The 47th President and the Post-Biden World 2.0

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Trump ally and foreign policy hawk, dies at 71

His death comes at a difficult moment for the Senate Republican conference, which has struggled with a narrow majority
that includes a handful of outgoing members who occasionally break ranks to oppose the president.

The United States is currently in the grip of an outbreak of the Cyclospora parasite, which causes severe diarrhea and has sickened more than 3,000 people across the U.S. Last August, Aria Bendix of NBC News reported that on July 1, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would no longer track infections caused by cyclospora and five other common causes of foodborne illnesses.

The CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and ten state health departments covering about 54 million people have run a program called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet, since 1995. Until last July 1 it monitored eight pathogens. Now it monitors only salmonella and toxin-producing E. coli.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai said then: “The health and safety of the American people is the Administration’s utmost priority. USDA, HHS, FDA, and the CDC will continue to cooperate and maintain the highest vigilance to safeguard our food supply against pathogens.” But director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University Barbara Kowalcyk called the decision to reduce FoodNet surveillance “very disappointing,” saying, “A lot of the work that I and many, many, many, many other people have put into improving food safety over the past 20 or 30 years is just going away.”

Meanwhile, the New World screwworm continues to spread in the U.S. and Central America, where Melody Schreiber of The Guardian reported today conservation cameras are showing the infestations spreading rapidly in deer, jaguars, peccaries, and even porcupines.

While Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has repeatedly blamed former president Joe Biden for the arrival of the flesh-eating maggots, three former officials from the Agriculture Department, as well as another source, told Marcia Brown of Politico in June that Trump administration officials held up funding for the construction of a facility crucial to slowing the spread of the pest and also delayed funding for a $100 million research initiative to find new ways to stop the screwworm.

Trump administration cuts to staffing at the USDA meant that in 2025 the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service staffing dropped by 25%. More than half of the area veterinarians retired or resigned.

Things aren’t going terribly well internationally, either.

Despite the repeated assertions of administration officials that the U.S. “holds all the cards” in its war with Iran, Edward Wong, Michael Crowley, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported today that the memorandum of understanding Trump signed on June 17, 2026, formalized Iran’s power over the Strait of Hormuz. Former U.S. analysts and officials told the reporters that the agreement was dangerously vague and that Iran has interpreted its provision saying that Iran would “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels” through the strait as giving Iran control of the waterway.

As Iran has attacked ships trying to get through the strait near the Oman shoreline, Trump has ordered airstrikes on Iran. Over the weekend, Iran’s Navy said it was closing the strait “until the end of U.S. interference in the region.”

Today Tara Copp and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported allegations from soldiers who survived the Iranian attack on Port Shuaiba in Kuwait that killed six U.S. military personnel and wounded dozens more that the generals in command ignored intelligence that Port Shuaiba was a probable target. The site was not adequately protected against drones, as scouts noted before the war when the Pentagon began to move troops off large bases onto smaller facilities to make them harder for Iran to target. Port Shuaiba’s emergency warning system wasn’t working, and the facility had no coverings to conceal personnel or hamper drones. Then troops were deployed there without weapons.

After the strikes, wounded soldiers sent to Germany’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center discovered that they had neither been listed in the military’s database as seriously injured nor been recorded on the flight manifest as medical evacuees, so could not be admitted as patients. Doctors treated them as outpatients and sent them to barracks where they waited a week to be sent back to the U.S.

In June, Jonah Kaplan and Michael Kaplan of CBS News reported that wounded soldiers and their families say the Army downplayed their injuries. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters in March that almost 90% of the injuries 400 service members had sustained had been minor and that the wounded soldiers had returned to duty. One man the Army classified as “not seriously injured” sustained extensive shrapnel wounds, a concussion, hearing and vision loss, and lung damage. Another underwent multiple surgeries to remove shrapnel.

Wounded soldiers told Kaplan and Kaplan that the duty for which they had been cleared was an active order to recuperate from injuries in a specialized recovery unit.

