Lindsey Graham Is An Ex-Parrot
God overheard muttering, 'Damn. Missed again!'
It was not the dead senator announcement we expected this morning, but Lindsey Graham, the US senator from South Carolina who went from warning in 2016 that “If [Republicans] nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it” to being one of Donald Trump’s most loyal lap dogs, died Saturday night at the age of 71 after what his office said was “a brief and sudden illness.” We doubt it was a sudden attack of conscience for his career of demanding the US bomb every adversary at every opportunity, or for his epic toadying to Trump.
NBC News reports that a top Graham staffer said there hadn’t been any signs that Graham had been feeling sick before his death. He had been scheduled to appear Sunday on NBC News’s Meet the Press, and if producers hurry they can probably cobble together an AI version of Graham from his 63 previous appearances on the show.
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Graham died just a day after visiting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, where Graham told Zelenskyy that Congress was working on toughening sanctions against Russia and Zelenskyy said it would sure be nice if the US could help Ukraine defend itself from Russian missile attacks. (Being Tuff on Russia vis a vis its invasion of its neighbor Ukraine is one of the only times we can think of where Graham’s warboner, which definitely lasted longer than four hours, was warranted.)
At last week’s NATO summit, Trump agreed to allow Ukraine to build Patriot missile interceptors under license. Graham has been one of Ukraine’s more vocal supporters even as Trump has wavered between half-hearted support and willingness to let Russia win so Trump can say he gets a Nobel Peace Prize.
In a statement on Graham’s death, Zelenskyy said, “Lindsey was a true defender of freedom and of the values that make our world safer.” That was a lot nicer than in March 2025 when Graham called for Zelenskyy to resign after Trump insulted the Ukrainian president for not wearing a suit to that disastrous Oval Office meeting. At the time, Zelenskyy offered to grant Graham Ukrainian citizenship so his opinion might at least carry a little weight.
Graham’s weirdly flexible sycophancy toward Trump was a hallmark of his last years in office, what with his apparently clear-eyed 2016 assessment of the danger Trump posed, and his insistence after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump’s mob, which led Graham to declare — for five minutes — that he was breaking up with Trump, insisting, “All I can say is a count me out. Enough is enough.” Soon enough, enough was not enough, and he was right back insisting that Trump shouldn’t be impeached, and that his prosecution was a witch hunt.
As Wonkette’s Evan Hurst said in 2018, when Graham was simultaneously carrying Trump’s balls on the golf course and warning that Trump shouldn’t interfere in Robert Mueller’s investigation,
At times, Graham seems like he's trying to hump the line between sanity and staying in Trump's good graces, and maybe if we got into that weird little brain of his, we'd learn he thinks he's still doing that. He pays lip service to protecting the Robert Mueller investigation — his name is even on a Going Nowhere bill to do just that! — but then he gets up on his little high horse and says “NO COLLUSION! WITCH HUNT!” out of the other side of his mouth, and honestly we do not know what the hell is going on here.
Over time, it became clear that it wasn’t so much that Trump and Vladimir Putin were blackmailing Graham to keep him in line; instead, Lindsey Graham stayed true to his most deeply held moral principle: Keeping himself in the news and doing whatever he thought would be good for Lindsey Graham.
Now Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell (probably? we are pretty sure?) are dead, and we should get ready for Senators Nancy Mace and well we can’t think of a Kentucky Republican worse than Mitch McConnell who isn’t already in the Senate, but we’re sure the God who’s in charge of the current timeline in this particular universe has some pretty hilarious ideas up her sleeve.
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Good morning. Please refrain from referring to Lindsay Graham as "Miss." To do so implies that being a boot-licking hypocrite is a feminine trait.
That's a shame.