Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly last night, was an important citizen of the Washington conversation. He loved being in the mix, shooting two people’s backs from the camera, and then, when the lights came on, cutting smart, serious, and, yes, interested in some Audience of One.
What could be more appropriate, then, for Graham—he can’t be a party on this fateful Sunday morning–to be the single best thing: headline news. He died while he was living.
Graham was a complex character—his personal life, his sudden death, his public morals, his spoiled peach. Put it aside, though. Or I will (happily), because all of that will be covered and exposed and discussed. It already has been.
It is completely on the nose that Graham’s departure would happen just hours before his appearance. Meet the Journalists. It would be his 64th appearance on America’s longest-running public affairs program. In Meet the Journalists The Greenroom once featured a famous photo of Graham walking out with his Senate aide, John McCain. McCain, on the other hand, appeared 73 times Meet the Journaliststhan any other foreigner in history—something McCain was particularly proud of.
In early 2019, a few months after McCain died, Graham joked to me that his main goal in his remaining time on God’s green Earth (or God’s green room) was to beat McCain’s record. He never will.
Among the elite players, Graham was the “ultimate Sabbath bag”—a term author Calvin Trillin coined to describe the rotating cast of pundits and pundits who troubled Meet the Journalistses, This weeks, and Face the Nationof our (or our parents’) pixel lives.
Of course, Trillin came up with that coin when more people watched this Sunday roundtable interview. There were more of them relevantto convey what was probably Graham’s favorite word of the bunch—and largely his main mission as a United States senator.
“Try to be relevant,” Graham told me in the same 2019 conversation when I asked how he turned into such a ruthless and critical dog for Trump (okay, I didn’t actually use those words). This was an ongoing mystery in Washington, especially given how Trump criticized Graham when he (briefly) ran for president against him in 2016.
In Graham’s worldview, “media legacy” remained very important. This old, perhaps meaningless judgment served him well in recent years, because Trump, Graham’s publicist, was a major user of “shows,” as he calls them. No one understood better than Graham that Sunday morning television could be a good place to “manage the relationship” with the White House.
“Lindsey was very good at this game,” one senior White House official told me during Trump’s first term.
When I asked Graham about his keys to fooling Trump, he was candid about some of his formulas to follow. I was struck by how, by Graham’s description, Trump was a big, fat symbol.
“If you flatter him all the time, he will lose respect for you,” Graham told me of the president. If he wanted to get Trump to do something, especially if it involved foreign affairs, Graham would simply tell the president that his then-predecessor, Barack Obama, would have done something 180 degrees different.
This method “can be very good,” Graham told me. “Obama is afraid of him.”
Graham has always been a first-rate political shape-shifter, jumping effortlessly between the smarty pants of Official Washington and the MAGA buffoons of South Carolina. This power extended to the Lindseys on and off camera: One minute, she’d be talking to her Democratic colleague before their “hit,” and the next, when the lights came on, she’d be breathing partisan fire on behalf of the White House or Trump supporters back home.
Graham grew up in the rural town of Central, South Carolina, where his parents ran a dive shop called the Sanitary Café. It was frequented by townspeople, good old boys, and other rowdy characters. Nicknamed “Stinkball” around the bar, little Lindsey was always something of a mascot, tagging along with his dad. That became a permanent part of his personality. Graham always looked for stronger, bigger figures to bond with: “alpha dogs,” he called them. They would serve as his bodyguards and tickets of importance. They included the likes of his father, McCain, and, in his last public appearance, Donald Trump.
No doubt Graham would be pleased that the president took it upon himself to be one of the first to announce his death. Graham was “one of the greatest men and Senators I have ever known,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at 3:21 p.m.
Later in the morning, Trump would go one on one to call Graham “a great politician, really.”
The best, actually, is when Trump said this: Meet the Journalists.
