Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina and one of Donald Trump’s most loyal allies in Congress, is dead at 71.
His office announced that he died Saturday evening following a “brief and sudden illness.” Graham had just returned from Kyiv on Friday, where he met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work on a Russia sanctions bill. There were no known health concerns before the trip.
Trump called him a “true American patriot.” Zelensky said he was “deeply saddened” and called him “a determined leader.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had lost “one of its greatest friends.”
Graham was elected to the Senate in 2002 and served for nearly 24 years. His political evolution tracked the transformation of the Republican Party itself. In 2015, he called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and predicted destruction if he were nominated. After the January 6 Capitol attack, he stood on the Senate floor and said of Trump: “Count me out. Enough is enough.”
But he never truly walked away. By 2023, he was telling the BBC that despite Trump’s “dark side,” he was sticking with him because of the border policy, the killing of Qasem Soleimani, and conservative judicial appointments. He voted against convicting Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial and supported him in 2024.
Graham was a consistent hawk on foreign policy. He visited Ukraine 10 times since Russia’s full-scale invasion and pushed relentlessly for weapons and sanctions. He called the Afghanistan withdrawal “sad and dangerous.” He voted for the Iraq War. He was one of Israel’s strongest voices in the Senate.
“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” he said after January 6. “I hate it to end this way.”
It ended on a Saturday evening, quietly, a week after he was last seen in public shaking hands with Zelensky in Kyiv.