social workers from all parts of the world as well.
"Graham spent his entire life buying a seat next to the strong, and the price of that seat was always paid for until the last moment, at the expense of the weak."
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Graham's career is not so much an individual anomaly as it is the truest mirror of what has happened to the Republican Party in the last quarter century: a party whose principles have eroded between its neoconservatives and isolationism that makes no sense except the mood of the leader.
There is no room in the party for a new shark or even an independent big fish. In this environment, Graham was one of the most skilled swimmers, the most willing to pay the price of swimming next to the shark from his independence first, his stated principles second, and the lives of others third.
Lindsey Graham lived seventy-one years, including thirty in Congress, leaving no big law to bear his name, no ideology to be taught, no camp to continue his fight. Instead, he left a record of words and attitudes that, if collected, would make his life very short. And if there is to be a final scale of evaluation, let Graham himself be the man who measured everything by the standard of not sitting alone in the open. He got what he wanted, he didn't sit alone for a single day.
But the bill for this long man was paid by Gaza, Baghdad, Tehran, and hundreds of thousands of victims. This is Graham's legacy and legacy. He spent his entire life buying a seat next to the powerful, and he always paid for it, until the last moment, at the expense of the weak.
Source: Al Jazeera
