Congress
How Lindsey Graham got Trump to yes on Iran
Lindsey Graham’s effort to convince Donald Trump to attack Iran began — to the surprise of no one familiar with the relationship between the South Carolina senator and the president — on the golf course.
After the 2024 election, the pair hit the links to discuss a second-term agenda for the resurgent president, and Graham had lots of advice.
In an extensive interview Tuesday in his Capitol Hill office, Graham recalled pushing Trump to “blow some shit up” to combat drug trafficking. He talked about taking on Big Tech by challenging the legal underpinnings of their industry dominance. And he counseled Trump to build on agreements he’d brokered between Israel and U.S. allies in the Middle East.
That last part, Graham emphasized, would require confronting the elephant in the region.
“We were thinking about this early, early on about how Iran is a spoiler for expanding the Abraham Accords and stability in the Mideast,” he said. “I told him before he took office … if you can collapse this terrorist regime, that’s Berlin Wall stuff.”
That launched an ongoing conversation that continued for months, culminating in a flurry of one-on-one lobbying “in the last several weeks,” Graham said. The two also talked about Iran during a Thursday White House meeting that wrapped less than 48 hours before the beginning of the vast joint U.S.-Israeli operation aimed at Iran’s missile and nuclear programs, its civilian and military leaders, as well as other key targets.
Trump’s decision to go to war was the latest indication that hawkish voices he once publicly resisted — none louder than Graham’s — have dominated his second-term decisionmaking. It was also a full-circle moment for the veteran GOP senator, who has spent decades pushing administration after administration to take military action against Iran with no success until now.
Graham’s triumph was never a given. He described a “real contest” within the administration about whether or not Trump should take military action to end a geopolitical rivalry 47 years in the making.
Another person with knowledge of the internal debate said that, within the administration, the idea of striking Iran had very few vocal backers other than U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. That left Graham among those leading the charge from outside and inside.
In public, Graham used frequent cable news hits and hallway interviews in the Capitol to play up the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear and missile programs — even after Trump ordered a June strike to destroy its most sensitive nuclear facilities. He also used Trump’s preferred medium — TV hits — to lavishly praise him, frequently referring to him as “Reagan Plus” for his dramatic impact.
Privately, he appealed to Trump’s attraction to swaggering action and risk-taking over quieter moves — not to mention the term-limited president’s growing concern with his legacy.
“There was a real fight not to do it,” Graham said. “Let Israel do it by itself or just not do much. So we talked a lot about this: ‘Mr. President, you want to have your fingerprints on this. You want them to know America will fight.’”
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Graham said the successful January capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro put Trump “in the mindset to follow through.” But he wasn’t certain until late last month when Trump sent a second aircraft carrier near the region that Trump would ultimately take action.
The strikes have opened Trump up to criticism from Democrats, key European and Middle Eastern allies and even some members of his own party, who have questioned the rationale for the sweeping operation and what the endgame will look like. Polling indicates the American public remains wary of sliding into another “forever war” in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan.
As he makes the rounds defending Trump — both publicly to TV cameras and privately to Middle Eastern allies — Graham has tried to hammer home that the U.S. is not nation-building in Iran. Where the country goes next, he said, remains up to the Iranian people.
“If they want to reconstitute their country, to build more nuclear weapons and more missiles to hit us, we’ll treat the new people like we did the old people,” he said. “I just don’t believe it. I think they’re going to find a way to … be a different country.”
He went on to dismiss the famous “Pottery Barn rule” articulated by former Secretary of State Colin Powell before the Iraq War more than two decades ago.
“‘You break it. You own it.’ That may be true for a consignment shop, but it’s not true for foreign policy,’” Graham said. “If there’s a threat, break it.”
But Trump’s strategy has opened him up to questioning from some of his own supporters, who believe it’s a far cry from the “America First” approach he preaches. The president and some of his top advisers pledged during the 2024 campaign that his second administration wouldn’t rush into foreign entanglements. And Trump during his 2025 inauguration speech said his administration’s success would be measured in part by “the wars we never get into.”
Many of those statements have resurfaced online since this weekend’s strikes, but Trump is now singing consistently from Graham’s interventionist hymnal, and the senator said he’s not concerned Trump will back down amid the criticism and that he’s “in it to win it.”
“He’s a hard sell, but when you sell him, he’s all in,” said Graham, who argued that “America First is not ‘head in the sand.’”
The strikes have sparked a bipartisan push in Congress to block Trump from taking additional military action without congressional signoff. That effort is expected to fall short, but it inspired a lively debate during Senate Republicans’ closed-door lunch on Tuesday — and Graham was in the middle of it.
He pushed back after Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) criticized the lack of consultation with Congress and GOP leaders for not holding hearings, according to two people with knowledge of his comments who were granted anonymity to disclose the private moment.
While Graham’s defense of aggressive military action is nothing new, Trump’s outright embrace of it is. The idea that the pair would be working in tandem on a new Middle East war would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when Graham was running for president himself and roundly criticizing the outsider candidate’s isolationism.
