{"id":1274,"date":"2026-07-12T20:40:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T20:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1274"},"modified":"2026-07-12T20:40:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T20:40:20","slug":"what-lindsey-graham-wanted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1274","title":{"rendered":"What Lindsey Graham Wanted"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly last night, was a pivotal citizen of the Washington conversation. He loved being in the mix, slapping bipartisan backs off camera, and then, when the lights came on, cracking wise, weighing in, and, yes, currying favor with a certain Audience of One.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump Loses Lindsey Graham<\/a><\/p>\n

What could be more fitting, then, for Graham\u2014unable to be a participant on this fateful Sunday morning\u2014to actually become the only thing better: the main topic of the news. He died as he lived.<\/p>\n

Graham was a complex character\u2014his private life, sudden death, public morality, the whole messy peach of him. Put that aside, though. Or I will (happily), because that will all be covered and uncovered and debated. Already has been.<\/p>\n

It is perfectly on the nose that Graham\u2019s departure would occur just a few hours before he was supposed to appear on Meet the Press<\/em>. It would have been his 64th appearance on America\u2019s longest-running public-affairs program. In the NBC News Capital Hill bureau where Meet the Press<\/em> is filmed, there is (or was until recently) a prominent photo of Graham yapping away alongside his longtime Senate sidekick, John McCain. McCain, for his part, appeared 73 times on Meet the Press<\/em>, more than any other guest in history\u2014something McCain was especially proud of.<\/p>\n

In early 2019, a few months after McCain died, Graham joked to me that his main goal in his remaining time on God\u2019s green Earth (or God\u2019s greenroom) was to beat McCain\u2019s record. He never will.<\/p>\n

Among active players, Graham was the ultimate \u201cSabbath gasbag\u201d\u2014the term the writer Calvin Trillin coined to describe the revolving cast of pundits and moralizers who haunted the Meet the Press<\/em>es, This Week<\/em>s, and Face the Nation<\/em>s of our (or our parents\u2019) pixelated lives.<\/p>\n

Granted, Trillin came up with that coinage when a lot more people watched these Sunday interviews and roundtables. They used to be a lot more relevant<\/em>, to deploy what was perhaps Graham\u2019s favorite word in the horde\u2014and pretty much his overriding mission as a United States senator.<\/p>\n

\u201cTry to be relevant,” Graham told me in that same 2019 conversation when I asked how he\u00a0 became such a relentless and essential lapdog to Trump (okay, I didn\u2019t use quite those words). This was an ongoing mystery around Washington, especially given how critical of Trump Graham had been when he (briefly) ran for president against him in 2016.<\/p>\n

In Graham\u2019s worldview, \u201clegacy media\u201d remained extremely relevant. This old-timey, perhaps musty conviction served him well in recent years, because Trump, Graham\u2019s lodestar, was the ultimate consumer of \u201cthe shows,\u201d as he calls them. No one understood better than Graham that Sunday-morning television could be a fruitful place to \u201cmanage the relationship\u201d with the White House.<\/p>\n

Read more The Quintessential Politician of This Era<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cLindsey was really good at this game,\u201d one senior White House official told me during Trump\u2019s first term.<\/p>\n

When I asked Graham about his keys to manipulating Trump, he was remarkably transparent about some of his go-to formulas. I was struck by how, in Graham\u2019s telling, Trump was a big, fat mark.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you flatter him all the time, he\u2019ll lose respect for you,\u201d Graham told me of the president. If he had a goal of getting Trump to do something, especially if it involved foreign affairs, Graham would just tell the president that his then-predecessor, Barack Obama, would do something that was 180 degrees different.<\/p>\n

This method \u201ccan be very effective,\u201d Graham told me. \u201cObama drives him nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graham was always a first-class political shape-shifter, easily darting between the smarty-pants of Official Washington and the bare-knuckled MAGA Populists of South Carolina.\u00a0 This dynamic extended to the on- and off-camera Lindseys: One minute, he would be chumming it up with a Democratic colleague before their \u201chit,\u201d and then, when the lights came on, he would be breathing partisan fire on behalf of the White House or Trump\u2019s supporters back home.<\/p>\n

Graham grew up in the rural town of Central, South Carolina, where his parents ran a divey saloon called the Sanitary Caf\u00e9. It was frequented by small-town eccentrics, good old boys, and other raucous characters. Nicknamed \u201cStinkball\u201d around the bar, little Lindsey was always the kid-mascot type, tagging along with his father. That became a lasting part of his persona. Graham always sought out powerful, larger-the-life figures to tie himself to: \u201calpha dogs,\u201d he called them. They would serve as both his protectors and tickets to relevance. They included the likes of his father, McCain, and, in his last public chapter, Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

No doubt Graham would have been thrilled that the president took it upon himself to be one of the first to announce his passing. Graham was \u201cone of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known,\u201d Trump wrote on Truth Social at 3:21 a.m.<\/p>\n

Later in the morning, Trump would go one to call Graham \u201ca great politician, actually.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The Scrubbed and Simple Moon<\/a><\/p>\n

Even better, actually, was where Trump said this: Meet the Press<\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The senator always sought relevance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Lindsey Graham Wanted - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1274\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Lindsey Graham Wanted - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The senator always sought relevance.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1274\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-12T20:40:20+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1274#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1274\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"What Lindsey Graham Wanted\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-12T20:40:20+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1274\"},\"wordCount\":857,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1274#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/12e60ab929d88fde5c09e5fcaf9194c2.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1274#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1274\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1274\",\"name\":\"What Lindsey Graham Wanted - 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