From Trump critic to trusted adviser: Lindsey Graham’s foreign policy legacy

In 2015, Senator Lindsey Graham called Donald Trump a “jackass” and warned Republicans that nominating him would be a disaster. Trump responded by reading Graham’s personal cell phone number aloud during his campaign rally, encouraging his supporters to call the South Carolina senator.

Few political rivalries appeared less likely to develop into one of Washington’s most important foreign policy partnerships.

Trump came to power promising to end America’s “endless wars” and challenged decades of Republican foreign policy orthodoxy. Graham, by contrast, remained an unabashed advocate of projecting American power abroad throughout his three decades in public service.

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But over the next decade, Graham became one of the few lawmakers with regular access to President Trump on national security issues and emerged as one of the Republican Party’s most influential voices on Iran, Ukraine, Israel and NATO.

He had built his Senate career around foreign policy. While most lawmakers spent weekends in their hometowns, Graham frequently met with presidents abroad, visiting war zones and trying to broker deals between allies and the White House.

By the end of his career, his office had become an unofficial transit point for foreign leaders trying to understand or influence the Trump administration.

In interviews following the senator’s sudden death on Saturday, Trump called Graham “like a member of the family” and said he was among the last people to speak with the South Carolina Republican after he returned from Ukraine just hours before his death.

As Trump reshapes Republican foreign policy around his “America First” agenda, Graham has become one of the few congressional voices with regular access to the president on war and peace issues. He has frequently pressed Trump to maintain a strong U.S. role abroad, even as the president questions longstanding alliances and warns against prolonged military interventions.

Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham pose for a photo at the golf course on June 28, 2025. (via Senator Lindsey Graham, X)

Rather than becoming another Republican hawk sidelined by Trump’s rise, Graham has developed one of the closest working relationships with the president, giving him unusual influence as the administration navigates conflicts from Ukraine and Iran to Israel and NATO.

Whether Graham simply reinforced Trump’s instincts or helped shape them may become one of the defining questions of his foreign policy legacy.

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“He would call me all the time,” Trump told Fox News on Monday. “And I was like, ‘Stop calling me, Lindsey.’ It was incredible. He never stopped. He was a worker, a total workaholic politician.”

Colleagues said Graham lives and breathes the work of the Senate, particularly serving as an unofficial ambassador between the United States and its allies around the world.

A few hours before his death, Graham told a confidant that he wasn’t feeling well but joked that he couldn’t die now because he still had work to do. He was preparing to pass the long-stalled bipartisan Russia sanctions bill in the Senate, focused on advancing Saudi-Israeli normalization and believing the Trump administration was not yet done confronting Iran.

He had just completed his 10th trip to Ukraine and maintained close relations not only with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but also with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Gulf leaders and others around the world.

According to Jack Keane, a retired four-star Army general, president of the Institute for the Study of War, and Fox News Senior Strategic Analyst, Graham believed the effect was due to exposure.

“He wasn’t interested in writing columns or giving speeches; he wanted first-hand contact with world leaders.” Keane, who considered Graham a friend, told Fox News Digital: “He was interested in getting results.”

After losing to Trump in the 2016 primaries, Graham acknowledged that the then-real estate mogul understood the American people better than he did.

According to Keane, Graham said at the time, “He understood the American people better than we do, and shame on us for not being able to do that as effectively as he did.”

So Graham began working to make himself useful to the president.

“Graham knew the world better than almost anyone in Washington, and probably knew many foreign leaders better than President Trump’s own appointees,” Keane said. “He made a conscious decision to assist the president by offering advice and counsel that developed into both a personal and professional relationship.”

Graham’s worldview is that of the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., with whom he traveled extensively abroad. and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. It was shaped together with Known as the “Three Amigos,” the trio advocated an interventionist Republican foreign policy rooted in American military leadership, support for democratic allies, and confrontation with authoritarian enemies.

Graham publicly disagreed with Trump on the Iran negotiations — favoring strikes and regime change — and had repeatedly pressed for a tougher line against Russia in the war against Ukraine.

These convictions have at times brought him closer to traditional Republican foreign policy than to Trump’s “America First” instincts, although he has sought to remain one of the president’s closest advisers.

Trump’s approach to foreign policy has often oscillated between military confrontation and diplomatic restraint. Graham rarely did this.

Senator Lindsey Graham is seen in Kiev on June 10, the day before his death. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)

Whenever Trump has moved to reach a negotiated deal with Iran, Graham has followed a familiar strategy: Remind the White House that Congress must eventually consider a permanent deal.

After Trump announced a memorandum of understanding with Iran in June, Graham argued that a permanent deal would need to be reviewed by Congress and even suggested that Vice President J.D. Vance would eventually have to defend the deal on Capitol Hill.

By the time he died, Graham had carved out exactly the role he wanted in Washington: trusted interlocutor between the White House, Congress and foreign leaders.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., described Graham as having “a childlike enthusiasm for his job and the responsibilities he is given.”

“Even in his sixties, he’d get off a plane in a foreign country with a twinkle in his eye and be like, ‘Can you believe we’re actually here and doing this?’ He looked like he said. He wrote to X.

Very rarely in life do you get to be exactly where you want to be, when you want, with the person you want to be with, doing exactly what you want to do; it was every moment for Lindsey,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller wrote of X.

“Lindsey was a senator’s senator. Business was everything to her. She truly believed in the grandeur of the office and the noble origins behind the office of which she was the worthy heir.”

Graham rarely seemed interested in winning an argument if it meant losing the president. Trump spent more than a year reviewing long-stalled sanctions legislation against Russia and negotiating with the White House while continuing his diplomatic assistance to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Just days before his death, Graham announced he had reached an agreement with the administration to move the bill forward.

While Trump often questioned the value of NATO and wanted allies to shoulder more of the burden, Graham saw America’s alliances as one of the country’s greatest strategic advantages. He generally agreed that European nations should spend more on defense, but argued that the alliance itself was indispensable to deter Russia and project American power.

Graham’s support for Israel was equally central to his worldview. He viewed Israel as America’s closest partner in the Middle East and spent years strengthening ties between Israel and Arab states, seeing Saudi-Israeli normalization as a historic opportunity to reshape the region while further isolating Iran.

Graham spent a decade proving in Washington that proximity to power can be as important as official authority. Without Graham in Washington, Ukraine now fears it may have lost its indispensable advocate in Washington.

“It’s a huge and absolutely unexpected loss,” Oleksandr Merezhko, a lawmaker from Zelenskyy’s party, told the AP. “He was truly indispensable. I don’t even know who in Trump’s circle could be that important to us right now.”

“He was the closest link between Ukraine, our president, and Trump,” he added. “Our position around Trump may be weaker.”

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It’s unclear who will carry Graham’s signature Russia sanctions bill through the Senate to the president’s desk and have the same access to both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

For now, the president will navigate the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East without the friend who never hesitates to tell him to hit harder.