As recently as 2019, Trump publicly criticized Graham’s history of advocating for military intervention in the Middle East after Graham urged him to be more aggressive after Iran bombed Saudi oil production facilities.
“It’s very easy to attack, but if you ask Lindsey, ask him how did going into the Middle East, how did that work out? And how did going into Iraq work out?” Trump said at the time.
Graham said one of his rules is to not “take yourself out of the game” just because of a past disagreement and that it paid off with a now-trusting relationship with a two-term president.
“If you had told me in 2016, I’d wind up being one of his better friends, closest adviser and admire him as commander-in-chief, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Graham said, adding that “what the president sees in me is somebody that can deliver.”
One person close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that if anyone had an outsize influence on Trump’s decision to attack Iran it was Graham. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who favors a hands-off foreign policy approach, made a similar observation about Graham’s impact on Trump’s Venezuela strategy, telling reporters that his GOP colleague should be “banned from going to the White House.”
“That’s sarcasm,” Paul clarified.
Other corners of the party’s libertarian-leaning wing have been more blunt. Doug Stafford, Paul’s chief political adviser, called Graham a “warmongering fool.” And Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told reporters after a closed-door Iran briefing Tuesday that “Lindsey Graham hasn’t seen a fistfight he hasn’t wanted to turn into a bombing raid.”
Graham, meanwhile, is looking ahead as he back-channels with Trump and allies in the Middle East. He wants to put together a bipartisan coalition in the Senate to finish the job he talked about with Trump on the golf course — enshrining the full normalization of Israel-Arab relations with a Senate-ratified treaty.
And he is coordinating closely with Trump. The two spoke Tuesday morning, and the president has indicated he’s closely watching Graham’s TV sales pitch for the war, including declarations that the “mothership of terrorism is sinking” and the “captain is dead.”
“He called me and said … ‘I like that — stay on TV,’” he said. “Something tells me I will.”
Dasha Burns and Jack Detsch contributed to this report.
Senate Republicans’ farm bill proposal rejects Democrats’ demands to delay a planned shift of some food aid costs to states, according to three people familiar with the plans — jeopardizing hopes of winning bipartisan support for the package.
Democrats say they will oppose a farm bill that doesn’t push back a requirement that will soon force some states to pay for some Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a provision included in the domestic policy megalaw Republicans passed last year.
Senate Agriculture Chair John Boozman (R-Ark.) gave Senate staff and industry representatives a private preview of his farm bill text Monday afternoon ahead of a planned public release of the discussion draft at 2 p.m. Tuesday, according to the people, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss the not-yet-public plans.
Boozman will need some Democratic support to guarantee the bill can clear the 60-vote threshold on the Senate floor.
A GOP spokesperson for the Agriculture Committee said Boozman had “developed a discussion draft that can earn the bipartisan support needed for Senate passage.” The spokesperson added that Boozman will continue talks with senators and industry representatives while “finalizing text and moving toward a markup.”
The draft legislation also excludes some Republican and agriculture industry priorities, such as provisions that would allow year-round sales of E15 fuel and block states from creating certain animal welfare and pesticide labeling laws, according to the three people.
Senators from both parties are already eyeing how they might amend the bill to include their priorities. That could muddy the legislation’s path forward by generating a number of conflicts during the committee’s markup ahead of a potential floor vote on the package.
Some GOP senators whose state budgets would be hard hit by the change have privately indicated that they would support delaying the provision, which is set to begin October 2027.
Those senators and anti-hunger advocates argue the SNAP cost-share plan will kick people off the program and lead to benefit cuts. Democrats also note that many states will already receive delays or exemptions to the cost-share requirement due to high or low payment error rates.
Boozman said in an interview last month that he was “open to listening” to Democrats’ argument, but contended it could complicate his efforts to craft a budget-neutral bill.
The Senate’s version largely mirrors the House’s, which passed with 12 Democratic votes in April. Boozman is aiming to mark up his bill between the chamber’s Fourth of July and August recesses.
Donald Trump is about to come face to face with one of his frequent punching bags: Senate Republicans.
They might just be in a mood to punch back.
The president was invited to GOP senators’ Wednesday lunch to push for his No. 1 priority, the GOP election bill known as the SAVE America Act. But several outgoing Republicans who have clashed with Trump said Monday they will be there to deliver a reality check: The bill isn’t passing, and it’s time to move on.
“I’m going to be there front and center,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters. “It will be important if it actually is a constructive exchange of different opinions, and hopefully we can all get on the same page. Right now, we’re not in a great place.”
Cornyn, who recently lost his bid for a fifth term to a Trump-endorsed challenger, reiterated the votes just aren’t there to pass the elections bill: “I’ve been around here long enough and been through enough battles and counted enough votes to know that it doesn’t just magically occur, no matter how much you wish it would happen.”
Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) — who are also departing the Senate in part due to Trump — said Monday they, too, will be at the closed-door lunch and urged Trump to turn the page on the SAVE America Act.
