Don't sanitize the sinner
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Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago. He is the greatest commander-in-chief of all time. Our military is the best of all time. Iran is going down, and Cuba is next.
— Lindsey Graham, March 8, 2026
Trump’s crude narcissism has blinded many to lesser forms that are endemic within the corrupt media and political establishment, which have revealed their moral rot with a flurry of sanctimonious statements fluffing the greatest “fluffer” of the last 30 years at the hour of his demise .
The statements serve less as eulogies and more like the contrasting dye that courses through human veins in a CAT scan. In this case, however, the utility is illuminating the weak and insincere clique for whom the American crisis is kabuki theater.
It’s the cynicism that binds them all together, and it’s unrelenting.
Perhaps deep down it’s why they so deeply admired Graham, whose cynicism was as pure as glacial ice freshly melted.
His cynicism came in the purest form.
What’s an insurrection between friends, after all?
A great many people have taken to social media with shaded remembrances of Lindsey Graham in which what he became has been omitted from the remembrance.
The Lindsey Graham story is complete. The ending is known.
In the end, it’s reported that Graham said:
I can’t die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out and do Israeli-Saudi normalization.
Man plans and God laughs, as they say.
Once again, the folly and hubris of the indispensable man or woman staring back at their reflection has been laid bear. Lindsey Graham’s work is finished, and the undiscovered country of new possibilities closed permanently.
This Robert Frost poem is often misunderstood, but it applies to Lindsey Graham more than most:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Lindsey Graham lived his life in the arena, which was his heroin and our tragedy.
What he was must be reckoned with because it requires relentless confrontation, not ceaseless appeasement.
Power corrupted Lindsey Graham more completely than most because it twisted him into a malignancy which was sinister, aggressive, and ultimately, faithless to his oath. What must be reckoned with at the hour of his death is the meaning of his public life and his embrace of putridity, fascism and cruelty for a seat on Mar-a-Lago’s Predator Patio.
Graham’s life must be measured against the damage he did by the standard Graham set:
One commentator offered this banality on X:
We need more grace in public life, so I will choose to remember the patriot Lindsey Graham I worked with first in ‘95, when he was a young reformist Congressman helping Lamar Alexander and 5 years later as a key wingman for John McCain in 2000. Worthy fights, with much laughter.
Grace?
The arrogance and small narcissism is typical of the Washington, DC, media clique of poseurs, losers and pretenders that has done so much to bring the Trump years to life.
Think about the arrogance required to assert with certitude that the moral high ground around what can and can’t be said about Lindsey Graham should be policed by commentators who demand the erasure of the chaos Graham caused and the disappearance of the people he did it too, while inserting their happy personal memory of a Lindsey Graham joke into the center of the story.
You see, for many, the life of Lindsey Graham can never be about the mayhem, chaos, suffering or death he helped unleash over and over again, frivolously and carelessly.
No, it can’t be about that or the political system he helped break with nuclear weapons-grade demagoguery.
Instead, none of that matters if you happened to have a White Russian somewhere with Lindsey. It now leads to the obnoxious and screeching declaration of “I choose to remember,” which appears to me to be close kin to the philosophy of “I choose not to see.”
This position is first cousin to that of those who cheered on the ICE Gestapo’s lawlessness until someone they loved was locked up, and then it became a national crisis for them.
The indifference is astounding.
What about the Epstein survivors whose dignity Lindsey Graham assailed with his support of Todd Blanche, the most corrupt lawyer in American history to be nominated for attorney general?
What grace do they deserve?
What about the dead American soldiers from Lindsey’s warmongering?
What about the republic?
Pretending isn’t grace.
It’s delusion.
Erasing the millions of human lives that won’t survive the Trump regime because of the evisceration of USAID programs that will weaken America and destabilize a continent from Lindsey Graham’s story, in favor of tales from the Senate floor, the CODEL circuit or campaign trial, is disgraceful.
Lindsey Graham was never a MAGA believer. He was MAGA through cynicism and a bottomless neediness.
He was a fascist for the opportunities it bought him.
Mark Carney, a true statesmen, said the following about Graham:
It isn’t true, and my response to a prime minister I greatly admire is, what about democracy in United States?
What about in Denmark?
What about in Canada?
Lindsey Graham was a constitutional vandal, and a man who was frivolous about human life. Case in point, when he said this on “Face the Nation” on June 21, 2026:
If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them.
The praise of hollow politicians and their analogues in the media doesn’t exculpate Lindsey Graham.
It indicts them.
Lindsey Graham was a deeply indifferent man to everything except the man in the mirror.
The brutalized immigrant children and dead Americans were just extras on Fox News to Graham. Part of the show.
He helped collapse trust in democracy with his embrace of extremism and a thousand lies. His moral relativism unleashed a foul tide of depravity that has humiliated America, and made us as weak as we are decadent.
Graham was reckless, irresponsible and wrong about the great questions of his time.
He didn’t serve with honor.
He didn’t serve with grace.
Many commentators seem to think their dispensations mean something when it comes to Graham’s legacy.
They seem to be saying, “But you don’t understand…I knew him and I’m a good person, so he couldn’t have been that bad, right? Maybe?”
In the end, even for the most benign narcissist, it is about them, and that’s why the reaction to Graham’s death is so telling for so many among the so few who shared his gilded cage in the US Senate, or a worn-out spot on the green room couch.
The reaction is a confession of sorts.
What mattered were the small things apparently — a joke, a laugh, a White Russian on a patio.
The big things?
Not so much.
Now isn’t the time to talk about it. It never is. It’s just like the school shootings. It’s never the time.
In fact, it’s exactly the time.
If you’re one of the many coward Republicans who decry the madness in private, condemning it with your thoughts, then thinking about the death of Lindsey Graham should help clarify a couple of things for you.
Lindsey Graham died for MAGA.
He betrayed this country.
His reputation is destroyed.
He is among the great villains in American history.
Think about yours.
It’s too late for Lindsey, but not you.
Here’s the thing: everyone sees through the lies. We know who all these people are, and our anger is righteous and real.
Lindsey’s choice was his alone.
I refuse to look away.
The stakes are too high to pretend a funny man didn’t choose to become a rotten man by following an evil and un-American fascist off a moral cliff, while lighting the Constitution on fire.
I dissent.
Lindsey Graham was a disgrace.
The idea that he stood for freedom in the world is as big a lie as the one about the stolen election.
Lindsey Graham stood for Lindsey Graham, and he did that by lying in bed with Trump.
He was the master of his fate.
He chose poorly. Very poorly.
Well said, and the proper epitaph for the odious Lindsey Graham.
Good riddance to a bad American!
This morning’s news brings reports about how Trump’s sons are profiting in the billions of dollars in military stocks. I’d pass this along to the MAGA serfs, but they’re too stupid to know they are being fleeced.