Sia: Well done piece on LG by someone who knew him very well.

The Power Addict. A cold-eyed look at a Lindsey Graham

by Rick Wilson - Jul 13

Lindsey Graham is dead at 71, and the tributes are already stacking up like cordwood, warm and bipartisan and mostly, in the way of these things, a lie of omission.

Let me tell you what he actually was, because I watched it up close for a long time, and because the men who knew him best are the least likely to say it out loud this week. Before we dive in, I did not dislike Graham, as a rule. He was easy to like. I dislike what he became, and the addiction that drove him into his final, diminished form.

Graham was a willing prisoner of the system of power and influence in Washington. He was, as many have noted, a pilot fish. He needed, for a host of psychological, practical, and political reasons, a shark to swim beside. For years, the shark was John McCain, and Lindsey was better next to McCain than he ever was alone, sharper, funnier, braver by proximity and association.

When McCain died, the water changed. Graham went looking for a bigger fish, found one in the fetid waters of Mar-a-Lago, and never looked back. Graham’s noted abilities as a persuader, a backslapper, a bullshitter (not an insult), and a dealmaker will be cheered this week, but I look at his legacy today with colder eyes.

Graham was more Reek than Richelieu, whispering cloying, honeyed lies into the ear of power, moving the pieces across Washington and the globe. In the McCain era, one could make that case. For Trump? He was not.

He was, in these final years, a conduit between more powerful, more self-directed forces. He was the thing that got kept around because he did the legwork, was useful and brazen, and knew when to genuflect. I suspect a large driver of his addiction and addiction to this President was Trump’s protean control of other men and his unique sadism, which appealed to some broken part of a broken man, with Graham on the edge of destruction if the winds of Trump’s caprice switched too suddenly.

It’s like base jumping; it can all go wrong, but what a thrill.

You have seen the list by now of just how malleable Graham was in Trump’s presence. The 2016 Graham, before the golf outing that reprogrammed him. “Race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” “A kook.” “Nutjob and a loser.” “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed, and we will deserve it.”

He said all of it, and he meant it, and then in March of 2017, he played eighteen holes of golf with his new master and came back a convert. People treat that heel turn like a mystery.

It was never a mystery. Graham told you exactly who he was in those quotes, and then he showed you again by abandoning every word of them. The tragedy is not that he lied about Trump. The tragedy is that he was telling the truth the first time and wanted access to power too badly to keep telling it.

Here is the part I want to be fair about: he was not a stupid man. Sharp lawyer, quick wit, one of the few in that chamber who could actually think on his feet in a hearing or a floor action.

But intelligence without a center is just a faster way to arrive nowhere.

Graham was the purest specimen I ever met of a particular Washington disease, the man whose entire interior life is the game itself. Not the country. Not a philosophy. The game. The room. The proximity. Take away the most powerful addiction in Washington, and there was nothing underneath, no there there, just the early trauma of hard childhood tragedy, a lost boy from South Carolina with no one important returning his calls.

That is why damn near everyone loved him in Washington’s power club, and I mean everyone. The bipartisan affection for Lindsey was real, but it was not because he was garrulous and fun at dinner, though he was.

It was because he was a horse trader. A favors guy. A backslapper who could cut a deal across the aisle at eleven at night and mean it, at least until morning. In a Senate that has forgotten how to legislate, Graham remembered the mechanics were secondary to the relationships. That is a genuine loss, and I won’t pretend otherwise, though I wish his powers hadn’t been suborned to evil.

And the press adored him for the most cynical reason of all: he answered the phone.

Graham was a firehose of leaks. He would talk to anyone, on background, on the record, in a hallway, at any hour, in any era, including this one, when talking to reporters became an act of near treason inside his own party. He fed the beast, so the beast purred. Half the warmth in this week’s coverage is muscle memory from a thousand blind but insightful quotes he handed out for free.

But here is the thing that the obituaries so far have largely missed.

Graham was not just a bridge to Trump. He was a bridge to the Before Times, to the old GOP caucus, the ones who still remember an actual Republican foreign policy, an actual legislative process, and an ideology before MAGA, before the Tea Party.

He was the translator, the man who could speak MAGA to the institutionalists and institutionalism to MAGA, and make both sides think he was on their team. That function does not transfer. You cannot appoint a successor to it. It was personal, it was Lindsey, and it is gone.

