Front Burner - Lindsey Graham and the transformation of the GOP

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Lindsey Graham, the U.S. Republican Senator from South Carolina, died on Sunday at 71. Before Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, Graham was a high-profile critic of the future president, calling him “hateful,” a “kook,” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” But over time, Graham became a key ally, championing Trump through his many controversies. Will Saletan of the Bulwark sees Graham’s trajectory as emblematic of the Republican party’s transformation under Trump. He joins Jayme Poisson to discuss the conspiracy theories swirling around Graham’s death and his political legacy.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts 

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is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody, it's Jamie. Over the weekend, Lindsay Graham, the brash, hawkish, long-time senator from South Carolina, died unexpectedly. He was 71. The medical examiner in a preliminary report said the cause of death was an aortic tear.

Though that hasn't calmed speculation, it was something far more nefarious, despite a complete lack of evidence. Lindsay Graham had been a fixture in American politics for decades, often at the forefront of advocating for American military intervention abroad. In recent years, he underwent a dramatic transformation from Trump critic to Trump champion. My guest today is writer Will Salatin. He wrote this seven-chapter polemic on Graham's evolution for the bulwark.

And he makes this argument that Graham is actually a perfect case study for how the Republican Party became the party of Trump. Will, hi, it's really nice to have you on the show. Thank you very much for making the time. Thanks for having me. So let's start with the news of Lindsay Graham's passing. How did we learn about his death over the weekend? Take me through it. Well, this was all over social media, obviously.

And then Donald Trump did a couple of interviews on Sunday morning, one of them literally in place of Lindsay Graham where he was supposed to be speaking in which Trump lionized him. He was like a member of the family to me. It's very tough, actually. There was nobody like him. He loved being a politician. People loved him. Everybody loved him. Well, no, he had some of him. He was a tough cookie. Don't

misunderstand. He was a tough cookie in many ways. And gave us a lot of whatever information Trump had, including some suspicious information. Yeah, just elaborate for me a little bit more on what you're talking about there. Well, Graham had just been back from Ukraine. Trump announced that Graham had called him in the evening on Saturday. He said, we're all set for the Save America Act. He was pushing the Save America Act like crazy. He got back, said he just landed from Ukraine. I said, that's a long trip to make it. He sounded a little tired, but perfect, but a little bit tired.

I had a right to be. He told him that he was gung-ho and ready to work on the Save America Act, which is a voter registration and election security bill, supposedly. And just why did you say it was suspicious? Well, look, there's been stuff around social media about the fact that Graham had just come back from Ukraine. And Graham, as a lot of people know, was a strong advocate for Ukraine. And so there was talk about did Vladimir Putin try to assassinate Graham by poisoning him the same way he did with Navalny or other dissidents? So that's the suspicious theory about it.

Authorities were called to his home responding to initial report. of a cardiac arrest, again, his office saying a brief and sudden illness, do you have any more details about that? I would think it would be that because when I spoke to him, it could have been, you know, minutes before based on, you know, based on the fact that I heard about the call, whatever time that was, so it was shortly before. But it had to be something like that because he was, other than being tired, he was fine. I thought people like were a Lumer, mega influencer type, talking about how it could be Moscow, Bill Akman. The very online financier shared a video of Graham and commenting that he didn't look like a guy who had died days later, Bill Browder,

the financier who was also a big critic of the Kremlin, also a critic of Trump, talked about the need for a full investigation. And then I think also what really did throw some fuel on the fire was the head of the FBI, Kasputo, who came out later in the day, saying, that the FBI was assisting local authorities and making every necessary resource available. I know that this preliminary report came out from the medical examiner, which found that it was an aortic tear. People have talked about how Graham's father died of a heart attack in his sleep at 69. Do you think any of this information will put some of that speculation to rest? It's very hard to disabuse people of a conspiracy theory. I personally don't think

put credence in any of this stuff. The fact that Cash Patel spoke about it just tells you that this is the kind of thing that the present United States administration has to constantly put out because its own supporters tend to believe conspiracy theories. This is a guy who has a history of heart disease in his own family whose only known source of exercise was playing golf with Donald Trump now and then. Not exactly a model of health. It's entirely plausible that the simple explanation here is the correct one, that he had an aortic terror and that it was not visible to anyone, including people who think that they can diagnose someone by looking at them until before it happened.

