Lindsey Graham fought for Ukraine to his dying breath
National Post, 15 July 2026
The late senator was criticized for his cozy relationship with Trump, but this was the price he paid to sway the administration on Ukraine
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.
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.”
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.
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.
“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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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