Over more than two decades in the Senate, Lindsey Graham was one of its most well-known hawks and, in recent years, one of Donald Trump‘s staunchest defenders.
The South Carolina Republican has also been among media and pop culture’s favorite legislators — a staple both of the Sunday morning talk shows and (without his participation) Saturday and other late-night comedy shows. In the process he became, so stealthily we barely realized it, the face of the Senate to millions of casual TV viewers.
A media-friendly quippiness, easygoing manner and zeal for arguing on behalf of U.S. military action made the 71-year-old, who died suddenly late Saturday night of unknown causes, a go-to for broadcast and cable-news bookers. The point was underscored by Graham’s scheduled appearance on Meet the Press Sunday morning. Graham had just returned from a barnstorming trip to Turkey and Ukraine, where he met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and was expected to argue on behalf of more aggressive U.S. intervention in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East on the current-affairs show.
He also had a penchant for reversing positions, especially on the worthiness of Donald Trump, making him easy fodder for late-night writers and a kind of shorthand for the Republican capitulation to its controversial party leader.
Such tendencies gave Graham a national profile far bigger than that of many other legislators, especially those from small and midsize Southern states. Most Americans could not pick Graham’s fellow junior senators from neighboring North Carolina or Tennessee out of a lineup (Ted Budd and Bill Hagerty, for the curious). But Graham was instantly recognizable, as much for his face as his wry barbs, usually delivered in a downhome drawl.
“Is this Watergate or Peyton Place?” the then-House member famously asked during the 1998 Bill Clinton impeachment hearings about the president’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, arguing that his fellow Republicans on the Judiciary Committee needed to chill the hell out. As a Washington Post profile at the time noted: “Lindsey Graham, a Twang of Moderation,” describing his “singular, humorous and highly quotable voice.”
Where other senators were either not interested or not able to present their case on television, Graham appeared there time and again. Graham was a hawk on immigration and argued on cable news for months, eventually successfully, for the June passage of a $70 billion package to fund ICE. He also appeared last year on CNN’s State of the Union criticizing President Donald Trump’s pardoning of those convicted for Jan. 6 offenses, a rare recent split with the president.
Graham kept a close relationship with TV journalists. “He was at the center of all of these debates in the U.S. Senate, not just right now but over the course of his tenure,” Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker told NBC South Carolina affiliate WYFF on Sunday morning, noting she had spoken to Graham multiple times in the past week.
Graham also had a refreshing way of dropping the veil on the staid proceedings on Capitol Hill. At one point in the fraught Bret Kavanaugh SCOTUS hearings in 2018 — after a vote by the Judiciary committee meant a delay in confirming the president’s handpicked choice — Graham appeared in a media scrum on news coverage explaining the latest, which he closed with a droll “Now I gotta go tell Trump.” The moment offered a rare glimpse into the psyche of a Republican legislator contending with a mercurial president.
That same year, Graham turned up in an HBO documentary, John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls, one of three white-haired hawks (Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman was the third) who would work across party lines on foreign-policy issues they agreed on. All three are now gone.
It was a TV newsmagazine appearance that actually helped give Graham his political career. In 1984, eight years before he would run for the South Carolina House of Representatives, Graham was an unknown lawyer working for the Air Force when he defended a pilot accused of marijuana use. He argued that the military branch’s drug-testing procedures were flawed. Graham won the case and ended up in a segment on 60 Minutes talking about it. Political insiders were suddenly aware of the obscure lawyer from Pickens County, South Carolina.
Graham’s unadorned manner and high media profile soon led to a spotlighting on late-night comedy shows. Kate McKinnon and later James Austin Johnson played Graham on Saturday Night Live, giving him the kind of notoriety many senators with aspirations to higher office only dream about. McKinnon memorably gave voice to him after Jan. 6, when she satirized the senator defending Trump. “He didn’t attempt a coup. He is coo’. He’s the coo-est guy I know,” she riffed as Graham in the 2021 sketch.
A recent SNL caricaturing came during the 2024 campaign, when Johnson played Graham in the cold open set at a dinner of Republican lawmakers where everybody decried Trump’s tactics and then declared him the greatest president since Lincoln.
Graham’s hawkishness in particular could draw the attention of late-night hosts. Jon Stewart made much of his fearmongering on foreign threats. “The poor man lives his entire life trapped in The Blair Witch Project,” Stewart famously deadpanned on The Daily Show in 2014 after Graham warned of imminent threats from ISIS.
Stewart would routinely impersonate his drawl and homespun metaphors (as he did in 2013 when Graham went after President Obama in a committee hearing), often with a heavy dose of subtext about Graham’s personal life.
(The unmarried senator, who had a long record of opposing gay rights, was the subject of much personal-life speculation. The matter bubbled up in 2018 when Chelsea Handler insinuated in a tweet that it was time for Graham to come out, prompting him to tell TMZ, “To the extent that it matters, I’m not gay.” SNL would sometimes play off the same subtext.)
Stewart featured Graham in a segment as recently as January after the U.S. military’s forced removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. “You’re an old-hand at warmongering,” Stewart exclaimed, hoping the senator would offer a reason for the invasion besides oil. The host teed up a clip of Graham talking about narcoterrorism and American lives — right before Trump cut in and brought it back to oil, unwilling to get the memo.
Graham actually appeared himself on The Daily Show in the spring of 2016 during Trevor Noah’s tenure, becoming a rare conservative politician to occupy the guest seat. Graham that presidential campaign season said he was endorsing Ted Cruz despite Cruz’s unpopularity. “That tells you everything you need to know about Donald Trump,” Graham said, to a major reaction from the audience. “I think his campaign is opportunistic, race-baiting, religious bigotry, xenophobia,” he added. “Other than that, he’d be a good nominee.” The piece now plays like a Paley Center piece of archival footage, excavated from a distant era.
Stephen Colbert, a fellow South Carolinian, sometimes made Graham the target of his Late Show monologues, particularly the senator’s flip-flopping on Trump — including the controversy late in his first term on an alleged quid pro quo the president made with Zelenskyy over military aid. “Don’t look away Lindsey,” Colbert repeated in the popular bit, in response to Graham saying he wouldn’t read the transcript of the Trump call to the Ukrainian leader.
One of the wildest pieces of political viral video ever had Graham at the center. During a feud in the 2016 campaign, Graham called Trump “a jackass” on CNN and CBS This Morning, leading the then-underdog candidate to dox Graham at a rally, giving out his cell phone number from the podium. Graham responded with a produced video that showed him destroying his phone in all kinds of creative ways, from dousing it in lighter fluid to piñata-ing with a stick. The move immediately conferred fame with millions of people who never followed Congressional politics.
Graham’s passing has numerous implications for South Carolina, the Senate and U.S. foreign policy (he had been working on a major Saudi-Israel peace deal at the time of his death). Who will be elected in November is now anyone’s guess. Graham, who fended off an America First primary challenge last month, was expected to coast to a fifth term. But a slew of Republicans will vie to take on the Democratic nominee Annie Andrews in what now becomes a far more contested election.
But Graham’s death also shakes up the landscape in a different and perhaps even more important way: without his personality all over television, it ends a key relationship between casual news consumers and Capitol Hill.
