In the summer of 2015, Donald Trump gave out Lindsey Graham's cellphone number at a campaign rally, leading to a flood of calls. The South Carolina senator replied with a video in which he alternately dropped the phone into a blender, whacked it with a golf club, stuck it in a toaster oven, set it on fire with lighter fluid and found other amusing ways to destroy it.

Graham flipped from being Trump's most brutal Republican critic to his most ingratiating minion. He claimed to have come around after playing a round of golf with the president and learning he was "funny as hell." But sometimes the mask would slip just enough to show that Graham knew he was trading honesty for influence, a classic devil's bargain. Never was that clearer than on Jan. 6, 2021, when Graham denounced Trump's tactics from the Senate floor: "Count me out. Enough is enough."

Given that Graham's public relationship with Trump began over a phone, it's sadly fitting that it ended with a friendly call between the two men Saturday, hours before Graham's death and just after the senator had returned from an overseas trip that had taken him first to the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, and then to Kyiv, Ukraine, for a meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian........

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