An Army spokesperson explained that the classifications were military designations. The spokesperson explained that the Army classifies soldiers as “seriously injured” or “very seriously injured” only if they are at risk of dying from their wounds within the next 72 hours.

Tonight the U.S. military launched new strikes against Iran. In a brief interview with Reuters over the weekend, Trump said: “We’re beating them up.”

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died Saturday night at age 71, apparently from a rupture of his aorta due to cardiovascular disease. Graham had just returned from a trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, where he met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. A former officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG Corps) in the U.S. Air Force, Graham was a staunch supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and of Ukraine. In that, he stood apart from Trump.

In his earlier years in Congress, Graham was an establishment Republican who pushed for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton but was willing to work with Democrats personally. He once said of then-senator Joe Biden of Delaware: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.”

He objected to the takeover of the Republican Party by the MAGA Republicans. In December 2015 he called then-candidate Donald J. Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and said: “He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.... I don’t think he has a clue about anything. He’s just trying to get his numbers up and get the biggest reaction he can.” “You know how you make America great again?” he said, “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

In 2016, Graham said he voted for Independent Evan McMullin because “Voting for Hillary Clinton was always a non-starter and I couldn’t go where Donald Trump wanted to take the USA & [the Republican Party].”

But after a meeting with Trump in March 2017, Graham became a loyalist. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he ushered through Trump’s judicial nominees, and his fierce defense of Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings for a position on the Supreme Court has been credited with enabling Kavanaugh’s nomination to go through despite accusations of sexual assault.

Graham was a staunch enough Trump supporter that he urged Trump not to concede the 2020 presidential election because “if Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.” He called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger over the votes in Georgia; Raffensperger believed Graham was suggesting he should throw out legal ballots.

Graham briefly turned against Trump after the president tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, but then he came around to Trump again, supporting his 2024 presidential run.

Graham’s sudden death came as a surprise, but Trump was able to find Graham useful one last time. Although Graham’s top priority appears to have been working with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to push more stringent economic sanctions on Russia, Trump told Kristen Welker of Meet the Press that he had spoken to Graham just before he died. According to Trump, Graham “said, ‘We’re all set for the SAVE America Act,’” the voter suppression act that Trump wants so badly. Trump continued: “He was pushing the SAVE America act like crazy…. And I said, ‘Well, we’re gonna get it done, Lindsey. We’re gonna get it done.’”

On May 3, 2016, Senator Lindsey Graham posted on social media: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”

News of Lindsey Graham’s death will understandably prompt an outpouring of retrospectives in the days and weeks ahead.

Before going any further, I want to offer my sincere condolences to his family, his friends, and those who cared about him. I know what it is to experience loss. While Lindsey Graham was someone with whom I disagreed on virtually every major political issue, that does not diminish the reality of grief for those who loved him.

There will be many discussions of Graham’s political career. He was, by any measure, a consequential public figure. People will remember his friendship with John McCain, his reputation as one of the Senate’s most consistent foreign policy hawks, his unwavering support for Israel, his advocacy for the Iraq War, and, of course, his evolution from an early critic of Donald Trump into one of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill.

What interests me is something I suspect will receive much less attention: how Graham’s defense of executive authority during the Iraq War helped cultivate the assumptions that eventually made Today’s expansive view of presidential power seem normal.

The Iraq War and Presidential Loyalty

One memory from earlier in Graham’s career comes to mind.

During the Iraq War, I watched a congressional hearing in which Lindsey Graham argued that America was a nation at war and that, in such a moment, Americans needed to support the president—George W. Bush.

The argument wasn’t simply that Bush deserved respect.

It was that good Americans stand behind the president in wartime.

Those who questioned the Iraq conflict were portrayed as undermining national unity. Graham repeatedly suggested that dissent aided the enemy. Opposition wasn’t merely disagreement; it became suspect. To criticize the president during war was to fail a test of patriotism.

