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Dear Lindsey,
Your body had not long been in the grave when your pal Donald Trump made the anti-Russia legislation that carried your name a nullity. Wondering how you’d feel about this if you were around to see it. The whole point of your last decade of life was the belief (or was it a rationalization?) that by truckling to Trump you could do more good than you could have by opposing him.
In your final hours, you reportedly joked that “I can’t die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out and do Israeli-Saudi normalization.” That was the Graham optimism! You were getting big things done. You were making a difference. You could torque Trump toward the light.
The Russia sanctions did indeed become law after your passing. They named the legislation after you in tribute. The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 gave the president new authority to impose tariffs on countries importing Russian oil and gas. It commands sanctions, for example, against banks or brokers who transfer funds
- to or from the Government of the Russian Federation, including any entity owned by the Government of the Russian Federation; or
- for the direct or indirect benefit of officials of the Government of the Russian Federation.
It further prohibits investment by “United States persons” in the Russian Federation, and imposes tariffs on countries that import Russian energy.
Belated congratulations. It must have felt, for a brief shining moment, as if you were back in the Bush years. And then, less than a month after signing that bill, Trump turned around and proclaimed a deal that would make the United States a major purchaser of Russian diesel.
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Trump’s supposedly “massive” diesel deal with Vladimir Putin, as David Frum notes, is trifling as an economic matter. The 2.2 million barrels of diesel he proposes to buy from Russia amount to what the U.S. consumes in less than a day.
But the purchase is massive in another way. It is a massive betrayal of everything you once stood for. It empowers the nation that has been committing war crimes in Ukraine and arming Iran (a nation with whom we are currently at war) with TNT and drone components. Every dollar we spend on Russian diesel can be spent on missiles and drones aimed not only at Kyiv and Kherson, but at the American naval base in Bahrain and at U.S. Navy ships at sea. It empowers China, which is in alliance with Russia. And it undermines America’s moral authority vis-a-vis international aggressors (if anything is left of it). In one fatal stroke, Trump has confirmed the suspicion that absolutely nothing the U.S. says — even in law — can be relied upon by friend or foe. Oh, and by the way, in his desperation to reduce diesel prices (which rose due to his decision to launch the Iran war), Trump could have simply imported the fuel from Canada.
But then, you had every reason to know this was possible, even likely, before you died.
You were around when Trump said that Ukraine had started the war, and when JD Vance and Trump teamed up to insult and humiliate Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February 2025. Remember what Trump said? He said Zelensky was going to lose the war to Russia because he “didn’t have the cards.” It wasn’t true even then. Ukraine has proved a marvel of improvisation and scrappy resilience. But even if Ukraine had been losing, a non-sociopath American president might have thought that the answer was more support, not less.
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When Zelensky asked for security guarantees, noting that Putin had broken every single one of his promises and treaties, Trump responded, “He never broke to me. He never broke to me.” That was the tone of the encounter. The victim of Russia’s vicious aggression adjusting to the mind-bending reality that the American president was taking Putin’s side. You were OK with it, though. More than OK. You said, “Somebody asked me if I was embarrassed about President Trump. I have never been more proud of the president. I was very proud of JD Vance for standing up for our country.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the clearest moral and strategic story of the 21st century. Open and shut. You must have rejoiced when Sweden and Finland joined NATO, no? That is how the world of conservatives like Lindsey Graham worked. We united with our allies against aggression. But then, you had to know that Trump essentially halted American arms deliveries to Ukraine after that Oval Office disgrace (though Trump was willing to sell arms to the Europeans that would go to Ukraine) and provided only intelligence support.
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Worst possible bargain
And then there is the matter of personal comportment. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S, like all other democratic nations, made Putin a pariah. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in March 2023 for the war crime of kidnapping Ukrainian children. The European Union imposed sanctions, froze Russian assets, and began to phase out Russian oil and gas imports. You were still in the Senate then.
In the spring and summer of 2025, Trump repeatedly issued ultimata to Russia about the Ukraine war. They had two weeks, he kept saying, to prove they weren’t just “tapping us along.” The two-week deadline in April came and went, as did the deadline in May, and another in July. Trump kept saying he was going to do something severe. Au contraire. In August, Trump announced that he was meeting with Putin in Alaska. It was the first such meeting between the leader of a democratic nation and the Russian despot since the invasion. Trump not only rolled out the literal red carpet for Putin and arranged a military flyover, he also stood at the foot of the plane and applauded as Putin approached. The perversity is glaring. What the hell was he applauding? And of course, he never applauded for Zelensky.
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You knew all of that, and you knew that Trump’s followers were taking to the project of inverting morality with gusto. Tucker Carlson was hosting Holocaust deniers and “revisionist” historians who said that Hitler was misunderstood and Churchill was actually the villain of World War II. That fits perfectly with making Zelensky the villain in the Ukraine war and recasting Putin as a great potential ally.
Lindsey Graham, I hope you are at peace now, but at the risk of speaking ill of the dead, I cannot refrain from saying that you came to embody the moral cowardice and self-delusion of an entire political party. You all convinced yourselves that some good could come of being a water carrier for such a fool. If you ever really cared about America’s values or even its basic welfare, you made the worst possible bargain.
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Mona Charen is policy editor of the Bulwark and host of the “Beg to Differ” podcast.
A letter to the late Lindsey Graham 2026
IUSTITIA.BG – Investigations 2009-2026 2026-10-16 11:27:00
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