Senator Lindsey Graham is dead at 71. He died the way he lived — in motion, at full throttle, pressing some cause or another into the next news cycle.
He had just returned from Ukraine, where he met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, announced a new package of Russia sanctions, and — by all accounts — worked the room at every dinner and private meeting available to him. He was scheduled to appear on Meet the Press the next morning. Instead, his aorta gave way in the night, and by Sunday the tributes were flooding in.
Grady Throneberry
I want to believe what Amy Klobuchar wrote about him.
Her statement was generous, warm and clearly genuine. She called him her friend. She described his “kid-like exuberance” stepping off planes in foreign capitals, that twinkle in his eye that seemed to say, “Can you believe we’re actually here and doing this?” She talked about standing outside a Republican cloakroom holding a sign that read “Save the Afghans” while Graham held the vice president on the phone — and how he finally said, “OK, OK, I’ll go on your bill even if it gets me in trouble.”
“That statement tells only part of the story.”
She said he “brought joy to his job.”
I believe she meant every word. I also believe that statement tells only part of the story, and a senator running for governor of Minnesota probably knew that when she wrote it.
The tributes have been nearly universal in their generosity. Trump called him one of the greatest people and senators he had ever known. Zelenskyy said he was a “true defender of freedom.” John Fetterman called his death “sudden and awful.” Even Hunter Biden posted his condolences — a complicated sentence that began, “When I heard about Senator Graham’s death, the first thing I thought about was not all the things he said and did in service of Donald Trump.”
The man he started out to be
Lindsey Graham grew up hard. His parents owned a bar, a restaurant and a pool hall in Central, S.C. They lived in a single room in the back of the building, where he and his sister, Darline, slept alongside the sofa and the television. His father died of a heart attack at 68. His mother followed not long after. Graham was still in school. He became the primary caretaker of his younger sister — the same sister Gov. McMaster just appointed to finish his Senate term.
That origin story matters. It tells you something about what drove him into public service in the first place. He was a first-generation college graduate who then earned a law degree, served 33 years in the Air Force and Air Force Reserve, and arrived in Congress in 1995 with a legitimate sense of purpose. He was sharp. He worked hard. He had real friendships across the aisle.
There is a version of Lindsey Graham — the version Klobuchar remembered, the version John McCain trusted — that probably entered politics for genuinely noble reasons, if sometimes misguided ones.
I want to believe that version was the real one.
What the record actually shows
But the record doesn’t let me rest there.
As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Graham helped shepherd what Trump called his “One Big Beautiful Bill” through the Senate — a piece of legislation that cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid over 10 years and slashed close to $200 billion from food stamps.
In South Carolina, one of the poorest states in the nation, those numbers are not abstractions. They are people. They are families who rely on SNAP because the economy Graham’s party built has not built enough for them.
He voted to take food from the tables of his own constituents in the name of fiscal discipline while supporting tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy.
His civil rights record is equally difficult to square with the warm eulogies.
The NAACP gave him a 19% rating in its Federal Legislative Report Card. Earlier in his career, the ACLU gave him a zero on the civil rights votes it tracked.
He voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act — legislation designed to restore federal protections gutted by the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling, a ruling that immediately opened the door to a wave of new voter suppression laws across the South.
He voted to confirm Supreme Court justices who made that gutting possible. He voted against Ketanji Brown Jackson, the most qualified nominee in recent memory to the Supreme Court.
In 2020, at the height of Black Lives Matter protests, he told Black South Carolinians they could go anywhere in the state — so long as they were “conservative.” He said repeatedly that systemic racism does not exist in the United States, pointing to Barack Obama’s election as evidence. He was photographed having dinner with a lead organizer of the Proud Boys after Trump told them to “stand back and stand by.”
And yes — after the Charleston massacre in 2015, he eventually supported removing the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds. He attended a Black church, heard the congregation’s pain and said the Sunday service closed the deal for him.
That moment was real. Credit where it’s due.
But one moment of moral clarity does not cancel a career.
The Trump question
The hardest part to reconcile is the Trump chapter.
Lindsey Graham once told a reporter, plainly, “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” He called Trump unqualified to be president. He warned his own party that Trump’s immigration rhetoric would destroy their standing with Hispanic voters. He voted in 2016 for a third-party candidate rather than put his name next to Trump’s.
Then Trump won, and something shifted — or perhaps more accurately, something revealed itself. Graham became a golf companion, a Mar-a-Lago regular, a man whose campaign website in his final election cycle proudly displayed Trump’s “complete and total endorsement.”
He helped amplify the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. He worked to overturn votes in states with large Black populations. After January 6, he said he’d finally had enough — then voted against convicting Trump at the impeachment trial, and later said, “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no.”
“By the end, he was serving something smaller: his own survival inside the only coalition available to him.”
He chose his position over his principles. He may have started in politics wanting to serve. By the end, he was serving something smaller: his own survival inside the only coalition available to him.
That is a familiar American tragedy. It doesn’t make him a monster. It makes him a cautionary tale about what power costs and what it eventually demands of the people who need it too much.
What I can offer
I offer prayers for his sister, who adored her brother and has now been handed the strange inheritance of his Senate seat. I offer prayers for his staff, who by all accounts were fiercely loyal to him and will grieve this loss deeply. I offer some measure of genuine respect for his work on Ukraine, his relationship with John McCain, and the moments — however few — when he chose the harder right over the easier wrong.
I do not offer the eulogies that pretend the record was something other than what it was. That kind of comfort is not actually comforting. It is amnesia dressed as grace.
Micah 6:8 does not say do some kindness or aspire toward justice. It says do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly. The conjunction is the point. You don’t get to claim one while abandoning the others.
Lindsey Graham was complex. Most of us are. But complexity is not absolution. The people who lost food assistance because of his budget votes are still going hungry. The voters who lost federal protections because of his judicial votes are still navigating a more hostile democracy. The facts of his legacy do not soften, regardless of how charming he was on a foreign trip.
Rest in peace, Senator. I genuinely mean that.
I just can’t pretend the rest of it didn’t happen.
Grady Throneberry is a speaker, author, coach, pastor, retired police chief and member of Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky.
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