I want to get into the legacy of Graham with you more in just one minute, but first, just to stick with the conspiracy theories for a moment, I feel like I would be remiss not to mention that following Graham's death on Sunday, another U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, release what I think is fair to describe as a kind of proof-of-life photo with a current newspaper on his lap. And it was accompanied by a statement. He addresses his month-long hospital stay where not very many details have been released about his health. We talked about this on our show last week about the wild speculation that he was brain dead or dead. And his team was just keeping it secret until this deadline so that they wouldn't have to call special election before the midterms. even after this photo was released, you still saw people speculating that it was AI generated.

And when you take these two examples together, I just am curious to know what you make of all the theories promulgated. Like, what does it say to you about the health of your democracy? So I could distinguish the two cases, if you'd like a little bit, but I could also to give you sort of a general theory of this. The Mitch McConnell situation, there was plenty of behavior over time by McConnell and he. his staff, concealing what was going on. Him not appearing in public. There was no word. He's not voting. He had been in a leadership position. He's a prominent person. They did plenty to create an appearance that was suspicious. So I can understand why in the absence of that, a lot of people thought this guy was seriously ill, possibly dead, possibly brain dead. There had been an incident

where publicly Mitch McConnell, standing at a microphone at a Senate press conference, had suddenly lost the ability to speak. So there was a track record that gave rise to some of that suspicion. In the Lindsey Graham case, there is none of that. All you have is that this guy who had a history of heart disease in his own family was flying back from Ukraine. That's where he had just been. Maybe something happened. So I would say there was no basis in the Graham case as opposed to the McConnell case. However, to your larger question, what we have in America is, and I can't speak for the rest of the world. We have a culture now that is used to the promulgation of conspiracy theories through social media and people believing statements that they read on social media,

also images they see on social media. I have seen fake images of McConnell on social media appearing in a hospital gown, but with multiple fingers, with, you know, things that convey the idea that images of McConnell cannot be trusted. I personally have seen among my own friends and family, a circulation of fake videos from the World Cup claiming that Johnny Infantino, the head of FIFA, had apologized to Egypt for bad refereeing and for biased refereeing and that match turns out to be fake. This stuff is circulating all the time. And people who normally think that they can filter out false information or false images are falling for it. And so, number one, you can see how people believe this stuff. And number two, clearly, there's a lot of people.

a problem where we need more authority that's capable of suppressing this stuff by convincing people of what the actual truth is. Okay, so let's move on to the legacy of Lindsay Graham, because we really are talking to you today because you wrote this excellent seven-part piece about Lindsay Graham back in 2023, about how he was basically this embodiment of how the Republican Party transformed under Donald Trump. You called it a case study in the rise of authoritarianism and maybe just Briefly, why did you use Graham to illustrate this change? Why focus on him? Well, there were several Republican politicians who during Donald Trump's rise could have illustrated.

They certainly participated in the capitulation of the Republican Party to the rise of this American authoritarian. I chose Lindsey Graham because he was quite public in the way that he spoke about this. There are other politicians. Marco Rubio, now our Secretary of State, was a senator. also participated to some extent in this change in the Republican Party. But he didn't talk all the time. Lindsay Graham talked all the time. He was on TV all the time. Literally, at the moment when Lindsay Graham died,

he was preparing to be on Meet the Press the next morning. In fact, he said, I'll go to the doctor after I do meet the press. That's how much he was on TV. So because Graham was on TV, it was possible to track over time the changes in what he said about Trump. and he was constantly trying to explain himself. And so that's why I chose Lindsey Graham. It was possible to tell the story through him changing visibly over time. And just take me through some of that.

So he had already been representing South Carolina in Washington for about two decades by the time that Trump arrived on the political scene in a serious way in 2016. Graham first represented South Carolina in the House before being elected to the Senate in 2002. And back then, Graham had very very. different things to say about Donald Trump as a potential leader of the Republican Party. You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell. And how would you describe how he spoke about Trump back then? Well, in 2015, when Donald Trump first appeared on the scene as a presidential candidate,

Lindsey Graham was also running in that presidential race. No one here, including me, ever expected to hear me say, I'm Lindsay Graham, and I'm running for president of the United States. Lindsay Graham was the most vocal, the most critical person speaking against Donald Trump. He was the person, certainly in the Republican Party, who said that Donald Trump was essentially a barbarian. Donald Trump was proposing to ban all Muslims from the United States. Donald Trump was saying that we should target the family members of terrorists. Donald Trump was saying we should have used the military to take oil from Iraq, which was a preview of Donald Trump using the military to take oil from Venezuela, a thing he has actually done.

