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Lindsey Graham sacrificed his reputation to Donald Trump. He got plenty in return.

His career explains why so many Republicans made peace with Trump — and what they gave up to do it.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died suddenly over the weekend, his office announced on Sunday, and the political world is processing his legacy earlier than it ever expected to.

More than perhaps any senator — even the currently ailing Mitch McConnell — Graham embodied the transition from an older era of the Republican Party and Washington politics to the Trump era we live in now.

Graham was famously a vocal critic of Donald Trump, whom he ran against in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, but rapidly became a top ally after the election, to the horror of many of his longtime friends inside and outside the GOP.

But Graham’s career arc also showed why so many Republicans of so many different stripes were tempted to embrace Trump. The senator ultimately succeeded in steering an inexperienced, ideologically malleable, and easily flattered president toward many of his own lifelong priorities.

Take just one aspect of Graham’s considerable legacy: Foreign policy, where he was one of the most prominent hawks in American politics for decades.

At the time of Graham’s death, the US was engaged in a major military conflict with Iran that he had championed for decades and exercised de facto control of Venezuela’s government after arresting its leader, Nicolás Maduro, an operation Graham had also pushed for years earlier. The day before he died, Graham toured Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose forces are making military gains against Russia with US support after Graham helped him weather Trump’s early hostility — partly by advising the leader to humble himself before the president. Right up to the weekend, the senator was working to sell the president on a bipartisan sanctions bill against Russia.

If Graham made a Faustian bargain to sacrifice his pre-Trump reputation in order to advance his pre-Trump policy goals, then the terms were often honored.

But history is rarely so neat: What he gave up was also real, and other forces stirred up by Trump could one day erase those gains.

Graham’s career before Trump

Graham rose to prominence from small-town obscurity in Central, South Carolina, where he raised his younger sister after their parents died and ran their family restaurant. He served as a lawyer in the US Air Force and quickly climbed the ladder from the state legislature to the House, where he helped lead Bill Clinton’s impeachment, before winning an open Senate seat in 2002 after Strom Thurmond died.

But by the time of Trump’s rise in 2016, he was something of a fading relic within his party.

Graham was a close ally of the late Sen. John McCain, who jokingly called him “my illegitimate son,” and the two shared many habits and ideals that were being challenged by the then-ascendant Tea Party movement. They were both national security conservatives, they were known for their........

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