Trump just lost something important

At 2:02 this morning, while much of the country was fast asleep, the office of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina released a statement on social media that the senator had passed away hours earlier. The announcement caught the country off guard. With so much attention focused on Mitch McConnell and his nearly four-week absence following a medical emergency at his home, Graham’s death was shocking and unexpected. And it wasn’t just the public who was caught by surprise. It appears the President of the United States was, too. Less than ninety minutes later, Donald Trump posted his own message on social media declaring that Lindsey Graham was “dead!” and that he was “so sad!”

Without skipping a beat, Trump positioned himself as the true victim of Graham’s death when he appeared on Meet the Press with Kristen Welker. Instead of simply honoring a man he had repeatedly described as “like a member of the family,” he returned again and again to what the death meant for him and his agenda. He said multiple times that Graham’s death was very bad news for the votes needed to pass the SAVE America Act. “This is a big blow to the SAVE America Act, let me tell you.”

He described his final conversation with Graham not as a personal goodbye but as a progress report on legislation. “He called and he said, ‘We’re all set for the SAVE America Act.’ He was pushing the SAVE America Act like crazy.” He rambled in circles about Graham’s condition, saying “He sounded a little tired, but perfect, but a little bit tired,” then “But he sounded great, actually. But he actually said he was tired. But he wanted to pass the SAVE America Act.” Even in the retelling of a dying man’s last phone call, Trump could not hold the thread of another person’s life for more than a few seconds before pulling it back to himself.

When Welker asked what his final words to Graham were, Trump said, “I said, ‘We’ll see you soon. Come over anytime you want.’ He came into the White House a lot because I liked him. Can’t do that with everybody.” When asked about how Graham died, Trump said, “It had to be something that would just be a quick end. And maybe that’s not the worst way to go.” And when Welker asked whether he had thoughts on who should fill Graham’s Senate seat, Trump said he already had “somebody that I think would be great,” but that it was “too soon” to share specifics.

This is who the President of the United States is. A man who cannot hold space for another human being’s death without calculating what it costs him. Someone who is only capable of playing the part of a mourning friend for short outbursts at a time. And then, as if to prove that, Trump went back to Truth Social throughout the day and shared more about Lindsey Graham along with multiple posts that did not match his performance of a man in mourning.

He posted a video titled “DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM MUST BE CRIMINALIZED; LEADERS DEPORTED.” He posted a fake image with Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all wearing red hats with white stitching that said “I lost to Trump”. He posted 3 pictures of fighter jets. And he posted “59% Approval Rating. Prices coming down along with the lowering of oil and gas. Thank you! President DJT.” There were more, too. This is what he posted on the same day he told the country he lost a dear friend.

Last night we lost a man who once understood how broken and dangerous Donald Trump really is. There was a version of Lindsey Graham who saw what Trump was and said it out loud, clearly and without hesitation.

In December 2015, Graham said, “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” He added, “I’d rather lose without Donald Trump than try to win with him.”

In February 2016, he said, “I’m not going to get into the mind of Donald Trump, because I don’t think there’s a whole lot of space there. I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.”

In May 2016, he wrote, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed...and we will deserve it.”

And on January 6th, 2021, after watching a mob storm the Capitol, Graham stood on the Senate floor and said, “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

He was right every single time. And then he abandoned all of it. Within weeks of that Senate floor speech, he was back at Mar-a-Lago, playing golf with the man he had just publicly disavowed. By May of 2021, just four months after the Capitol attack, Graham said, “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.” And when the New York Times asked him why he made the turn, he was disarmingly honest. He said he was attempting “to be relevant.”

That is the word he chose. Relevant. Not principled. Not courageous. Not faithful to his oath. Relevant. And he spent the rest of his career proving that relevance was the only thing he was ever truly loyal to.

Because the man he was loyal to before Trump was Senator John McCain. They were very close friends and often considered inseparable for nearly 15 years. They traveled the world together alongside Joe Lieberman, known in the Senate as the “Three Amigos.” When McCain died in 2018, Graham spoke about what his friend had taught him. He said, “Country first means that even if it’s inconvenient for you and it makes you uncomfortable, you do it anyway. Country first hurts, but it’s the right way to go.”

