Lindsey Graham, influential and polarizing US senator, dies at 71

WASHINGTON (MNTV) – US Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican whose four terms made him one of Washington’s most influential and most divisive voices on foreign policy, died on the evening of Saturday, July 11, his office said. He was 71.

In a brief statement released early Sunday, Graham’s office said he had passed away after a “brief and sudden illness,” offering no further detail and asking for privacy for his family.

Graham had turned 71 days earlier and was campaigning for a fifth term in this autumn’s midterm elections.

First elected to the Senate in 2002 after eight years in the US House, Graham built a 23-year Senate career defined by an assertive, interventionist view of American power.

He chaired the influential Senate Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2021 and later led the Budget Committee, but he was best known as a foreign-policy hawk who pressed for a muscular US posture abroad, higher defense spending and military pressure on adversaries.

A former Air Force lawyer who retired as a colonel and received a Bronze Star, he often framed his politics through the lens of national security.

His political identity was closely tied to his relationship with Donald Trump — a relationship that reversed dramatically. During the 2016 campaign Graham was among Trump’s harshest Republican critics, once branding him a bigot unfit to lead the party.

After Trump took office, Graham became one of his most reliable allies and frequent golfing partners, a shift commentators linked to his growing sway over foreign policy.

Trump paid tribute on Sunday, calling Graham one of the finest senators he had known and a patriot who would be greatly missed.

A hawk on Iran and staunch defender of Israel

Graham was one of the Senate’s most forceful advocates for confrontation with Iran, repeatedly urging military action against Tehran and, during the recent Gaza genocide, calling for strikes on Iranian oil infrastructure.

As the 2026 conflict with Iran unfolded, he backed keeping the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in place to pressure the Iranian government and laid out stringent conditions for any nuclear agreement.

He was also among Israel’s most vocal supporters in Congress and a consistent opponent of positions favored by advocates for Palestinian rights, drawing repeated condemnation from Muslim and Arab-American organizations.

In July 2024, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil-rights group in the United States, denounced as racist his description of Palestinians in Gaza as the most radicalized population on earth, “taught to hate Jews from birth,” and his comparison of anti-war protesters to Nazis.

Later that year, the Council of Shia Muslim Scholars of North America condemned remarks he made on the Senate floor about Shia Muslims, calling them inflammatory, false and dangerous, and noting they were not the first such comments from the senator.

In 2019, CAIR had demanded he apologize for appearing in a photograph with the Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders, a figure widely described as anti-Muslim.

Experts pointed to a broader pattern in his rhetoric, including questioning the loyalty of American Muslims in the military during a 2016 Senate hearing and remarks about Iranians that Iranian-American groups called offensive.

That identification with Israel was on full display after his death, which drew an outpouring of tributes from across the Israeli political spectrum — from President Isaac Herzog and opposition leader Yair Lapid to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had once said Israel had no greater friend in Washington.

Among the mourners was Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister — an ultranationalist convicted in the past of incitement to racism and of supporting a terrorist organization, and long associated with the banned Kahanist movement — who wrote that Israel had lost one of its greatest friends and praised the senator’s courage and “moral clarity.”

To Graham’s critics, the embrace of one of the most extreme figures in Israeli politics only underscored the record they had spent years denouncing.

Combative style that outlasted his critics

Graham relished political combat. After Russia issued an arrest warrant over his comments on the war in Ukraine — which he strongly supported — he said he would wear it as a badge of honor.

He cultivated a reputation as a dealmaker willing to work across the aisle on issues such as immigration and judicial nominations, even as his alignment with Trump alienated some former admirers.

For nearly a quarter-century he was a fixture of Sunday political television and a central player in debates over war, the courts and the direction of the Republican Party. His death removes one of the Senate’s most recognizable figures and, with his seat now vacant, sets up a contest to succeed him in a state he had represented in Washington since the 1990s.

Graham, who never married and had no children, is survived by his sister, Darline Graham Nordone, whom he helped raise after the deaths of their parents.