US senator and close Trump ally Lindsey Graham dies after ‘brief and sudden illness’

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of US President Donald Trump, has died at the age of 71. He died on Saturday evening following a “brief and sudden illness”, according to his office.
Elected to the Senate in 2002, the South Carolina politician was one of Washington’s most influential voices on foreign policy, often pushing for US military intervention overseas.
Donald Trump said Graham was a “true American Patriot” who would be “greatly missed”.
Graham had just returned from Kyiv, where he met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday. There were no known health concerns ahead of his trip.
Graham was a staunch supporter of arming Kyiv and applying sanctions against Moscow. Zelensky said in a post on X that he was “deeply saddened” by his death.
“America and the world have lost a determined leader,” he added.
Graham’s relationship with the US president had evolved since Trump first ran for office.
In a CNN interview during his campaign for the presidency in 2015, Graham called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot”. The next year, he said: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.”
After the US Capitol riots in 2021, Graham gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he said: “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way.
“All I can say is a count me out. Enough is enough.”
But the South Carolina senator later became one of Trump’s most loyal supporters. He voted against convicting Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial, and supported his election in 2024.
“There is a dark side to Donald Trump… and he was a very good president. But I am sticking with him because I saw what he did,” Graham told the BBC in 2023.
He cited Trump’s record on the US southern border, the killing of Iran’s powerful military commander Qasem Soleimani and the appointment of conservative judges.
Graham was known for his interventionist stance in foreign policy, including a strong support for the war in Iran.
Speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation last month in one of his last televised interviews, Graham said the US would “obliterate” Iran if the country did not submit to US control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid tribute to Graham on Sunday, saying “Lindsey understood that the security of Israel and America are inseparable”.
Israel lost “one of its greatest friends”, he added.
Graham also voted in favour of military action against Iraq in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001 and was opposed to the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021, describing it as a “sad and dangerous event for US national security”.
“Jihadists all over the world are celebrating,” he added. “America will be seen as weak.”
On Sunday, Trump said in an interview with NBC News that he had spoken with Graham on Saturday night and the senator “sounded great”. He was due to appear on NBC’s Meet the Press programme on Sunday.
According to US media, transmissions from emergency medical personnel at a home he owns in Washington, DC, said a man at the house was suffering from cardiac arrest.
His office issued a statement about his death several hours later.
“He was a tough cookie in many ways,” Trump told NBC on Sunday. “If he wanted to get something, if he thought he was right and he had people against him, he could be very tough, actually. But he was a good person.”