Kevin Spacey was inspired by his accent in House of Cards to play Frank Underwood. Failed imitation, it sounded so borrowed! Lindsey Graham never needed to overdo her drawlthat slight rolling “r” drag that the South Carolina senator cultivates as proof of his southern origins. As if this 70-year-old hawk, a neoconservative survivor who joined the Maga camp late in life, wanted to show that he too is a child of Appalachia. Son of bar owners in Central, a working-class town in Piedmont, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Lindsey Graham was orphaned at 22. From his youth behind the family counter, he has retained a discreet rusticity. Self-taught in politics, he first made a career as an officer-lawyer in the Air Force, as a military judge, and advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thirty years in the reserves, retired colonel, without having fought once. However, war, like uniforms, fascinates him.
For years, Graham embodied everything the Trumpist base loathed. Right down to the appearance. The gleaming ribbons, the silver epaulettes, the crumpled sand-colored fatigues brought back from Iraq. Barely ten years ago, Donald Trump mocked this uniformed lawyer, calling “air wimp” this Washington cacique who dreamed of himself as Tom Cruise Top Gun while having the physique of WC Fields. The George W. Bush era really reveals this. Under Bush, Graham established himself as one of the most assiduous hawks in the Republican camp. The story begins far from think tanks of Washington. In 1994, in the wake of the conservative revolution orchestrated by Newt Gingrich, he was elected to the House of Representatives for South Carolina’s 3rd district. He is 39 years old. At the Capitol, he advances with a fixed idea: to restore institutional discipline.
He distinguished himself during the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton. Washington then discovered a pugnacious jurist, very comfortable in the minefields of national security. Then came September 11. And with it, Graham’s ideological matrix. Wounded America turns to fight back. The Bush administration puts preventive war into practice and theorizes the export of democracy. Graham agrees without reservation. He defends a lasting commitment in Afghanistan and is already pleading for firmness against Iran.
In 2015, when he himself launched himself into the Republican presidential primary, he embodied this Atlanticist and belligerent tradition
In 2002, he reached a milestone. Elected to the Senate to succeed Strom Thurmond, he changes scale. The Senate, its strategic commissions, its hearings on defense, became his playground. He grew closer to John McCain, another veteran, another interventionist. They form a noisy tandem, sometimes a minority, but influential. At the time, the Republican base adored him. The years pass, the wind turns. Iraq is a semi-fiasco, Afghanistan is bogged down. The American right is fractured between interventionists and supporters of a national withdrawal. Graham stays on his line.
In 2015, when he himself launched himself into the Republican presidential primary, he embodied this Atlanticist and bellicose tradition. Facing him, Trump dynamites his vision of the world by displaying his distrust of warmongers. Graham attacks Trump; Trump ridicules him. The senator seems to belong to prehistory. During the Republican primary, Graham mocked the New York billionaire. How to make America great again? “Tell Trump to go to hell”he replies. He continues the punchlines: “Crooked Hillary will beat crazy Donald”, “A born loser”. Trump retaliates at a meeting, reveals his phone number out loud, publicly humiliates him.
An enigma fascinates Washington. Eternally single, Graham has never been married. Rumors about his homosexuality have always circulated, without any proof having ever been put forward and without him ever responding other than with humor. During the 2015 primaries, when asked about the absence of a wife, he said with a smile: “I have friends. There will be a rotating first lady. » In South Carolina, the evangelical electorate never sanctioned him.
Graham claims that Trump “surpassed the great Reagan”
In 2014, it was Joe Biden, then vice-president, who came to Graham’s aid during his South Carolinian re-election. In March 2013, in Columbia, the Democrat blurted out in front of the cameras: “I will do whatever it takes to get Lindsey re-elected. » A daring bet in South Carolina, where Graham is engaged in a primary facing a fierce Tea Party. Upon his retirement from the Air Force in 2015, Biden delivers a moving speech: “A brilliant officer, a man of honor. » Graham burst into tears when later talking about Biden, “the nicest person I have ever met in politics”. They eat lunch, travel to Iraq, mourn the death of Beau Biden together. Their bipartisan friendship is legendary… Until Trump.
Because Graham understood before anyone else that Trump would not be a parenthesis. After 2016, he made a spectacular shift. On immigration, he is getting tougher. As head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he defends conservative nominations to the Supreme Court tooth and nail. The trigger? The death of McCain in 2018. Freed from his mentor, Graham becomes closer to the president. Images of the two men playing golf are circulating. The senator becomes a regular at Mar-a-Lago. Graham goes to the front to defend Trump. “I was her friend, it hurts”says Jill Biden in 2020.
However, foreign policy remains his field. And this is where the paradox sets in. Trump does not want military involvement abroad. Graham, for his part, does not give up the idea of an America that hits hard. But he reformulates. Faced with Iran, he pleads for a hard line. On Russia, he calls for maximum sanctions – much more than Trump. On Israel, his position is unambiguous, in line with evangelicals, fervent supporters of the Jewish state. He blows the slogan “Peace through strength” which Trump adopts immediately.
Intractable against Tehran
Little by little, a complementarity emerges. In Trump, the instinct for duel. To Graham, the relays at the Capitol. Where other neoconservatives have stuck to their certainties, Graham ceases to be a guardian of orthodoxy to become a facilitator. His strategy is simple: never appear as a rival, but as an indispensable ally. In Washington, we make fun of it. Many see him as a survivor of a world that has collapsed. A man who lived through three Republican eras: Reaganite conservatism, post-September 11 interventionism, then Trumpist populism. On Capitol Hill, Graham established himself as the leader of the most intractable Republican wing against Tehran. Negotiate with the mullahs? Never !
When the strikes were launched last week, he defended their necessity without nuance, presenting them as the expected response to an old threat against the United States. He repeats that the future of Iran belongs to the Iranians, rid of the figures of a regime brought down by Tomahawks. Now, Graham assures that Trump has surpassed Ronald Reagan in his management of international crises, going so far as to assert that he “surpassed the great Ronald Reagan” facing Iran, recycling the imagination of the Cold War, as if Iran were the new evil empire.
And finds the accents of the war in Iraq. The good guys (all those who stand behind Washington) versus the bad guys. Addressing Paris, Berlin and London, he rages on X: “It is you, collectively, who are wrong by refusing to come to the aid of the Iranian people and, the height of indecency, by suggesting that we should continue to negotiate with religious Nazis. It’s pathetic how far Western Europe has fallen. » His accent has not changed. Neither does his speech. Graham has only learned to adapt to the moment.
