Trump Is Spitting on Lindsey Graham’s Grave

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If it’s possible for a dead man to roll over in his grave, Lindsey Graham must be doing just that. In the last few years of life, he sold his soul, abandoned his principles, and betrayed his best friend, all for the sake of getting close to Donald Trump and swaying him to embrace Ukraine and punish Russia. Yet now, after a few months of resting in peace, assured that the bootlicking had been worth it, he sees the president emphatically embracing Russia and punishing Ukraine, so intently that he probably had his fingers crossed all along.

Back on Earth, among the living, Graham’s former Republican colleagues should learn the lesson while they can. It’s farcical to believe that cuddling up to this president will earn them favors down the line. Trump will push them under the bus on a whim, or—if they’ve already shuffled off this mortal coil, as Graham did in July at the age of 71—he’ll spit on their tombstones.

Not long after Graham died, a bipartisan majority of both houses passed a bill stiffening sanctions against Russia for its continued aggression and war crimes in Ukraine. They named the legislation after Graham, and Trump signed it.

But this past Friday, Trump announced that he’d struck a deal in which Vladimir Putin sells 300,000 metric tons of Russian diesel fuel to the United States and any other country that wants it—a deal that violates not only the Graham bill but also a bill, passed soon after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, barring the import of Russian energy supplies.

Trump’s goal in striking the deal was to lower fuel prices, especially for truckers and farmers reliant on diesel fuel, and thus win back their support in the upcoming midterm elections. (It’s unlikely prices will decline quickly enough to make much difference, but Trump is desperate to try.)

Speaking to reporters afterward, Trump not only publicly thanked Putin for the gesture but condemned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, citing his attacks on Russian oil and gas facilities as the cause of high oil prices—when, in fact, the main cause is Trump’s war in Iran. He even called on Ukrainians to “get a new president.”

Graham should be spinning in his grave at double speed, since he not only touted Zelensky but supported Trump’s war—even urged the president to hammer Iran hard. (The world reaps what Graham sowed.)

Trump may not get away with the diesel deal. It is, after all, illegal, and while that hasn’t stopped him from doing dreadful things in the past, he has this time aroused opposition, even fury, from not only Democrats but a fair number of Republicans. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, normally an agile apologist for the president, denounced “Trump’s Diesel Insult to Lindsey Graham.” Maybe the resistance will swell with unlikely collaborators.

The larger question, though, is whether many—or any—Republicans will rethink their calculations on the costs and benefits of bending their knees so strenuously to Trump’s demands.

Soon after Graham died, the New York Times’ conservative columnist Bret Stephens wrote that he’d “spent years publicly ridiculing Graham” for having “flipped from being Trump’s most brutal Republican critic to his most ingratiating minion.” Now Stephens wondered if he’d been too harsh. As a result of his toadying, Graham had worked a “steadying influence on the president,” culminating in Trump’s support of the bipartisan sanctions bill against Russia. That wouldn’t have happened, he argued, “if Graham had stuck to his anti-Trump guns, keeping up a steady fire of rhetorical barbs.” Would the world be better off if Graham had stuck to his guns? “Two years ago, I would have answered … with a loud yes,” as “freedom mustn’t be secured abroad while abetting demagoguery at home.” But now Stephens had changed his mind, seeing “a nobility” in Graham’s sucking up to Trump—or, as Stephens put it, his decision not to “let his moral or intellectual self-respect get in the way of advancing” his belief in “big things,” like Ukrainian democracy.

I look forward to reading Stephens’ future column re-asking the question, now that it’s clear Graham’s influence on Trump wasn’t so “steadying” after all. I hope he urges his fellow conservatives—in the media, in Congress, and inside the administration—to reconsider their own illusions about the virtues of kowtowing to this president.