And so Lindsey Graham was the person who said, this guy is really bad, this guy is really dangerous. We shouldn't let him control our party. We shouldn't let him be president. I think he's a kook. I think he's crazy. I think he's unfit for office. He's a train wreck. He's a car wreck. He's a jackass. I think he's a wrecking ball. He's a race baiting, xenophobic. religious bigot. And then Graham began to change his tune as Donald Trump began to win the Republican presidential race. Yeah. And just tell me more about those first inklings that you saw where Graham's opposition to Trump was starting to soften. Well, when I traced this, the first thing that I saw was that in May of 2016, when Donald Trump won the primary in Indiana and began to wrap up the Republican presidential nomination, he called Lindsay Graham. They had a phone call. They had a nice phone call. And Graham began to start to rationalize how he would support Donald Trump, this politician whom he had previously denounced. It was because Trump had the nomination. Graham wanted to support the Republican nominee. And then Donald Trump won the presidency. And at that point, Lindsey Graham thought or told himself, well, he's going to be president. I may as well try to influence him. So I should be nice to him.

Donald, you beat me like a drum. You're the president. I'm a senator. I want to help you. Let it go. Let's go. Let's move on and we're going to make America great again. And that's when Lindsay Graham began to talk to him all the time, began to play golf with Trump, began to have dinners with Trump, and it was all in an attempt to suck up to Trump to gain influence within his circle. Do you think that he is a racist? Absolutely not. Let me tell you what. You could be dark as charcoal and lily white.

It doesn't matter as long as you're nice to him. You could be the Pope and criticize him. It doesn't matter. He'll go after the Pope. You could be Putin and say nice things and he'll like you. Here's what I found. He's a street fighter. It's not the color of your skin that matters.

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It's just, it's odd because there was no trace of a scuffle. There was no nothing. Hear the very best in award-winning true crime. Listen to uncover wherever you get your podcasts. One pivotal moment for Graham in that first Trump presidency was during the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh had been accused of sexual assault by a professor of psychology, who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And when a Democratic Senator Dick Durbin suggested that the confirmation process should be suspended so the FBI could investigate the allegation, Graham blew up. If you wanted an FBI investigation, you could have come to us.

What you want to do is destroy this guy's life, hold this seat open, and hope you went in 2020. You've said that, not me. What happened after that episode? So this is clearly a moment that Donald Trump remembers strongly because he spoke about it on Meet the Press this week. It was that Graham, when Brett Kavanaugh was under threat from the Democrats for his confirmation, Graham exploded. Graham had the most emotional moment that anyone could remember him having, certainly had a hearing. And he denounced the Democrats. This is the most unethical sham since I've been in politics.

politics. And if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn't have done what you've done to this guy. And he spoke with such venom about the Democratic Party. And this endeared him to the entire Republican base because Graham was not known as a firebrand on behalf of Donald Trump. All of a sudden, that's how he appeared. Donald Trump personally spoke to him, praised him. Graham became beloved among the hardcore Republican base in South Carolina and nationally. And it changed his relationship with the Republican base. He had always been thought of as a moderate. Now he was thought of as truly a Trump man because the polarization of politics in this country means that to be an influential Republican, you kind of have to be very harsh against the Democratic Party. And that's sort of what happened in that moment.

And then as the 2020 election approaches and Donald Trump starts hinting that he might not accept the results of that election, Graham stands by him, right? Keeps supporting him. And on election night, Graham wins, but Trump doesn't. If you don't get this message, it's hopeless. Here's the message I got. People like what I'm doing and I'm going to keep doing it. In theory, Graham could have cut Trump loose then, but he doesn't. So how does Graham respond to that loss? This is to me the most surprising moment of the whole story because up to this point, Trump has been president. You can make a case, I don't like it, but you can make a case that as a Republican senator,

you need to curry favor with Trump. You need to defend Trump because he's influential. You're going to influence his decisions, which are going to help the country, and he has power over you. At this moment, Trump has. Trump has just lost the presidential race. Graham has just won another Senate term. We give senators six-year terms. He doesn't have to worry about running for office again for another six years. And so this is his chance to cut the court with Trump. It's his chance to say Trump is out of power. I'm going to let go of him. And I'm going to carve out my own path for the next six years. Whatever happens to me in six

years, it happens. Instead, at the moment when Trump no longer has power and the moment at which Trump is showing that he is of greatest danger, that is, Trump is trying to overturn the election, he's lying about the election results, he's beginning to marshalist supporters for what will be a march on the Capitol. Lindsay Graham instead decides that he is going to join in the lies about the 2020 election. I've had a microphone in my face all day. When is Trump going to concede? I said, when are you going to ask a question about the 2020 election? When are you going to take seriously the idea that every vote counts? You want an outcome.

