A Fact-based Lindsey Graham Obituary

Jul 13, 2026

Like many Americans, I mourn the sudden passing of Lindsey Graham. I had hoped he would live long enough to be tried for treason.

Let me define my terms. A true traitor collaborates with the enemy despite knowing better. For that reason, someone like Sen. Tommy Tuberville could never be considered a traitor, because he knows nothing.

And then there’s Lindsey.

For the better part of a decade, the senior senator from South Carolina was enmeshed in an on-again, off-again—but mainly on-again—bromance with Donald J. Trump.

It began when both men were running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. At the time, Graham had some pretty harsh words for his GOP rival.

“There’s only one way to make America great again,” he said. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

Snap! But Lindsey was just warming up. He’d go on to call Trump “crazy,” “a jackass,” and “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” who “shouldn’t be commander-in-chief.”

“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed,” he said, “and we will deserve it.” Why was he so sure that Trump would lose? “Donald Trump is the most unelectable Republican I’ve seen in my lifetime,” he said.

As for Trump’s mental health, Lindsey offered this succinct diagnosis: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy.”

Just one year later, when the crazy xenophobic jackass was chain-slurping Diet Cokes in the Oval Office, Graham decided to revise that assessment somewhat.

“What concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president,” he told CNN.

This sort of flip-flop worked so much better before the invention of Google. But Lindsey seemed to hope that by piling praise on the man he once wished would go to hell, we’d forget about all that mean stuff he’d said before. By 2018, Graham was bizarrely claiming that Trump “deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and then some.”

In his quest to suck up to Trump as strenuously as possible, Graham hurled himself into self-abasement as if it were an extreme sport. When Trump relentlessly insulted the memory of John McCain—purportedly Graham’s best friend when they were Senate colleagues—Lindsey responded with astonishing nonchalance.

“I don’t like what he says about John McCain,” Graham told Bloomberg. “But when we play golf, it’s fun.”

Yes, Lindsey apparently lost his moral compass somewhere in the sand trap of the Trump National Golf Club. That’s why it was so striking when he seemed to express genuine outrage on the floor of the Senate after Trump incited the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

“Trump and I... we’ve had a hell of a journey,” he said. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my god, I hate it... but today, all I can say is ‘Count me out. Enough is enough.’”

Alas, Lindsey’s appearance on the right side of history turned out to be a head-fake, as his hell of a journey with the insurrectionist-in-chief was far from over. Like his fellow quisling, Mitch McConnell, Graham voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial. And once it became clear that launching a coup against the US government wasn’t a deal-breaker for 99 percent of the GOP, Lindsey was hitting the links with the wannabe junta leader once more.

“I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot,” he told Axios two months after January 6. “I still consider him a friend. What happened was a dark day in American history. And we’re going to move forward.”

Lindsey just couldn’t quit him.

All of the events I’ve recounted thus far are sufficient to qualify Graham as a traitor. His defenders, though, might raise a mitigating factor: his hawkish stance against the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.

In this regard, Graham was always on the same page as his Senate pal McCain. Responding to George W. Bush’s gullible assessment of the murderous Russian (”I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”), McCain quipped, “I looked in Mr. Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters—a K, a G and B.”

But Graham might have topped McCain in his detestation of Putin. Calling him a “war criminal” and “not a legitimate leader,” in 2022 he proposed assassination as the swiftest way to end the war in Ukraine: “I just want him to go…I wish somebody had taken Hitler out in the ‘30s.”

When the International Criminal Court, in a somewhat less draconian measure, issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023, Lindsey hailed the decision: “To forgive and forget Putin’s war crimes—that are occurring on an industrial scale—would irrevocably damage the Rule of Law-based world order established at the end World War II.”

That “Rule of Law-based world order” was shredded in the Oval Office last year when Trump and JD Vance disgracefully ganged up on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for having the audacity to suggest that Putin might not be a trustworthy fellow. Aware of Graham’s longstanding hatred of the man he called a war criminal, I eagerly awaited his rousing statement of support for Zelenskyy.

Instead, Lindsey told reporters, “What I saw in the Oval Office was disrespectful, and I don’t know if we could ever do business with Zelensky again… I have never been more proud of the president. I was very proud of JD Vance standing up for our country.”

That kind of statement made many people wish Lindsey would go to hell. Done.