President Donald Trump remembered the late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham as an American idealist, a good golf buddy and “one of the great figures in Senate history” during a memorial service Tuesday in the nation’s capital.
Graham died suddenly July 11, two days after his 71st birthday, of a tear in his aorta. The two-hour, invitation-only service at the Washington National Cathedral was the second commemoration of Graham’s life Tuesday, after colleagues spoke in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda earlier in the day.
A public funeral service is planned in Columbia on Wednesday, following a procession from the Statehouse to First Baptist Church.
Graham learned his first lessons in politics at his parents’ pool hall in Central, where he grew up, Trump said in a 15-minute eulogy. It was there that Graham’s father told him he needed to be funny enough to keep people coming back and tough enough to stay in business, Trump said.
“For his entire career, that’s exactly who Lindsey Graham was,” Trump said. “He was the first person to make you laugh and one of the last people you ever really wanted to fight.”
“These were the traits that made him into one of the great figures in Senate history,” Trump added.
Both of Graham’s parents died when he was in his early 20s. He adopted his sister, Darline Graham, who was then 13. Every weekend, he drove two hours between Columbia, where Graham attended the University of South Carolina, and Seneca, where his sister stayed with their grandparents, his niece Emillie Boggs Roberts said during Tuesday’s service.
Darline Graham was appointed to fulfill her brother’s term in the Senate following his death. Lindsey Graham easily won the June primary for the Republican nomination, and a dozen candidates, including the newly sworn in senator, are vying in an Aug. 11 primary to replace him on the ballot in the November election.
Graham “stormed into Washington” in 1994, Trump said, when he won election to the U.S. House. He won a seat in the Senate eight years later.
Graham became known as a war hawk, and he had deep connections with global leaders, Trump said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy both attended the services Tuesday.
Graham had just returned from a trip to Ukraine when he died.
“For more than 30 years, nothing of consequence happened in the Capitol without Lindsey Graham knowing about it,” Trump said. “Nothing of significance happened anywhere in the world without Lindsey Graham having a view on it.”
Although Graham and Trump became close friends and spent a lot of time together on the golf course, “Lindsey and I did not exactly get off to the best of starts,” Trump said.
Graham blasted Trump ahead of the 2016 election, when the senator was briefly among Republicans challenging Trump for the nomination, though Graham dropped out in December 2015 ahead of his home state’s presidential primary.
As the two hurled insults back and forth in 2015, Trump gave out Graham’s personal cellphone number during a speech. Trump recited the number again Tuesday, “if anybody wants to give it a shot,” he said.
“It was Lindsey who had the last laugh, because, while I blew up his phone for one day, we became great friends, and Lindsey did not stop calling me for the next 10 years,” Trump said.
Trump rattled off some of Graham’s accomplishments during his 32 years in Congress, including helping usher through Trump’s major spending package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, last year.
He called Graham’s defense of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings against allegations of past sexual misconduct “one of the greatest moments the Senate has ever seen.
“No matter how heated things got in Washington, virtually everyone, Republican or Democrat, liked Lindsey,” Trump said.
“Well, not everybody,” Trump added, acknowledging he was veering off script. “But it sounds good.”
Graham was “a tough cookie,” Trump said. “But he was beautiful.”
Everything Graham had went toward his job, said Sean Hannity, a Fox News TV personality and friend of Graham’s.
“He lived it, he breathed it, and he left every single bit of energy he had on the field fighting for what he believed in,” Hannity said.
Despite his reputation as a war hawk, what Graham really wanted was peace, Hannity said, calling characterizations of him as a war monger unfair.
“Lindsey desperately wanted and talked to the president about a lasting peace in the Middle East,” Hannity said. “He wanted every region, every country in the region, on that path to peace. That was Lindsey’s dream, if people would only listen to what he had been saying.”
Graham’s top priorities were God, his family and his country, Hannity said. Above all else, he loved his sister, who he considered “his single greatest accomplishment in life,” Hannity said.
Despite his busy political schedule, Graham always made time for his family, Roberts, his niece, said. He picked up every phone call from his sister, and he always started by checking that everyone and everything was OK, she said.
Even during family vacations and holidays, Graham stayed busy. Roberts remembered trips to Disney World when Graham insisted on being the first people in the parks and the last to leave.
“Lindsey had to squeeze every second of joy out of those trips,” Roberts said. “See it all and do it all.”
Roberts told her mother she was pregnant with her second child the night Graham died, Roberts said. She never got to tell her uncle.
“But I have no doubt that he knows and is thrilled,” Roberts said.
Trump, Hannity, and Roberts all said they believed Graham was looking down on them from heaven. Hannity imagined Graham’s afterlife as “a heavenly version of Mar-a-Lago,” Trump’s estate in Florida, he said.
Graham carried one of his father’s golf clubs on the course and kept a ring of his mother’s, Trump said. Both were in his bedroom the night he died, the president said.
“For 71 years, Lindsey Graham was strong, steadfast,” Trump said. “As a brother, a senator, a warrior and a patriot, he withstood every last test, every single test that you can go through, and every trial, and now he wears the crown of life in heaven, reunited with his parents and reunited with his lord.”
“Lindsey, we love you,” Trump concluded. “God bless you. We will always be with you, and you were very, very special.”
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