You know, they can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned. I've had it with these people. Let's fight back. Let's give President Trump all the due process the law allows him. Let's call out cheating when we find it. Let's count every vote. He's going to personally get involved. He's on the phone with the Secretary of State in Georgia trying to get him to overturn the results.

He's threatening the governor of Georgia saying he needs to call us. special session. Here's what I think. If you're not fighting for Trump now when he needs you the most as a Republican leader in Georgia, people are not going to fight for you when you ask them to get reelected. There's a civil war brewing in Georgia for no good reason. It's not unreasonable to ask the legislature to come back in and order an audit of the signatures and the presidential race to see if the system worked. It's not unreasonable. And then when it fails, when there's the January 6th corruption. Lindsay Graham says, well, I'm not going to try to overturn the results. He did not do that. The president's frustrated. He thought he was cheated. Nobody's ever going to convince him that he wasn't.

Do you trust the president not to incite the kind of violence that he promoted yesterday in the next two weeks? I'm hoping he won't. I'm hoping that he will allow Mark Meadows to continue with the transition. So my hope is that we can move forward in the next 14 days. But this will depend on. what the president does. I am hopeful that the worst is behind us and we can transfer power on January 20th. But then he tries to bring Donald Trump back as the head of the Republican Party almost instantly. Again, at the moment when Trump is maximally disgraced and there was the greatest opportunity for the Republican Party to let go of him, Lindsay Graham said, no, Donald Trump is going to be our leader into the future and he is going to be our nominee again in 2024. So Lindsey Graham

unnecessarily brought the menace back. Right, because, you know, at first after January 6th, you got this sense that he thought it was unacceptable and he had had enough, but it really, it doesn't last long at all. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough. I've tried to be helpful. I saw on Fox News this morning when Trump was paying tribute to Lindsay Graham.

He says January 6 was Graham's. One bad moment, that was, you know, the January 6th thing, when he stood up, all right, now I've had it. That's it. I can't do it anymore. Didn't he call me like about 40 minutes later? And he said, did I really say that? I can't believe it.

And he took it back. So I give him a 99 instead of a 100. After everything you have described here, why do you think it is that Graham stuck with Trump? You spoke earlier about how Graham wanted to influence Trump. What did Graham want from Trump? Ultimately, what did he get from him? It's very difficult to answer this. question, my best guess from the evidence of Graham's behavior is Graham himself said that without Donald

Trump, the Republican Party will break apart. We'll have a civil war in the party. We need Donald Trump to get elected again. We don't have a snowball's chance in hell of taking back the majority without Donald Trump. If you don't get that, you're just not looking. I'm sorry what happened on January the 6th. He'll get his fair share of blame, but to my Republican colleagues in the Senate, Let's try to work together. There had been a Republican Party before Donald Trump. In 2015, it was a relatively normal conservative party in 2016. Donald Trump comes into office, and it rapidly becomes the Trump Party and does whatever

Donald Trump wants. It's kind of astonishing. But by 2020, within just those four years, Lindsay Graham no longer believed that the Republican Party could survive without Donald Trump. that if it turned away from Donald Trump, Trump would leave the party. He was afraid that Trump would form his own party, and Trump was hinting at that, and that would fracture the right in America, and the Democrats would win. And Lindsey Graham, by that point, believed the Democrats were so dangerous that we couldn't afford to have them in office anymore. That was part of his explosion about Brett Kavanaugh.

