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Hello and happy Saturday. Sometimes the news cycle lends itself to focusing on one big story—war overseas or domestic political squabbles or scandal and outrage. The past week was more of an “and” week, with the Iran war heating back up and confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee and a primetime speech by the president on election integrity. And we woke up Sunday to the news that Sen. Lindsey Graham, 71, had passed away the night before, hours after returning from Kyiv. It was his 10th trip to Ukraine since Russia invaded in 2022, and while there he announced that Trump had agreed to a Russia sanctions bill that he’d sponsored with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
That episode is a microcosm of Graham’s complicated legacy: He was known for his bipartisanship (he worked on a comprehensive immigration reform package in 2013 that ultimately died in the House, and he voted for both of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees), was a staunch interventionist on foreign policy (he was a leading advocate for the Iraq surge in 2007), and … he was very close to Donald Trump.
