Op-Ed: To Save His Principles, Graham Made a Deal With the Devil

Lindsey Graham's political story, Bret Stephens argues in the New York Times, can't be summed up as either courage or capitulation. Stephens opens by recalling Graham's 2015 video mocking Donald Trump for doxxing his cellphone number ("Vintage Lindsey: witty, folksy, angry and on point"), then traces how the South Carolina senator morphed from "Trump's most brutal Republican critic to his most ingratiating minion." Graham knew the trade he was making, Stephens writes, pointing to Graham's Jan. 6, 2021, floor speech—"Count me out. Enough is enough"—as proof he understood he was "trading honesty for influence, a classic devil's bargain."

Yet Stephens contends that bargain may have paid geopolitical dividends. In Graham's final days, he helped coax Trump toward tougher sanctions on Russia, a more constructive NATO summit, and critical support for Ukraine's air defenses. That record, Stephens says, complicates a pundit's easy judgment that Graham should have stayed a pure Trump foe, à la Liz Cheney, whose "principled inflexibility" means she currently has no sway. Instead, Graham took a "middle path": public abasement to keep influence, while holding tight "his core belief in the unity of interests of democratic nations." For Stephens' full argument about whether that compromise holds any loftiness, read the column at the New York Times.