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Lindsey Graham would have been pleased to know that he would never spend a second of his life as an ex-senator. No one needed to be a senator like Graham, who suddenly died over the weekend, and no one savored it more. In his 2016 presidential run, Graham would campaign about how he, a bachelor with no kids, had no life and would be purely focused on the work. His friends and foes alike—most fell somewhere in between—already knew that well enough. He was exhausting.

Graham’s presidential run went nowhere. That was all fine for Graham: He got his fix with bonus cable-news bookings and participated in some debates, and then—phew!—was able to return to being a busybody in the Senate. Graham knew well, unlike a lot of self-deceiving senators, that he was never destined for the presidential game. He was not, to use his own term, an “alpha dog.” For most of his career, he found his relevance by attaching himself to those who were. But by the time he left office, he was finally achieving something unlikely: becoming a power center of his own.

To simplify things a bit—though not by much—there were two distinct eras of Lindsey Graham’s almost quarter-century in the Senate: the John McCain era, and the Trump era.

For most of the first 16 years of Graham’s Senate career, McCain was the most famous senator in the United States. The two had a deep and enduring friendship, as both were storytellers and bullshitters with a shared interest in overseas military adventurism. Graham didn’t share McCain’s star-making knack for stabbing his own party on high-profile occasions. He didn’t vote against the Bush tax cuts or take the........

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