Lindsey Graham was skeptical of Donald Trump’s handling of the Iran war in the weeks before he died.
Graham, who died on July 11 at 71, had been a strong advocate of military intervention in Iran, which Trump began in late February but has failed to end. However, in filmmaker Alex Holder’s upcoming documentary, Lindsey’s Game—a project based on hundreds of hours of filming with Graham over the last three years—Graham revealed some candid thoughts on the status of the war, with the president not looking the best.
“Iran—he’s letting this thing slip away. We had them on the ropes, and his indecision is coming back to hurt us,“ Graham said in June, in a clip aired Monday on CNN. ”I’ve got to go talk to him, you know? Open up the straits, keep the pressure on, unleash Israel to hurt them, and maybe you’ll get a better deal. But the big deal—Saudi, Israel... that’s the big prize, and that can’t happen until Israel and Saudi believe Iran can’t be enough evil force—that they have been put in a box."
Graham then told some “good news,” which is that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have two things in common: “They owe Trump a lot, they like Trump, but they’re afraid of Trump.”
The 80-year-old commander-in-chief, he continued, “is the first president who doesn’t hold back when it comes to Israel. I mean, I think he’s going a bit too far, but he will dress [Netanyahu] down in a way that no other Republican president has ever done. That gives him some credibility in the Arab world.”
Graham, a foreign policy hawk, also said that he intended to prove that “isolationism is an outlier” in the GOP.
“So this was a referendum on isolationism versus ‘Lindsey Graham MAGA Trump,’” he said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Graham died a few weeks later in Washington, the day after returning from Kyiv, Ukraine. In announcing his death, Graham’s office said he had had a “brief and sudden illness.” According to a preliminary medical examiner finding, Graham suffered an aortic dissection, which is a tear of the inner wall of the aorta.
In the documentary, Graham was also critical of Trump’s Middle East negotiators, Steve Witkoff, 69, and Jared Kushner, 45, the president’s son-in-law.
“I can’t do it with Jared, and I can’t do it with Witkoff. They’re just too conflicted,” Graham told former President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Responding to a request for comment, a White House official told The Wall Street Journal that “Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are excellent dealmakers whose results speak for themselves,” defending the pair’s role in the negotiations.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Graham said, should instead handle negotiations—a notion that has been raised in conservative circles by the likes of Fox News host Brian Kilmeade.
“They’re business guys,” Kilmeade said on air July 9. “They have not been effective in Ukraine, not been effective in Gaza. They have not been effective in this. They can’t have three portfolios to begin with. We have a State Department for a reason.”
Though Graham died a Trump ally, he was not always on board with the president. The senator, who had a brief run for president in 2016, called Trump a “jackass” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” during that campaign cycle. Within a few years, though, they were on the same page, and Graham campaigned for Trump in 2020 and 2024.
Graham also had Trump’s ear in the lead-up to the Iran war, urging him to target Iran’s supreme leader in January.