Which brings us to the machinery, and to the people who should be nervous this morning. Graham was the glue on many recent Trump judicial and Cabinet nominations. Full stop.

On the Judiciary Committee, he was the man who kept the caucus in line on Trump’s judges, from the Supreme Court on down. He knew how to whip a confirmation, when to twist an arm, and when to offer a bribe. Every judge Trump got confirmed passed through Lindsey’s hands. Whoever inherits that gavel inherits a much tougher landscape, and there is no guarantee they inherit the discipline. The confirmation conveyor belt just lost its foreman. (To say nothing of Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and John Cornyn joining the YOLO Caucus and no Lindsey to walk them back into line.)

Todd Blanche should feel that in his guts today. Graham was the senior Republican with the standing, the relationships, and the appetite to run interference on Blanche’s appointment as Attorney General. Thune is down two votes right now, and even if Mitch McConnell isn’t dead dead, I’m gambling he’s not making the Blanche fight.

On DOJ oversight, on defense and intelligence matters, on keeping the Judiciary machinery pointed the way the White House wanted it pointed, there’s no logical replacement. Without him in that chair, the oversight fights over Epstein and Patel and Blanche get harder to manage, and the stakes get higher and uglier.

The man who could have kept a Blanche confirmation hearing from going sideways is in a casket. Rough ride ahead.

And for the Israel hawks, the interventionist-for-Israel-only wing, the last true believers in Bibi’s role in determining the deployment of American muscle abroad: check your surroundings, because you are on the endangered species list now. Graham was the loudest, most senior, most media-saturated Israel hawk in the building, the guy who gave Republican cover to every hard line and is the spiritual architect of the war with Iran.

Beyond Israel, the MAGA caucus was already drifting toward the isolationist shore. He was the anchor holding it against the current, and the anchor just got cut. There is no one with his seniority and his megaphone to replace him.

People ask me when I stopped waiting for the old Graham to come back.

Everyone who knew him spent years waiting for the flip, for the day the McCain-era Graham resurfaced and said “Enough.”

I stopped on January 7th, 2021. That last flicker of defiance, the night of the 6th of that fell month, when he stood up and said, “Count me out, I’m done,” lasted about a news cycle. Even as he said it, I could see the gears turning in his head as he pondered how to get back into Trump’s good graces. (He knew, and only a few of us would even whisper, that Trump would never go away. It’s our national curse.)

By morning, the flicker was gone, snuffed, and he was back in a slow orbit towards the man whose mob had just hunted his colleagues through the halls. He later devolved into a screeching, pathetic defender of Trump on the matter of January 6th. That was the moment the old Graham died. Everything after was the Temu animatronics of today’s MAGA GOP.

So what was his legacy, in the end?

He got exactly one thing he wanted out of Donald Trump: war with Iran, the hawk’s dream, the thing he’d argued for across three administrations.

And here is the cruel, perfect joke of it: in the final days of Lindsey Graham’s life, that war has curdled into a catastrophe of historic proportions. The ceasefire in ruins, as even the slowest kids in the class could have predicted. The economic, security, and political damage is mounting by the minute.

The Strait of Hormuz is closed. American strikes and Iranian counterstrikes trading back and forth across the Gulf, oil markets convulsing, sailors dead, allies begging both sides to stop, and no end that looks like anything but disaster. The one thing he wanted was delivered by a fool without a strategic bone in his body, and it has become a smoking wreck, Vietnam with less humidity and fewer upsides.

He got his war, but in the last minutes of his life, he knew it had failed. The Iran he so feared for thirty years is more powerful than ever, all because he got his one wish from Donald Trump.

Men of power in Washington are often addicts. Not to money, though the money is nice, and not to ideas, though they’ll rent one when it’s useful. They’re often addicts to sex, to fetishes their rural constituents couldn’t handle, to young men and young women who inherit the same addiction that broke them.

More than anything, Graham is the perfect example of it; they are addicted to being in the room. To access. To the tingling certainty that they are close to the fire, that they can lean in, whisper, and be heard by the one who decides. Graham was the addict’s addict. He would have traded almost anything for another year of proximity, and in the end, he traded everything he once claimed to believe.

What did he believe, at the very end?

Only in that. Only in the whisper, and the ear it was aimed at.

The rest was just noise he made while waiting to be useful to stronger men.