Hunter Biden has said he prefers to remember the late Republican senator Lindsey Graham for his friendship with his father, former president Joe Biden, rather than his subsequent support for Donald Trump and MAGA.
Graham, 71, who served four terms as a South Carolina senator, passed away suddenly over the weekend following his return from a diplomatic mission to Ukraine, with a preliminary medical assessment concluding he had died of a ruptured aorta arising from heart disease.
Trump led the tributes to Graham on Sunday morning’s episode of NBC’s Meet the Press, on which his ally had been booked to appear.
“When I heard about Senator Graham’s death last night, the first thing I thought about was not all the things he said and did in service of Donald Trump,” Hunter Biden wrote on X.
“I thought of the time before Donald Trump when he was a brother to Senator John McCain. A time when senators from different parties could fight about politics and still be friends.
“A time when a conservative Republican from South Carolina could say of my father: ‘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.’”
Biden continued: “That is the Senator Graham I will remember today. Not because I have forgotten what came after. Because in that memory there is hope. Hope for a country where brothers can fight like hell over policy and still share a meal, and a laugh, and the loss of the people they love.
“I will choose to remember the time before Trump. Because I believe in an America after Trump.”
Joe Biden himself posted on X that he was “shocked” by Graham’s death, remembering their time together in Congress by saying: “We disagreed often, and sometimes loudly.”
Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger struck a similar tone to the younger Biden, saying that Graham and he had “a complicated relationship.”
He said they had been friends “before Trump,” but that the senator’s conversion to Trumpism had sent them “in very different directions, and we eventually stopped speaking.”
Kinzinger concluded: “I choose to remember the man I knew before our paths diverged – the one who cared deeply about America’s role in the world and wasn’t afraid to see suffering up close.
“Rest in peace, Lindsey. My prayers are with his family and all who loved him.”
Another former GOP representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene, offered the most contentious take on Graham’s death seen so far, invoking his hawkish reputation by responding to a U.S. Central Command post about airstrikes on Iran with the words: “Lindsey Graham would be proud. RIP.”
For his part, Trump remembered Graham as a “tough cookie,” telling CNN that he forgave the harsh criticism the senator levelled at him during the GOP primary of 2015 when they were rival candidates seeking their party’s presidential nomination.
Among other things, the late politician called the future president “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” a “kook” and “unfit for office.”
Trump brushed aside the memory of those slurs, saying they had been opponents at the time and had barely known one another while also acknowledging that he had been “nasty too”.
He also paid tribute to Graham on Truth Social by posting a picture of him from earlier this year wearing a “Make Iran Great Again” cap and holding up a spoof Wikipedia page proclaiming Trump “Acting President of Venezuela” following his removal of Nicolas Maduro from power, nodding to the deceased’s unquestioning support for his recent foreign policy adventures.
