The sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham, perhaps the most effective hawk in the modern Republican Party, has created a vacuum among supporters of an assertive American foreign policy.
America First leaders see it as a sort of macabre opening to advance their cause.
To Trump’s anti-interventionist allies, Graham was a constant irritant who boosted strong and proactive U.S. involvement in Israel and Ukraine and supported a transatlantic European alliance they argue no longer serves core American interests. While others in the Senate share Graham’s support for a more muscular military policy, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), none have the relationship with the president and other Senate Republicans that made him, in the America First crowd’s eyes, so worrisomely influential.
Instead, they see Graham and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who has been absent from the chamber for weeks after a fall and a bout of pneumonia — as the last vestiges of a hawkish old guard that has been dwindling since Sen. John McCain's death in 2018.
“The McCain wing of the ‘America Last’ party has taken a mortal blow with the death of Graham and the demise of McConnell — Cotton and the rest of the cabal have neither the gravitas nor the cunning of those two,” said Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist. “The Oligarchs in Ukraine and Imperial Israel Proponents are curled up in the fetal position.”
Graham used his rare, durable rapport with the president to push his hawkish instincts in an administration whose impulses often ran in the other direction. They day before he died, a bipartisan group of senators that included Graham announced they had reached an agreement with the White House on new Russian sanctions legislation. His death may be the final boost needed to enact the long-stalled bill, an illustration of the kind of cause that will be missing a champion like him in the future.
While he was never able to convince Trump to embrace Ukraine in the same way that he did, he personally lobbied Trump to send Ukraine Tomahawk missiles and was among the loudest Senate voices advocating for the U.S. strikes on Iran earlier this year.
It’s that track record that has some anti-interventionists — even those unwilling to name Graham directly — conceding his death may help their cause. They argue that one fewer hawkish voice in the president’s ear can only help the America First movement.
“Broadly, whatever the reason, if there are fewer voices in President Trump’s ear advocating for intervention that’s a great thing,” said Steve Cortes, a former Trump adviser. “It’s a great thing for our country, it’s a great thing for our movement, it’s a great thing for our party, it’s a good thing for November.”
Trump himself noted Graham’s sweeping influence on foreign policy, including in an interview on Fox & Friends Monday morning.
“We lost a great man. He was a great politician and a kind man. You know who really lost? Israel. Ukraine. A lot of countries he fought for — they lost somebody who was very special,” Trump said.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement that the president “listens to many opinions on any given issue, but ultimately decides based on what he feels is best for the country.” Still, she said Graham was “an incredible ally” for the president on the Hill.
“The President valued the Senator’s opinions on a variety of topics, including foreign policy,” she added.
Even as they fiercely opposed his views, several anti-interventionists in interviews deemed Graham a savvy political operator who understood the president well enough to stay useful to him over the course of a decade.
And Graham was known as a practical legislator who took his losses in stride and kept working the relationship rather than retreating to grievance.
“[Trump] would call him for advice, and Graham would call him constantly to try to give him his counsel to help him push responsible national security policy,” said Fred Fleitz, Trump’s former National Security Council chief of staff and vice chair of American security at the American First Policy Institute. “He learned from what Graham told him, from Graham's trips abroad, from Graham's vast number of international contacts.”
Another person close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly, added that the president respected both Graham’s background and his motives.
“Lindsey, he was a veteran, he was a JAG, but he wasn’t considered soft by any means. He was pretty hawkish,” the person said. “The president recognized that Lindsey wasn’t some war monger like [former national security adviser John] Bolton and he wasn’t a squish. He had the advantage of having the trust of the president on these issues.”
Some in the America First camp also noted that Graham was willing to battle with their wing and its media allies head on in a way that some of his GOP counterparts with higher political aspirations were not — a move they grudgingly respected.
“Not only was he a hawk, but he was willing to be the Great Satan of the sort of realist restrainer camp,” said Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative magazine. “What you don't see from [Senate Majority Leader] John Thune or Tom Cotton is a desire to be on Tucker Carlson's bad side, be on Steve Bannon's bad side. I think that matters. Lindsey Graham didn't care. His goals were bad, but in that sense, his political courage for what he believed in was an asset for the hawks.”
And Graham’s commitment to the fight wasn’t rhetorical. He died shortly after returning from yet another trip to Ukraine, the kind of relentless, hands-on advocacy that made him uniquely difficult for anti-interventionists to oppose.
Still, not all of the president’s America First allies see Graham’s death as a boon to their cause. Some instead frame him as a bridge between a still-hawkish Senate GOP conference and a more anti-interventionist White House — someone who was able to move between both camps in a way that actually helped the America First cause.
“It actually hurts the America First movement if we don't have establishment senators who are willing to give America First views a fair hearing, the way Graham did. He inserted kind of an interpretive bridge between the two sides. He did a lot for America First foreign policy,” said Alex Gray, a former NSC official in Trump's first term. “Because he was so passionate about his view of America's role in the world, he chose to be that bridge.”
Patrick Wilson, a first term Trump administration official and technology lobbyist, said there is no clear person who can fill Graham’s shoes.
“Sen. Graham was a true believer in American liberty and our role in the world. He often reminded student groups, when they came to the Hill, that no other country in the world had to struggle with the conundrum of whether to make other men free," Wilson said. "There isn’t a natural successor in the president’s immediate circle.”
Alex Gangitano contributed to this report.
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