On July 13, 2015, my Washington Post colleague Michael Gerson and I interviewed Senator Lindsey Graham about his long-shot and, as it turned out, not terribly long-lasting Presidential campaign. The day before, on CNN, the South Carolina Republican had unloaded on Donald Trump, who had glided down the golden escalator at Trump Tower the previous month to launch his own, seemingly improbable, Presidential bid. Other Republican contenders, perhaps wary of Trump’s growing appeal among voters, had been restrained in their criticism of the real-estate developer. Graham was unsparing. Trump, he said, was a “wrecking ball for the future of the Republican Party” and a “demagogue.” Trump’s depiction of undocumented immigrants as rapists and murderers, Graham said, was a “defining moment for the Republican Party.” He added, “If we do not reject this way of thinking clearly, without any ambiguity, we’ll have lost our way.”

When I asked Graham why he thought Trump’s message was catching on, he situated Trump within the same populist mode as the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who had entered the Democratic Presidential race. “There’s a market, always, for this kind of stuff,” Graham told me. Still, he predicted of Trump, “At the end of the day, his growth potential is not great. He’s probably hit where he’s going to go.” It was nonetheless important to counter Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, Graham said, not least because the Party was alienating such a significant chunk of the electorate. “I will not be part of this,” he told me. “I will not be part of this as a Presidential candidate, as a United States senator. I know better, and I have an obligation to speak up.” The disdain was mutual. Trump dismissed Graham as a “lightweight” and an “idiot.” He read Graham’s private cellphone number at a rally in South Carolina, much to the delight of the crowd.

Trump’s growth potential was, of course, greater than Graham had anticipated. And Graham, who died suddenly Saturday night, just a few days after his seventy-first birthday, became, over the past decade, very much part of this—an omnipresent adviser who was, with rare exceptions, firmly supportive of Trump’s extreme agenda. But during the 2016 campaign, Graham had resisted: like his mentor, the Arizona senator John McCain, Graham did not attend the Republican Convention that year, and he later revealed that he wrote in the name of the independent candidate Evan McMullin on the general-election ballot.

Once Trump was in office, though, Graham fell in line—and into Trump’s favor. If Graham felt an obligation to speak up, he muted it in the service of maintaining his remarkable access to the President—their hours together on the golf course, their White House lunches and frequent phone calls. “I’ve tried to be helpful where I could because I think he needs all the help he can get,” Graham told the Associated Press, in 2018. “You can be a better critic when people understand that you’re trying to help them be successful.” In an interview with the Times’ Mark Leibovich, Graham was even more candid about his motivation: “to try to be relevant.” Graham elaborated, “I have never been called this much by a president in my life. It’s weird, and it’s flattering, and it creates some opportunity. It also creates some pressure.” By this point, he had been in public office for nearly three decades, first in state politics and then in Washington, where he served four terms in the House before his election to the Senate in 2002.

One way to understand Graham’s transformation—on subjects including immigration reform, climate change, and fiscal responsibility—is through the lens of biography. Graham grew up in a back room of the Sanitary Café, a liquor store, pool hall, and bar that his parents operated in Central, South Carolina. But before Graham graduated from college, both of his parents had died; he had been particularly close to his father. “I came along late in my dad’s life, and he made the most of our time together,” Graham wrote in his campaign autobiography. “Whatever he did, he did it with me.” It is not a stretch to see the arc of Graham’s adulthood as a shift from one influential male figure, McCain (who called Graham his “ illegitimate son”), to another, Trump. That shift came despite the uncomfortable reality that Trump had derided McCain’s war service (“I like people who weren’t captured,” he said in 2015) and clashed with him as President, most dramatically when McCain offered a literal thumbs-down to the repeal of Obamacare in 2017. McCain’s battle with brain cancer, and his eventual death in 2018, coincided with Graham’s growing alliance with Trump. “John’s death really left a hole in his heart,” the Maine Republican senator Susan Collins said of Graham. “It seemed like Lindsey had lost a father.”

But there is a larger point, and perhaps a larger lesson, in Graham’s evolving relationship with Trump: about the stories that politicians tell others, and even themselves; about the concessions they make in order to cling to power and influence; and about the particular way in which Trump has managed to bend the Party, and its leading figures, to his will. In the age of Trump, what were once mavericks are now vassals—unless they have left the Party or been effectively cast out. Graham would no doubt argue that this is a reasonable price to pay for retaining the ability to convince a President. After all, Trump’s support for Ukraine at the recently concluded NATO summit was, in part, a reflection of Graham’s passionate advocacy; Graham had returned from Ukraine just before his death. But consider the cost in tongue-biting and principle-swallowing this entails. After rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Graham seemed to break with the President. “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way,” he said on the Senate floor that day. “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” Just a few months later, in May, he said, “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”

Graham, choking back tears as he spoke during a tribute to McCain after his death, said that among the lessons McCain had imparted was the imperative of flexibility. “He taught me that principle and compromise are not mutually exclusive,” Graham said. That may be, but the question lingers: In Donald Trump’s Washington, must so much principle be compromised that none remains? ♦