 Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
The last time I talked to Lindsey Graham in June, he was trying to be pragmatic about President Donald Trump’s tentative deal to end the war with Iran. The time before that, he was gently panning — but accepting — Trump’s decision to endorse Ken Paxton over John Cornyn in the Texas Senate Republican primary. “I’ll leave it up to the president to endorse who he likes,” Graham said then. Explaining the president’s decision to oust a respected GOP colleague, Graham said that Trump is “looking at people that were not there when he needed them the most.” Of course, Graham had already won his own Trump endorsement this election cycle. He famously cast aside his very public doubts about Trump early on to become something of a consigliere to the mercurial president. He declared “count me out” after the Capitol riot and Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, but within a few weeks he’d gone to visit Trump and mend fences. The two spoke shortly before Graham’s death, Trump said on Sunday. Graham lived multiple political lives since he became a senator in 2003. He helped break a deadlock over judicial nominees in 2005 and wrote the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill in 2013 with his best friend, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. But as his former colleague, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, likes to say: “When you are in public life, people remember the last thing you do.” | 
