When someone dies people tend to be kind. As with Senator Lindsey Graham who passed over the weekend. In the last 48 hours politicians and pundits have bent over backwards to say good things about Graham – even if they found his late life pivot to President Donald Trump personally and politically reprehensible.
I see him as a man who was two things at the same time. For many years he was known for being among a small group of highly effective senate leaders. And for the last decade he was known for being among a small group of singularly servile presidential followers. Graham metamorphosed into a consummate groveler.
Graham is a minor character in my forthcoming book, Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t.* In the book I explore what motivated such a man – a man with his establishment history and independent ideology – to become a Trump lap dog.
But in a book that I wrote several years ago titled, The Enablers: How Trump’s Team Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America, Graham is a major character.** A quintessential example of an enabler, which I defined as follows. Enablers are followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in, behaviors that are destructive. Given that those being enabled are leaders, what they do has an impact on others, sometimes many or even millions of others. What we have then, alongside bad leaders, are bad followers.
For those of us who consider Trump a bad leader, Graham was all along, during the president’s first term and into his second, a bad follower. Moreover, Graham seemed sometimes in a class by himself. Which is to say that he was exceptionally, excessively, fawning. I should add though that it paid off. Graham was desperate to become a Trump crony and a Trump crony he quickly became. By 2019 Graham could describe himself, accurately, as a member of Trump’s “smaller orbit.”
Many if not most of us contain multitudes – a rule to which Graham was no exception. In one thing he was, however, exceptional. In his willingness abjectly to follow a leader who, earlier in his life, he did not just quietly dismiss but loudly disdain.
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*University of Toronto Press, 2026.
** Cambridge University Press, 2021.