In 2015, Sen. Lindsey Graham called a “jackass” and warned Republicans that nominating him would be a disaster. Trump responded by reading Graham’s personal cellphone number aloud during a campaign rally, encouraging supporters to call the South Carolina senator.
Few political rivalries seemed less likely to evolve into one of Washington’s most consequential foreign policy partnerships.
Trump rose to power promising to end America’s “endless wars” and challenging decades of Republican foreign policy orthodoxy. Graham, by contrast, remained throughout his three decades in public service an unabashed advocate of projecting American power abroad.
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Yet over the next decade, Graham became one of the few lawmakers with regular access to President Trump on questions of national security, emerging as one of the Republican Party’s most influential voices on Iran, Ukraine, Israel and NATO.
He had built his Senate career around foreign policy. While many lawmakers spent weekends back home, Graham was often overseas meeting presidents, visiting war zones and trying to broker agreements between allies and the White House.Â
By the end of his career, his office had become an unofficial waypoint for foreign leaders trying to understand â or influence â the Trump administration.
In interviews following the senator’s sudden death Saturday, Trump described Graham as “like a member of the family” and said he was among the final people to speak with the South Carolina Republican after he returned from Ukraine just hours before his death.
As Trump reshaped Republican foreign policy around an “America First” agenda, Graham became one of the few congressional voices with regular access to the president on questions of war and peace. He frequently pressed Trump to maintain a muscular U.S. role abroad â even as the president questioned long-standing alliances and warned against prolonged military interventions.
Rather than becoming another Republican hawk sidelined by Trump’s ascent, Graham cultivated one of the closest working relationships with the president, giving him unusual influence as the administration navigated conflicts from Ukraine and Iran to Israel and NATO.
Whether Graham simply reinforced Trump’s instincts â or helped shape them â may become one of the defining questions of his foreign policy legacy.
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“He would call me all the time,” Trump told Fox News Monday. “I’d say, ‘Stop calling me, Lindsey.’ It was amazing. He just never stopped. He was a worker â a total workaholic politician.”
Colleagues said Graham lived and breathed the work of the Senate, particularly serving as an informal envoy between the U.S. and allies around the world.
In the hours before his death, Graham told a confidant he wasn’t feeling well but joked he couldnt die now because he still had work to do. He was preparing to push a long-stalled bipartisan Russia sanctions bill through the Senate, remained focused on advancing Saudi-Israel normalization and believed the Trump administration had not yet finished confronting Iran.
He had just completed his 10th trip to Ukraine, and maintaine