And then Trump mocked McCain for being a prisoner of war. He disparaged him while he was alive. He attacked him after he was dead. And Graham stood beside the man who did all of that to his supposed best friend. He golfed with him. He bragged about it. He said Trump had beaten him “like a drum.” Stephen Miller, one of the architects of the Trump cruelty machine, posted this tribute after Graham’s death: “At the end of a particularly thrilling and rollicking meeting in the Oval Office, Lindsey Graham turned to the room and said: ‘I’ve never had this much fun in my life.’”

That is how he spent his final years. Having fun. In the room where they were dismantling the country he once swore to protect.

And the damage is permanent. Brett Kavanaugh sits on the Supreme Court because of Lindsey Graham. Amy Coney Barrett sits on the Supreme Court because of Lindsey Graham. He was one of the chief proponents of the war in Iran, and after the strikes began on February 28th, he went on Fox News and said, “When this regime goes down, we’re going to have a new Mideast, we’re going to make a ton of money.” He chaired the Budget Committee that pushed Trump’s sweeping tax and spending legislation through the Senate. He was a co-sponsor of the SAVE America Act, the very bill Trump could not stop talking about on the morning of Graham’s death.

The world of politics is messy and disordered. It is a space I have had to learn to navigate, and early on I realized I needed to create rules for myself to reinforce my own values and keep from losing sight of them. One such rule is to never celebrate anyone’s death, and never to wish for it. It is something I had never done before, and I promised myself I wouldn’t let this world ever convince me otherwise. So when I heard the news myself last night, the only emotion I felt was shock. I sat there without words. I felt sadness for his family and loved ones. But grief does not rewrite history. And the tributes pouring in today about service, patriotism, and dedication do not undo what he chose to become. His legacy is not the early career bipartisanship or the decades of friendship with McCain. It is not the military service. He erased all of that himself, deliberately and repeatedly, every time he chose power over principle. History will be honest about that, even if the eulogies are not.

But it was the detail that has not left me since I read it this afternoon that I keep thinking about. Graham’s last message was one that could actually do good in this world. Axios reported that after Graham hung up with Trump on Saturday night, he spoke with another person and complained that he was feeling unwell. The person urged him to seek medical attention immediately. Graham refused. He said he would go Sunday morning, after his scheduled appearance on Meet the Press. And then he joked, “I can’t die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out, and do Israeli-Saudi normalization.”

Emergency responders were called to his home at 8:30 that evening for chest pains. Twenty-five minutes later, CPR was in progress. He never made it to the show the next morning. The preliminary cause of death was aortic dissection, a rupture of the aorta from hardened arteries. His father died of a heart attack at 69.

He felt something wrong in his body. Someone told him to get help. And he said no, he had a television appearance in the morning. He chose the job over his own life.

We talk a lot about what it means to age in public life. Trump is 80 years old now. We have watched him struggle through sentences, fall asleep in meetings, and post hundreds of messages on social media in the middle of the night. Cognitive decline is natural. It is something that, if we are lucky enough to live long lives, we may all face. And there is no shame in that. The shame is in refusing to be honest about it. The shame is in clinging to power when you are no longer able to carry its weight, or allowing yourself to be propped up by people who benefit from your decline.

But Graham’s death carries a different kind of lesson, and it is one for all of us. Life is busy. We all have the thing we think is more urgent than that feeling in our chest, that pain we keep ignoring, that appointment we keep putting off. We tell ourselves we will deal with it tomorrow. And then tomorrow keeps moving down the calendar. Graham felt something was wrong and chose a television appearance over an emergency room, and it cost him his life. That is not strength or dedication. It is stubbornness, and it is a mistake too many of us make. We owe it to ourselves and to the people who love us to listen when our bodies are trying to tell us something. Not tomorrow. Now.

And while we were processing all of this over the weekend, we cannot lose sight of what this administration did on Friday. The Trump administration finalized a rule that guts the Endangered Species Act by erasing the definition of “harm” that has been in place for more than four decades. Since 1981, the law defined harm to include habitat modification or degradation that kills or injures wildlife by impairing breeding, feeding, or sheltering. That definition is now gone. Oil and gas companies, mining operations, and logging interests can now move into critical wildlife habitats so long as the animals themselves are not directly killed in the process. As if an animal can survive without a place to live.

The spotted owl. The Florida panther. The monarch butterfly. The wolverine. The manatee. The Atlantic salmon. All of them now at greater risk because this administration decided their homes were less important than drilling permits. The Endangered Species Act is the reason the bald eagle still exists. It is the reason the American alligator came back from the brink. And they are dismantling it for oil companies while the Interior Secretary calls it “common sense.”