Republicans have hardly been consistent on this principle. Support for executive authority often depends on whose party controls the White House.

But consistency isn’t really the point.

The point is that Graham articulated a political logic that has become deeply familiar: authentic American identity is demonstrated through unwavering support for presidential authority.

The Seeds of Today’s Executive Theory

To be clear, Graham was not advancing what we now recognize as the fully developed “unitary executive” theory. He wasn’t explicitly arguing for the sweeping claims of presidential immunity or the expansive understandings of executive power that have emerged in recent years.

His claims were narrower.

But they’re significant.

They reveal that the underlying assumptions were already present decades before Trump entered politics. Long before MAGA, influential Republicans were cultivating the idea that dissent from the president—particularly during moments of national crisis—was fundamentally suspect.

Those assumptions didn’t suddenly appear in 2016.

They had been growing for years.

A Political Theologic

What strikes me even more is what I would call the theo-logic operating beneath Graham’s political arguments.

I use that awkward term intentionally.

Graham was never a leading public figure of the Religious Right in the way that others were. Like John McCain, he rarely grounded his arguments in explicit biblical language. He wasn’t known for quoting Scripture on the Senate floor or presenting himself primarily as a Christian culture warrior.

That doesn’t mean religion was absent from the logic he employed.

In conservative Christian theology, one foundational assumption is that whatever God does is, by definition, good.

Notice the distinction.

It is not simply that God always chooses the good because God is morally constrained to do so.

Rather, God’s actions define what goodness is.

God is not limited by goodness; God’s actions establish goodness.

If God commands something that appears morally troubling, it must nevertheless be good just because God commanded it.

Power itself becomes self-justifying.

That is the theo-logic I see reflected in Graham’s understanding of executive authority.

The faithful Christian accepts God’s actions because they are God’s actions.

Likewise, the faithful American is expected to accept the president’s actions because they are the president’s actions.

The president is not understood primarily as someone constrained by constitutional limits, legal boundaries, or democratic accountability.

Instead, legitimacy flows from the office itself.

The office validates the action.

From Theology to Politics

This is why I think Graham deserves attention beyond the familiar stories about foreign policy or his relationship with Trump.

His rhetoric during the Iraq war years helped normalize a political imagination in which loyalty supersedes accountability.

That imagination fits remarkably well with later developments in conservative politics.

When contemporary defenders of expansive executive power argue that criticism of the president weakens the nation, or that presidential authority should be insulated from ordinary legal constraints, they are not inventing something entirely new.

They are extending ideas that figures like Lindsey Graham had already started to cultivate.

From the perspective of religious studies, the parallel is striking.

In one sphere, faithfulness means trusting that whatever God does must be right because God did it.

In the other, patriotism increasingly comes to mean trusting that whatever the president does must be right because the president did it.

The structure of the argument is remarkably similar.

Political Legacy

Political legacies are rarely limited to votes cast or offices held.

Sometimes a politician’s deepest legacy lies in the assumptions they help make ordinary.

When we think about Lindsey Graham, I think we should remember not only his role in American foreign policy or his evolution during the Trump era.

We should also remember the intellectual work he performed decades earlier.

The groundwork for Today’s understanding of executive power did not begin with Donald Trump.

It was cultivated over years by politicians who taught Americans to equate loyalty with obedience and dissent with disloyalty.

That, to me, is one of Lindsey Graham’s most consequential legacies.

Today began with yet another demonstration of the fact that the U.S. options for extricating itself from Trump’s war on Iran with conditions anywhere near as good as they were under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated with a number of countries under President Barack Obama, or even as good as they were in February 2026 before Trump and Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu launched air strikes on Iran, do not appear promising.

At 10:16 this morning, Trump announced on social media that the Strait of Hormuz “is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran. We are reinstating THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE, so named because it is only stopping Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving. All other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait. The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,’ but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World. The process and formation will begin immediately.”

