Graham’s legacy & his failure over Trump

I met the late Sen. Lindsey Graham about 20 years ago, when I was coming up in conservative politics.

I had been part of the neoconservative wing that believed in the “benevolent hegemon” version of America, and the idea that “history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will,” as Francis Fukuyama once described it.

Like Fukuyama, many of us later came to question both the prudence and the righteousness of that theory as the Iraq War unraveled. But at the time, my hawkishness endeared me to people like Lindsey. Famously a hawk himself, he took to calling me “my little libertarian,” not because I was one, but as a playful dig at my occasional limitations on war — namely, the Constitution.

As recently as last summer, he charged into a room in the basement of the Capitol where I was and proclaimed, “There she is — my little libertarian.”

I enjoyed working with Graham in those early days, and later as I broke with the party over Trumpism, I enjoyed covering him as a journalist. But I also watched with some sadness as he morphed into a coward.

Donald Trump’s entry into Republican politics scrambled everything — it changed both the party and many of those who had led it, and Lindsey was no exception. In 2016, Graham would call Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” who “doesn’t represent my party.”

Just a short time later, he refashioned himself into one of Trump’s staunchest defenders.

After Jan. 6, conversations inside the party were swirling around whether Trump was still the best standard-bearer for Republicans, or if he was now a liability. It was a moment when leaders on the right could have attempted a realignment of sorts, a life after Trump.

There were good reasons to move on from one of the most destructive periods in modern American politics, including the original ones Lindsey gave for opposing Trump. After all, he was still a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot, but now we also knew he was an incompetent, corrupt, and self-dealing narcissist. Now was the time.

But when Lindsey was asked about this in May 2021, gone were the courage and confidence of his convictions. Instead, he was at best a reluctant realist, at worst, a subservient suck-up.

Graham said of Trump, “He’s the most popular Republican in the country by a lot. If you try to drive him out of the Republican Party, half the people will leave.”

He wasn’t concerned with good conservatives leaving the party — folks like Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, and Sen. Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake were already being pushed out by Trump. He was talking about the people who showed up on Jan. 6, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the white nationalists and MAGA die-hards. They would have left if Trump had been pushed out. To which any good conservative should have said, “good riddance.”

But Lindsey, in his quest for power and relevance, decided to placate those ugly and odious elements, the very elements that his longtime friend John McCain had fought to marginalize and eliminate.

The sad irony in this is that Lindsey already had the kind of power and relevance that could have helped lead a movement to refocus the party on the ideals that once mattered to him. Instead, he squandered it to support Trump’s return, this time with a vengeance.

There’s a lot about Lindsey Graham that I’ll miss — his ability to work across the aisle, his fierce defense of the Syrians and the Ukrainians, his lifelong commitment to public service, and yes, his affectionate nickname for me. But what I’ll miss most is the man he never became, the man who could have led his party to the side of the right and the good. RIP to both men.

S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.