Lindsey Graham | Trump’s whisperer of war

In 2015, a survey found 30% of Republican primary voters and 19% of Democratic primary voters supported bombing Agrabah — the fictional city from the Disney film Aladdin. Among the supporters of Donald J. Trump, the enthusiasm was sharper still: 41% were in favour, and only 9% opposed. This was when Mr. Trump was talking endlessly against America’s endless wars as a Republican candidate for President. War enthusiasts in the U.S. cannot find a more effective voice than South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. Credited with the feat of steering Mr. Trump into attacking Iran alongside Israel, Mr. Graham is not stopping. “Cuba is next,” he said, soon after the U.S.-Israel axis started bombing Iran. He has also warned Saudi Arabia and Spain, two allies, of consequences if they do not stay in tune with U.S. war plans.

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Mr. Graham thinks bombing all the “bad guys” around the world is America’s manifest destiny. Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit in late 2025, he said: “I feel good about the Republican Party. I feel good about where we’re going as a nation. We’re killing all the right people, and we’re cutting your taxes. Trump is my favourite President.”

At 70, Mr. Graham is not done yet. He travelled several times to Tel Aviv in the weeks before the war, meeting with Mossad. Wall Street Journal reported that he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during these trips, “coaching him on how to lobby the President for action”. Mr. Netanyahu then showed Mr. Trump intelligence that “persuaded him to go ahead”, Mr. Graham told the Journal. If there is no particular U.S. interest involved in a war, there is always a god to invoke. “We’re in a religious war and I unapologetically stand with Israel,” he posted on X. American media is parading him from channel to channel, where he holds forth on the beauty and duty of wars. Mr. Graham is a Southern Baptist from South Carolina, a State where evangelical Christianity is as much cultural bedrock as political identity.

Mr. Graham had lampooned Mr. Trump in 2015, when the latter dropped onto the Republican stage, upstaging party orthodoxy on all things, particularly forever wars. “You know how you make America great again?” Mr. Graham asked on CNN that December. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” At the Republican primary debates, he called Mr. Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” At a Washington press dinner, he put on a Trump hat, called his own party “crazy”, and pronounced Mr. Trump “just generally a loser as a person and a candidate”.

Two-men club

Mr. Trump returned the compliment with equal passion and flourish. Once Mr. Trump captured the Republican Party, Mr. Graham worked with the singleminded objective of capturing his mind. What goes on behind the scenes is, of course, behind the scenes, but flattery and sycophancy are in full public display. After Mr. Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, Mr. Graham went on Fox News to declare: “Donald J. Trump saved the world from real chaos. Thank God Trump did this. In turn, Mr. Trump is giving his complete backing to Mr. Graham’s re-election bid for the Senate in the midterm elections in November. It is now a club of two old men — promoting each other and promoting war.

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Mr. Graham is open about war as an enterprise of capturing resources and land — a logic that Mr. Trump, a real estate developer by profession, finds entirely congenial. When he was told Iran war was costing a billion dollars a day, Mr. Graham told an anchor: “Best money ever spent… When this regime goes down, we’re going to have a new Middle East, and we’re going to make a ton of money.” He also pointed that Venezuela and Iran have 31% of the world’s oil reserves. “We’re going to have a partnership with 31% of the known reserves.” The same logic is deployed in his campaign for Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine is “the richest country in Europe when it comes to rare earth critical minerals,” he pointed out.

War is the present and, for Mr. Graham, the future. When asked what comes next, his answer is not peace, not reconstruction, not diplomacy — it is escalation. “This is a moment of world history,” he said in an interview. “Just jump in the deep end of the pool.”