In other words, the U.S. is restarting hostility—a blockade is an act of war—and, according to Trump, will protect the Strait of Hormuz but expects to be paid.

Trump has been clear that he considers the memorandum of understanding he signed on June 17 no longer in force, probably not least because Iranian officials interpret the words of the hastily constructed deal as giving Iran control over the Strait of Hormuz. They have been clear they intend to charge fees for passage of the strait, a condition the U.S. rejects although Trump’s current claim that the U.S. will charge fees seems to undercut the U.S. position.

Crucially, officials in the Trump administration continue to deny that Congress has any role in declaring war, despite the clear language of the Constitution. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, the president can respond without congressional input to an “imminent threat” so long as the president notifies Congress in writing within 48 hours of the beginning of hostilities. After that notification, the president has only 60 days before he must either end hostilities or secure congressional approval for them.

Trump got around this law first by overruling his own intelligence agencies to insist that Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. Then when the May 1 deadline for either withdrawal or congressional approval approached, he claimed that hostilities had ended on April 7 with the declaration of a ceasefire, notwithstanding that both sides continued to shoot at each other and the U.S. maintained its blockade of Iranian ports.

Now they are claiming the power simply to start the clock again. On Friday, Trump formally notified Congress that the U.S. has resumed strikes on Iran, claiming the Pentagon has another 60 days to strike Iran before the timeline specified by the War Powers Act runs out.

Today Elizabeth Dwoskin, Andrew Ba Tran, Luis Melgar, and Peter Jamison of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s sons “Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have amassed a portfolio of defense technology start-ups that are benefiting from new Pentagon priorities and spending, further entangling the United States’ interests and the Trump family’s financial fortunes.” They have invested in more than a dozen defense companies that have collectively received at least $3.2 billion in business directly from the government since those investments, along with $3.1 billion in options for future contracts.

Tonight U.S. Central Command announced it has begun a third night of strikes against Iran.

At about 7:15 this morning, an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. According to staff from the Portland Press Herald, Guerrero was from Colombia and was authorized to work in the U.S. The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition said he had a Social Security number and was on his way to work.

Spokespeople for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, have not commented. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) has called for “a full and impartial investigation,” but as her political opponents note, Collins voted just last month to give ICE another $70 billion. ICE and Border Patrol had become far less visible as Republicans worked to pass supplemental funding for ICE and Border Patrol through Congress. In the wake of that new funding, immigration sweeps are back in the news. Protests broke out today outside Collins’s Biddeford office.

Senator Angus King (I-ME) told Patrick Whittle, Leah Willingham, and Jack Brook of the Associated Press that Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told him Guerrero had tried to use his vehicle as a weapon against officers, forcing the agent to shoot. This allegation has been a common one for agents trying to justify fatal shootings, including that of Renee Good in Minnesota. Witness Daniel Boucher said that in the aftermath of the shooting, he saw Guerrero “bleeding profusely from the head. He was talking. He said: ‘I tried to stop.’”

This evening, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) said she had learned that the man ICE shot and killed was not the person they had an order to pick up. ‘

In a statement tonight the Department of Homeland Security claimed that the officer shot because he was “fearing for public safety.” David Bier of the Cato Institute and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the Immigration Council both called out that language, noting DHS was claiming not that the officer feared for his life, but that he had a vague concern for “public safety.”

The ICE killing of a man in Maine comes less than a week after ICE shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo of Houston, Texas. Salgado Araujo was a Mexican national who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years and was close to obtaining legal status. His son told Lekan Oyekanmi, Jack Brook, and Jeffrey Collins of the Associated Press that the homebuilder knew what to do when approached by ICE but may have feared that the men following him in unmarked SUVs intended to steal his tools.

ICE said the officers “attempted to conduct a vehicle stop as part of a targeted enforcement operation to arrest an illegal alien” and that Salgado Araujo “rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” It added that an officer “discharged his weapon in self-defense.”