Before that, they rescinded the Public Lands Rule, opening 245 million acres of public land to extraction over the objections of 98 percent of public commenters. They rolled back protections for more than 300 million acres of Pacific Ocean. Across both terms, Trump has removed protections from more than 100 million acres of American land. They are not just dismantling our institutions. They are destroying the land itself.

This week is one of the most consequential weeks we have had in months. The Senate reconvenes Monday. On Wednesday, Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney and acting Attorney General, goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing. Graham’s death brought the committee from 12 Republicans and 10 Democrats to 11 and 10. They cannot lose a single Republican vote. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is retiring and has nothing left to lose, is the swing vote. Tillis has drawn a clear line on January 6th. He said, “They better not have said for one minute that the people that beat up police officers were righteous people. You come even close to saying that, you don’t have a chance of getting my vote.” And Blanche has touted Trump’s pardons of January 6th rioters, overseen the dismissal of seditious conspiracy convictions against Proud Boys and Oath Keepers members, and fired more than 200 DOJ employees who worked on those prosecutions. More than 1,200 former Department of Justice employees have written to the committee warning that under Blanche’s leadership, approximately 16,000 employees have left the department.

The SAVE America Act, Trump’s voter suppression bill, is stalled in the Senate and now faces an even steeper path without Graham. The National Defense Authorization Act is moving. Every vote matters more right now than it has all year.

Tomorrow, and every day this week, we all need to sit down and plan to make as many calls as possible in whatever time we have. If you have 15 minutes, put the issues in order of importance and start dialing. Call your senators about Todd Blanche. Call about the SAVE America Act. Call about the Endangered Species Act. Tell them how you feel.

I know it can feel like making these calls doesn’t change anything, but they do matter and can affect how our representatives vote. Former congressional staffers have put numbers on it. One phone call from a constituent counts the way a hundred to a thousand angry voters count. Every call is logged. Daily tallies of calls for and against specific bills are one of the primary metrics offices use to gauge where their constituents stand. When enough calls come in on the same issue, it gets reported directly to the member. It disrupts the office. It creates a record that cannot be erased. And for members facing reelection, it is a reminder that people are watching and that they will remember in November.

We have seen these pressure campaigns work. We saw it work with some of Trump’s Cabinet nominees. We saw it when public opposition forced Republicans to pull the public lands sell-off from the One Big Beautiful Bill. We saw it when 98 percent of Americans who commented told the administration not to rescind the Public Lands Rule, and even though they did it anyway, that record now exists for the courts and for the ballot box. Pressure does not always win in the moment, but it always leaves a mark.

And beyond the practical impact, every call we make is a stand for history. It is us saying where we side. When our children and grandchildren ask what we did during this time, we will be able to tell them we did not stay quiet. We used every tool we had. We showed up. We spoke. We refused to let them do this without opposition.

It is we, the people, that this government answers to. And we need to have our voices heard. Because they are listening, especially the ones who want to keep their seats. And especially now, with the margins this thin, and the midterms less than four months away.

Graham spent his final years choosing power over principle, and that is his legacy now. He once described the path but could not follow it himself. Country first, he said. Even when it hurts. We still have the chance to make that choice. And every day we choose resistance to the destruction and cruelty the trump regime is unleashing, we are choosing the path he abandoned. The one that leads somewhere worth going. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Picture of the day: I decided to have a nostalgia-themed dinner tonight. My paternal grandparents often made artichokes with garlic butter for dipping whenever we came over, and it’s one of those memories that’s stayed with me all these years. I thought that little family tradition might end with me, but my middle daughter loves them just as much as I do.

I’m reminded more each day that it isn’t the big moments or the grand traditions that matter most. Sometimes it’s something as simple as sharing a special meal that quietly becomes a memory someone carries with them for the rest of their life.

Sources:

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/transcripts/meet-press-july-12-2026-rcna519783

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/12/lindsey-graham-longtime-south-carolina-senator-dies-71/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/10/climate/trump-endangered-species-habitats-rule-change

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/12/grahams-death-policy-washington-save-america-ukraine-blanche-reconciliation.html

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-lindsey-graham-death-save-america-act_n_6a5399fde4b0107f0db64bbb