There’s an old saying that if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
Lindsey Graham died scratching.
I’m not celebrating Graham’s passing – I’ll leave that to the lefty ghouls on social media – but nor will I whitewash his detestable sins just because he’s gone. The D.C. establishment is predictably busy conferring retroactive sainthood, which makes it all the more imperative that the sad and tragic truth be told.
Every aspiring fascist needs a simpering flunky. Donald Trump, with his uncanny ability to exploit human weakness, got his man.
Trump correctly intuited Graham would sacrifice everything – integrity, credibility, character, the semblance of a conscience – just to be in the room where it happened. Even if the room was overrun by a convicted felon who represented everything that Lindsey, once upon a time, claimed to loathe.
Ten long years ago, Lindsey was in relentlessly high dudgeon about the lowlife. He assailed Trump as “a nutjob,” as “a complete idiot,” as a “jackass,” as “crazy,” as “a race-baiting xenophobic bigot,” as “a demagogue of the highest order.” He said, “You know how to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”
He also denounced Trump as “a kook” who was “unfit for office.” And yet, one year later, after Trump’s first electoral win, Lindsey effectuated a gymnastic twist worthy of the Olympics: “What concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy some kind of kook not fit to be president.”
Graham’s pathetic subservience was endless – to the point where he trekked to Georgia at Trump’s command in December 2020 to baselessly contest Joe Biden’s statewide victory, pressuring state election officials (without success) to throw out some of the legal ballots. And despite his initial anger about the Jan. 6 desecration of the Capitol by MAGA goons, he predictably voted to acquit his alpha dog in the subsequent impeachment trial.
Look again at Lindsey’s string of scathing 2016 remarks, and the conclusion is inescapable: He knew perfectly well who and what Trump was, but he chose to play the toady and reverse-engineer his rhetoric. “Mr. President,” he said in 2024, “you’re not far behind God.”
You surely know for years Lindsey played “wingman” (his word) to John McCain, a heavy hitter and inveterate Trump foe. You may not know, however, that after Barack Obama ascended to the White House in 2008, Lindsey morphed into a groupie. He praised Obama as “a good role model” and “an American just as much as anyone else.” He took heat from right-wingers who called him “Obama Lite” and “Flimsy Graham.” Tommy Vietor, an Obama aide, later tweeted, “When Obama first took office, (Lindsey) lived in Rahm Emanuel’s office,” referring to Obama’s first chief of staff. “He has no core beliefs. He just drifts in the political wind.”
Obama, McCain, Trump…What’s the difference. Lindsey was remarkably nimble-footed. A Republican operative told me privately, “He started drifting toward Trump when McCain got sick.”
Lindsey saw nothing wrong with shifting his loyalty. He told a reporter in 2019 that his main motivation was “to try to be relevant.” And if that meant sucking up to the grifter who loved to trash McCain’s memory, hey, no problem because everything was grist for sacrifice at the relevance altar. Lindsey admitted to a reporter he didn’t like Trump’s trashing of McCain, “ but when we play golf, it’s fun.”
Fun for him, yes. Not fun for the Americans who’ve been hurt by his subservience to evil – starting with the millions of women who’ve now been denied autonomy over their own bodies, thanks in part to Lindsey’s vocal championing of Brett Kavanaugh, at Trump’s behest, for the U.S. Supreme Court. There are also millions of needy people who will lose Medicaid coverage and food assistance thanks to the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” that Lindsey, at Trump’s behest, steered through the Senate.
Lindsey chose to do all this, chose to serve his MAGA master – in defiance of sage advice that his erstwhile hero McCain co-authored in a book: “It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy. That is all that really passes for destiny. And you choose it. No one else can give it to you or deny it to you. No rival can steal it from you. And no friend can give it to you. Others can encourage you to make the right choices or discourage you. But you choose.”
So excuse me for failing to mourn the man. I’m tempted to joke that he died from an overdose of Trump’s shoe polish, and I suppose that’s in bad taste. But sucking up to the enemy within was infinitely worse.
Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]