So Lindsey Graham simply lost faith in the viability, in the possibility of a Trump-free Republican Party, a party that had been the Republican Party just for. years ago. It is an astonishing change. How animated was he, do you think, also by foreign policy? There is this revealing moment you described where a reporter asks Graham why Trump should get to be president again, especially after January 6th. And Graham says, you know, when he was president, I had a front road seat. Nobody could have done what he did. I was there. China was afraid of it. The reason Mexico helped us so much with illegal immigration is they saw what

he did to China. You know, I'm tired of being afraid of Iran. I would like Iran to be afraid of us. And when Trump was president, that was the case. Lo and behold, Trump's president again, and despite what many in his more isolationist mega coalition wanted, Trump has been remarkably hawkish. He has started a war with Iran. So in a way, did this allyship with Trump work for Graham? And in that sense, did he get what he wanted? So there are people who believe that Lindsay Graham capitulated to Trump, collaborated with Trump for no good reason. He accomplished nothing. He didn't believe in anything.

He had no policy interest. That is not true. And what I found when I wrote the history of this is that at every moment when Lindsay Graham was defending some corrupt thing that Donald Trump was doing domestically, Lindsey Graham was simultaneously lobbying Trump for some foreign policy interest of his. And it was generally to intervene. It was in a place like Syria or Iran. Lindsey Graham developed a strong interest in Ukraine. And you can see Lindsey Graham's influence today in the fact that Donald Trump went to war in Iran,

that he went into Venezuela, that he became more supportive of aid to Ukraine. Lindsey Graham influenced all of that. The irony is that the reason why Lindsey Graham believed in Trump's ability to do all of that was that Donald Trump was, in Graham's eyes, a strong man. He was willing to do things other people wouldn't. Going to war in Iran is an illustration of that. But the catch is if you elect a strong man as your president, he may do things that a hawk likes abroad, but he will also do things domestically that those of us who believe in civil liberties oppose.

Donald Trump has governed as an authoritarian at home for the same reason he has done what Lindsay Graham wanted abroad, and that is that he is by nature. Donald Trump is by nature a strong man. I just, I want to come back to the point that you made that Graham had come to the conclusion that the Republicans couldn't come back from Trump, that this was the only way forward. Do you think Graham was right? Did he make the right calculation? No, no. I think it is a failure of imagination and a failure of historical understanding to believe that there couldn't be a viable Republican Party without Donald Trump. It is the fault of the Republican Party that they failed to investigate. internally vet Donald Trump, that they failed to reject him and to say that is not what we want to become.

Once it happened, they needed to rectify that. They needed to purge that. They needed to renounce it. They certainly needed to evolve back away from it. But they have been a viable party before. And it is a failure of courage and imagination to forget that they could be the party that they had been. It just took courage.

And that is what they lacked. That is what Lindsay Graham lacked. And that is what the party has lacked. Today, the Republican Party is devoid of the people whom it has purged to become the Trump Party. Those people still exist. That could have been reconstituted. That's on them. It's a failure of the previous Republican establishment.

After his death, we've seen all these condolences come in from across the political aisle, even from our own liberal leadership here in Canada. Mark Carney has said that Graham stood resolutely in defense of democracy and freedom. our former Foreign Affairs Minister, Melanie Jolie, said that he has a wit that was unmatched. And this clip from last year for talking about their friendship has surfaced. It's funny in life. There are people that, you must have that in your families

or in your group of friends, people that really don't think like you, that don't see the world the same way. But that when you see, it just connects. That's my friendship with Lindsay Graham. Like, I'm completely different. I have a francophone accent. I, you know, come from Canada. I'm a progressive.

I wear white suits. You know, I'm a woman. But I love Lindsay. So we go for drinks. I, you know. Do you think that the Lindsay Graham that we saw in public was the same Lindsay Graham behind closed doors when the mics were off? Lindsay Graham was authentically gregarious. He was amiable.

He got along with everybody. He certainly, for leaders of other countries, officials in other countries. Lindsay Graham was sympathetic to them. He was friendly. You could you could have a conversation with him and he was reasonable in those conversations as opposed to Donald Trump who was transparently abrasive, aggressive. And all of that is true and it made Lindsay Graham authentically a better interlocutor on behalf of the United States. However, that same trait, the propensity to be gregarious and get along and to be flexible is why Lindsay Graham collaborated with Donald Trump. He spoke to Donald Trump the same way. He schmoosed

Donald Trump. And it was almost that Lindsey Graham had a strong ability to say yes and to get along with people and that helped. But he was weak when he needed to say no. And the person he needed to say no to was Trump. Well, this was really interesting. Thank you so much for coming by. I really appreciate you taking the time. Oh, thanks for having me on. All right. That is all for today. I'm just. Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.