The View co-host Sunny Hostin weighed in on Lindsey Graham’s “complicated legacy,” using five brutal words to sum up what the late MAGA senator is leaving behind.
The ABC hosts discussed Graham on Monday morning, after the South Carolina lawmaker’s sudden death over the weekend.
While host Ana Navarro knew Graham personally for years—and lambasted those “rejoicing” in his death—Hostin had a more critical view, ultimately concluding that he “betrayed his country for power.”
“I mean, I didn’t know him well,” Hostin admitted. “He had been on this show several times. I remember speaking to Meghan McCain about him quite a bit because she was very close to him and was very disappointed in the change that she saw after John McCain died.”
“I think he was certainly this political chameleon, and his legacy is complicated, and people are speaking out about the very hypocrisy that you saw when he was John McCain’s friend, and when he became friends with Donald Trump,” she continued. “Steve Schmidt, who’s a political strategist who worked on the John McCain campaign in 2008, wrote just today, ‘Lindsey knew better,’ and he said, ‘He was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.’ That is someone who knew him.”
She also quoted Schmidt, a fierce opponent of President Trump, writing on his Substack, “Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators.”
Hostin then pointed to Graham’s political dissonance. The senator marked a shift toward the MAGA camp once President Donald Trump assumed power, but previously condemned the billionaire.
“In 2016, he said, ‘If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed, and we will deserve it,’” explained Hostin. But then, in January 2026, he calls him ‘the greatest president of all time,’ and then May 27, 2026, he says, ‘They should change the Nobel Prize to the Trump Prize,’ and then finally on June 9, 2026, he says, ‘Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.’”
“When you’re talking about a complicated legacy and someone who may have betrayed his country for power, that seems to be, in my view, what his legacy became,” she concluded.
Graham died on Saturday night at the age of 71. Preliminary findings from the D.C. Medical Examiner’s office have revealed that the senator died of a rare cardiovascular condition.
The View hosts all seemed to agree that Graham’s political legacy has been marred by his association with Trump.
Navarro and Sara Haines both condemned those celebrating his death, with Haines saying, “He was a human, and so there were people that loved him. There were people that cared for him, and whether I disagreed with him completely or not, he’s gone. And so my heart goes out to the people around him that are suffering.”
Whoopi Goldberg said, “He was a complicated cat, and there’s no getting around that.”
“God rest his soul. God rest your soul. I don’t wish any bad on anybody, even the ones you know I really should,” she concluded. “But I don’t.”
