President Donald Trump appeared Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press as well as CNN’s State of the Union to pay tribute to Senator Lindsey Graham after the South Carolina Republican died unexpectedly late Saturday.
The president made the last-minute arrangement to call into the program after Graham’s death was announced just after 2 a.m. Sunday. Graham was originally slated to appear as one of the program’s guests this week, and made frequent appearances on the show over the decades. NBC’s Kristen Welker, the program’s moderator, noted that it was to be Graham’s 64th appearance on the show Sunday.
Trump, in a lengthy interview, told Welker that he’d spoken with Graham only hours before he was notified of the senator’s death around 1 a.m. The two spoke about Trump’s top priority on Capitol Hill, the SAVE America Act, which Trump said Graham was pushing “like crazy.” The senator was just back in Washington after a trip to Ukraine, where he had met with President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“It was like a member of the family to me, he was like a member of the family to me,” the president said of the senator, adding he’d planned to possibly meet with Graham on Sunday. “It’s very tough, actually. It’s amazing.”
Of his call with Graham, he added: “It was around the time — it couldn’t have been much longer. It could have been his last call, I don’t know.”
The president said Graham “sounded tired” on the call: “He actually said he was tired.” But Trump added that his overseas trip had rightfully sapped the senator’s energy.
Staffers for the 71-year-old lawmaker told NBC News that there were no indications that Graham was suffering from any kind of illness or medical issues before his death late Saturday evening.
Trump described Graham as an icon of the Senate, loyal to him and a fierce advocate for his causes but able to work across the aisle when necessary to get legislation passed.
“He was such an advocate. If he wanted to get something … And, you know, he had a unique ability, he was able to deal with Democrats and Republicans. If I had a problem, a real problem, I wouldn’t often ask, but if I had a problem with a Democrat, he could work it out,” said Trump.
“He was a great politician, actually.”
The president named the senator’s angry tirade against Democrats during the confirmations of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as Graham’s crowning moment in the Senate. Describing him as a “tough cookie”, he said that Graham wasn’t afraid to make enemies and ultimately “saved” Kavanaugh’s nomination.
“His moment on Brett Kavanaugh was one of the classics I think in the history of the Senate. His moment was, I mean, literally, one of the great classics of anyone in the Senate when he defended Brett Kavanaugh so brilliantly,” said Trump.
“And Brett might not have made it except for that,” the president added. “I think that saved Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court, you know, ascension. Lindsey did something that he was just so angry at the way Brett was being treated by the Democrats.”
Welker and Trump both noted how Graham “loved his work” and serving in the Senate, where Graham had been a member since 2003.
“He was going to win his election, he was going to win it big. I endorsed him early,” Trump said, joking that he told the senator: “If you didn’t win, I don’t think you could handle life.”
Trump and Graham did not always have the rosiest of relationships, and at its lowest point the South Carolina Republican tearfully repudiated the president on the floor of the Senate in the hours after the January 6 attack on Congress in 2021. During an early 2025 appearance on Meet the Press, Graham condemned the president’s decision to pardon hundreds of January 6 rioters.
The two also were once competitors, briefly, during the 2016 Republican presidential primary.
“I got to know Lindsey during the campaign. I didn’t really know him then. I met him once or twice, but nothing. And I got to know him during the campaign. He was tough. But he said, ‘I’ll see you in South Carolina.’ But when it came to South Carolina, I won South Carolina by a lot,” Trump recalled.
“I sort of ran the table on everybody. And it was good. And he appreciated it. He respected it. And we sort of got a little bit friendly. And just the friendship grew. It just grew.”
Their friendship was repaired after Trump’s post-presidential stint, a development that was notable given the failure of other senators who wavered from Trump’s side to return to the MAGA fold.
Graham won the president’s endorsement ahead of his re-election fight in November, where he was matched up against Democratic candidate Annie Andrews. Two other Republican senators who broke from Trump after 2021, John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy, lost their respective primary fights after Trump endorsed against them this cycle.
Graham would emerge in 2026 as Trump’s strongest booster on the matter of foreign policy as the president first pursued a campaign of military strikes against small boats it claimed were carrying drugs in the Caribbean, then escalated to launch an operation to arrest Venezuela’s president and launched a war with Iran, killing its Supreme Leader, in late February.
During yet another Meet the Press interview in March, he clashed with Welker over whether the administration had adequately planned its offensive against the Iranian government.
On CNN, the president spoke with State of the Union host Jake Tapper, who invited Trump to sit down for his first extended interview with CNN in months. Trump and the network regularly clash, and the president has repeatedly berated the network’s White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins during press gaggles in the White House and on Air Force One.
Trump responded favorably to the invitation, then added: “We’re trying to have CNN go in a normal path and we’ll do that.” His statement appeared to refer to the acquisition of CNN’s parent company by David Ellison, the billionaire owner of Paramount Skydance who has taken to transforming CBS News and its flagship 60 Minutes program since taking over.