“I’m a co-sponsor, but it doesn’t have the votes, and so it’s time to talk about something else,” said Cassidy, who also lost to a Trump-backed primary opponent.
Trump was invited to the Wednesday lunch by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who oversees the weekly gathering as GOP steering committee chair, at a tenuous moment. Senate Republicans have grown frustrated with Trump’s fixation on the elections bill, are openly questioning parts of his Iran deal and worry that his habit of blindsiding them with sudden policy U-turns is making it harder to preserve their majority in November.
Scott’s invitation comes as the elections bill has emerged as a perennial headache for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, whom Scott informed of the invite after it was extended. Thune and other members of the GOP conference insist it doesn’t have the votes to pass and have begged Trump to focus on more attainable priorities.
Same goes, they say, for other Trump demands — killing the 60-vote filibuster threshold for legislation, for instance, and ending the “blue slip” practice of giving home-state senators a say on some presidential nominees.
“None of those are going to happen here, and we need to be honest with the president,” Tillis said. “So why don’t we spend more time being productive about how we communicate, when we communicate, and get some of these very pressing issues done?”
But Trump has shown he will not relent, especially on the SAVE America Act — a bill that would impose new proof-of-citizenship and identification requirements for U.S. voters in its base form, with the president demanding still other controversial provisions added on top of that.
In a Truth Social post late last week, Trump name-checked Thune and urged the Senate to nix the filibuster and approve the bill: “Anybody who doesn’t want to Terminate the Filibuster is a FOOL, a very stupid one, at that!”
Several GOP senators, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have objected to the precedent the bill would set by nationalizing election procedures. Test votes on the bill have not garnered more than 48 supporters, though a narrower bill focused on voter ID won 50 votes. That’s still far short of the 60 votes needed to defeat a certain Democratic filibuster.
Asked late last week about Trump’s comments, Thune said a majority of Senate Republicans have long-held views against nixing the filibuster.
“It’s not a question of what I want to do or don’t want to do,” he said. “It does always come back to the math. And … there just aren’t the votes to do it.”
Thune said Monday that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the election bill comes up but predicted it would be a “back and forth” between Trump and GOP senators over multiple subjects, including the brewing Iran deal and the stalemate over a key surveillance law and future of the director of national intelligence post.
He added that “hopefully” the discussion would include “celebrating some of our successes, talking about the path forward.”
The GOP election bill has become a consistent friction point within the party and within the Senate GOP conference. Senate Republicans largely support the bill but believe the party needs to turn its focus to Democrats, rather than fighting each other, with just months to go until the midterms.
Republican senators have kvetched for months about how they believe Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is setting unrealistic expectations for the bill’s passage. Lee posted on X over the weekend that he spoke with Trump and “he’s as convinced as I am that we can get this done if the Senate’s willing to do the hard work.”
Cornyn called out Lee Monday, saying that he “is contributing to this fantasy that somehow it’s going to happen.”
Lee responded that the election bill isn’t a fantasy but “a plan to avoid a nightmare — one that’s coming soon unless we act.”
Senate Republicans agreed to take up the voting bill earlier this year, in part after leaders privately reassured wary GOP senators that the debate wouldn’t result in an attempt to skirt the 60-vote filibuster. But the weekslong debate failed to break the stalemate on the bill, and Senate Republicans ultimately placed it on the back burner as other legislative deadlines piled up.
Conservatives, however, hadn’t forgotten about the bill, and now they want the Senate to continue to vote on it.
Scott — who came in third in the leadership contest Thune won after the 2024 election— sent a letter to his fellow Senate Republicans Monday, a copy of which was obtained by Blue Light News, saying that he wanted to have “robust conversations” this week about what the party should be focused on before the midterms. That, he said, should include voting on the SAVE America Act or narrower voter ID legislation.
“We need to make a clear distinction as to who the good guys are and who the bad guys are,” Scott wrote in the letter. “We need to show voters that we are listening to them and will fight for their priorities whether any Democrats vote with us or not.”
The Senate on Monday overwhelmingly passed a long-awaited bipartisan housing bill, which is expected to set the legislation on a glide path to President Donald Trump’s desk for signature as soon as this week.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which passed 85-5 and contains almost 60 individual provisions, aims to tackle housing affordability and boost housing supply and homeownership. Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) voted “no.”
The legislation now moves on to the House, which could take up the bill for final passage as soon as Tuesday.
The legislation has become a pillar of Congress’ overall response to affordability concerns that have emerged as a key issue this midterm election year.
Despite broad, bipartisan support for the bill in both the House and Senate, the two chambers went back and forth on the legislation for months. Primary friction points developed over language establishing new restrictions on large Wall Street investors purchasing single-family homes, a ban on the Federal Reserve issuing a digital currency and a slate of community banking deregulation initiatives, among other measures.
The bill was able to move forward last week after the four lawmakers leading the legislation — Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and ranking member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and House Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) and ranking member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) — came to an agreement. The White House also announced support for the final version of the bill, which contains Trump’s top priority of limiting Wall Street’s footprint in the housing market.
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