Raymond J. de Souza: Lindsey Graham fought for Ukraine to his dying breath

Then-U.S. senator Lindsey Graham addresses the media during a press-conference at an open air exhibition of destroyed Russian equipment in Kyiv, in 2023. Photo by Sergei SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images

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Regarding the late U.S. senator Lindsey Graham, President Donald Trump had lavish praise, the kind he customarily reserves for tyrants. That’s a heavy burden for any man to carry to his grave, though Graham earned it. Such was the posterior osculation he offered the president after formerly castigating him as a reckless, bigoted nutjob.

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About Trump, Graham blew cold then hot, then cold and then as hot as can be. He ran against him for president in 2015 — the “nutjob” assessment — and then converted after Trump won the presidency. At the end of Trump’s first term, after the siege at the Capitol seeking to prevent the count of electoral college votes — with threats of violence against then-vice-president Mike Pence — Graham declared: “Count me out. Enough is enough.”

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He quickly recounted, calculating that while Trump had lost the 2020 election — a courageous position to hold in Trumpworld — he had not lost the Republican party. So enough was not quite enough, after all. With Trump, it never is.

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In assessing his “assiduous sycophancy,” Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal argued that Graham’s “obeisance was for a higher purpose.” Ostentatious obeisance it certainly was.

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“Graham’s journey from neoconservative gadfly to fierce Never Trumper to President Trump’s drooling fanboy could serve as a road map to the moral, intellectual and institutional decay of the party of Ronald Reagan,” wrote Baker.

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But the “higher purpose” of the drooling was to maintain a position among the other fanboys, such that Trump might listen to him. Trump’s second term includes a Vice-President JD Vance boasting that, “One of the things I’m proudest that we’ve done in this administration is … the United State is not buying weapons and sending them to Ukraine anymore.”

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The same vice-president boorishly shouted at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Trump joined in that ambush in February 2025; in August, Trump flew to Alaska to literally roll out the red carpet for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and to bond with him in the presidential limousine.

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Sen. Graham died hours after returning from his 10th trip to Ukraine since Putin launched his full-scale war in 2022. Given that the war has closed the airspace, the trip to Kyiv requires a 10-hour overnight train journey from Poland. It is not for the faint of heart, nor fair-weather friends.

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Graham announced in Kyiv that he had been successful in negotiating — with the White House! — new American sanctions on Russia. Given that many Trump fanboys have more affection for Putin than Zelenskyy, that was not a small achievement.

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The new sanctions package still needs to be voted upon by Congress and for Trump not to change his mind. Some have argued that it should be approved quickly as a posthumous tribute to Graham, who never wavered in his support for Ukraine and his assessment of the Russian threat.

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Yet without Graham’s voice in the president’s ear — he called Trump upon returning to Washington on Saturday, just hours before he died suddenly — might the fanboys prevail? Might the sanctions package be derailed without Graham on hand, not only to whisper but to perform the osculatory obeisance?