Lindsey Graham is dead at 71, and the tributes are already stacking up like cordwood, warm and bipartisan and mostly, in the way of these things, a lie of omission.
Let me tell you what he actually was, because I watched it up close for a long time, and because the men who knew him best are the least likely to say it out loud this week. Before we dive in, I did not dislike Graham, as a rule. He was easy to like. I dislike what he became, and the addiction that drove him into his final, diminished form.
Graham was a willing prisoner of the system of power and influence in Washington. He was, as many have noted, a pilot fish. He needed, for a host of psychological, practical, and political reasons, a shark to swim beside. For years, the shark was John McCain, and Lindsey was better next to McCain than he ever was alone, sharper, funnier, braver by proximity and association.
When McCain died, the water changed. Graham went looking for a bigger fish, found one in the fetid waters of Mar-a-Lago, and never looked back. Graham’s noted abilities as a persuader, a backslapper, a bullshitter (not an insult), and a dealmaker will be cheered this week, but I look at his legacy today with colder eyes.
Graham was more Reek than Richelieu, whispering cloying, honeyed lies into the ear of power, moving the pieces across Washington and the globe. In the McCain era, one could make that case. For Trump? He was not.
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