A lawyer for two of the people in the van with Salgado Araujo denied that he tried to ram officers. A source later told Dalia Faheid, Chris Boyette, Priscilla Alvarez, and Caroll Alvarado of CNN that ICE’s description of the events that killed Salgado Araujo as a “targeted enforcement operation” was misleading. While that may have been the case, Salgado Araujo was not the target. They saw him in his van near the target and thought he “resembled the target.”

José Olivares of The Guardian noted that Salgado Araujo was the tenth person shot and killed by federal immigration officers from either ICE or Border Patrol this year. Twenty-one more people have died in ICE detention this year.

This afternoon the Trump administration finally turned over to Minnesota investigators evidence from the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. That evidence includes statements, video from police body cameras, and Good’s badly damaged SUV.

Today U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida Kathleen Williams said Trump, his lawyers, and the lawyers for the Department of Justice had manufactured the so-called settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. “[T]he Court finds that this matter was brought for an improper purpose—to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact,” she wrote. They launched the lawsuit “as a means of conferring legitimacy upon a course of action that they were unwilling to subject to judicial review.”

The course of action they intended to take was to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund for Trump loyalists who claimed that the Department of Justice under former president Joe Biden had been weaponized against them. While that part of the deal got most of the attention, probably more important to Trump was the addition to the “settlement” announced the next day: a promise that Trump, his family, his businesses, and even his “associates” would be immune from prosecution for any tax crimes revealed by audits of tax returns filed before May 19, 2026.

“No sitting President has ever sued federal agencies completely subject to his control for monetary benefits, or any benefits that inure to him, his family, and associates,” Williams wrote. After Trump dropped his lawsuit, thirty-five former judges had asked Williams to set aside her dismissal of the case with the goal of determining whether the claimed “settlement” was a fraud on the court.

In her opinion, she noted that the question before the court was simply whether there was a legitimate lawsuit, and the answer was no. The final disposition of the slush fund and the immunity were not questions before the court. “Whether Executive Branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax monies for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this Court. The question is whether the Parties could do so by claiming to be adverse and engaging the legitimacy of a court proceeding. The answer is a resounding ‘no.’”

Williams recommended legal sanctions against some of the lawyers involved and said she was “extremely troubled” by the testimony of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, which was “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.”

Blanche used to be Trump’s personal defense lawyer and has said he believes he has a “continuing duty of loyalty” to Trump. The president has nominated Blanche to become attorney general. His confirmation hearings begin on Wednesday.

..through a windshield...

Neighbors left candles on the sidewalk in Biddeford, Maine. One sign read: “Immigrants make Biddeford great.”

Joan Sebastian Guerrero was 26. Colombian. Authorized to work here. Had a Social Security number. Drove for DoorDash. Married, with a three-year-old girl.

ICE went to a Biddeford address Monday morning looking for someone else. Guerrero was not the target. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed that to Senator Angus King — after first telling him the opposite.

DHS said the officer fired “fearing for public safety” as Guerrero “attempted to flee.” Then CBS obtained security camera footage. It appears to show his vehicle slowly driving in a circle a few times before coming to a stop.

A neighbor heard him say “I tried to stop.” Then the shots.

No body cameras. King says DHS told him they’re “on order.” Maybe 45 days.

His wife and daughter were on the street. The little girl in her pajamas. Neighbors watched police try to keep her behind the crime scene tape.

This is one week after ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. Also no body camera. Also a disputed account. Federal authorities are refusing to give Houston investigators the names of the agents involved — so Harris County DA Sean Teare and Commissioner Rodney Ellis announced Monday they’re opening their own independent investigation anyway. Mexico’s Senate has condemned the deaths of 17 Mexican citizens killed during US immigration enforcement.

DON’S TAKE
Two dead men in two weeks. No cameras on either one. And Washington won’t even release the names of who pulled the trigger.

Oops – posted Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American in the wrong topic this morning!