Remember me
Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senior senator and foreign policy hawk who changed from a Donald Trump skeptic to one of the U.S. president’s strongest allies, died on Saturday. He was 71.
The cause of death was “a brief and sudden illness,” Graham’s office said in a post on X that offered no additional details. He was in Kyiv as recently as Friday before returning to Washington, where he was scheduled to appear on U.S. TV on Sunday morning.
Emergency personnel responded to a call for “cardiac arrest” at Graham’s Capitol Hill home on Saturday night, NBC reported, citing police scanner audio.
His family “appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period,” his office said.
The veteran Republican lawmaker served in the Senate since January 2003. Before that Graham was a House member from 1995 to 2003 and a South Carolina state lawmaker. He chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2021 and was most recently chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
Seeking a fifth Senate term, Graham had been locked in a tight battle for re-election in the typically conservative southern state with Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician. He won his primary election on June 9.
Among his last legislative efforts, Graham was part of a bipartisan group of senators who claimed last week to have reached an agreement with the Trump administration to move ahead with new sanctions on Russia, raising the prospect of more U.S. economic pressure on the Kremlin to halt its war in Ukraine.
A lifelong bachelor, Graham was one of Trump’s loudest critics when the reality TV star and real estate developer sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, calling him a “race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot,” and a “disgrace,” among other things. On X, then known as Twitter, Graham said choosing Trump as the GOP figurehead would destroy the party.
By Trump’s first term in the Oval Office, though, the two men had formed an alliance that morphed over time into staunch loyalty on the part of the senator. The pair golfed together several times at one of Trump’s courses.
Graham staged his own short-lived bid for president, announcing his run on June 1, 2015, before suspending the campaign on Dec. 21.
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R), Republican of South Carolina, speaks to the press alongside U.S. President Donald Trump, surrounded by members of Congress, after Trump signed a funding bill to end a partial government shutdown in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Feb. 3. Graham, a key ally of Trump's, died on Saturday at the age of 71 following “a brief and sudden illness,” according to his office. | AFP-JIJI