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.
Americans are divided on whether it’s acceptable to fall behind other countries in the race to develop advanced artificial intelligence. So is Congress.
A new POLITICO Poll finds that Americans broadly recognize serious risks from frontier AI models, but many — particularly President Donald Trump’s voters — also prioritize maintaining a lead over other countries, including China.
Even as 63% of the poll’s respondents said there’s a real possibility that AI could destroy humanity, they’re split on whether it’s acceptable to slow down and potentially fall behind in order to mitigate that risk.
A plurality, 43%, say it is acceptable for the U.S. to fall behind other countries if that means developing AI more responsibly and securely, while 37% take the opposite view, saying the U.S. should not stand down, even if that requires taking risks. Voters who backed Trump in 2024 favor the competition-first position by 50% to 38%.
That split is already playing out on Capitol Hill as AI safety zooms to the center of congressional conversations. With legislation only slowly taking shape, fear of international competition stands to be a major point of tension during any bipartisan negotiations — with most lawmakers’ views divided closely along party lines.
Many Republican lawmakers said in interviews this week that pausing AI development could give China an opening to overtake U.S. capabilities. Democrats are also looking over their shoulders at Chinese advances, but they are cautioning that competition is not a reason for Congress to avoid instituting AI guardrails.
“The AI race is not an arms race that you win,” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) said during Wednesday’s Blue Light News Decoded Summit. “It’s an arms race that we need to end, and we need to protect the American people.”
Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has teamed up with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in calling for a ban on “superintelligence” to stave off the existential threats to humanity — a concern that bubbled to the fore last week when a former Anthropic researcher warned AI could “kill us all.”
Senior Republicans are denigrating proposals like Casar’s, arguing that the U.S. cannot risk Chinese AI dominance. Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), chair of the powerful House committee overseeing the tech industry, said as much at the summit.
“We absolutely can’t surrender,” he said. “And I think that’s what it would be if we stopped AI development.”
Guthrie further argued AI legislation is too complex to rush and that the Energy and Commerce Committee he leads might not take up AI legislation before next year. That sentiment is in line with Speaker Mike Johnson, who said this week that the U.S. must “maintain our edge over China.” Meanwhile, Trump has called the AI panic a “HOAX” and said that federal regulations would allow China to leapfrog the U.S.
Some Republicans have been almost flippant about the dilemma policymakers face in reconciling a potentially dangerous technology with their fear of Chinese competition.
“If there are going to be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said in a recent POLITICO interview. Like Guthrie, Cruz chairs a committee overseeing tech matters.
Among the bipartisan group of lawmakers who have locked arms in warning about the Chinese threat on other fronts, the familiar partisan divide is still emerging on AI regulation.
“We can lead in innovation and lead in safety,” said Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.), who sits on the bipartisan Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. “So if Trump or anyone else comes at it that we can only do one but not the other, he’s not looking at the history of the United States of America.”
Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a moderate Republican China hawk, said he is “very reluctant to hinder AI” via regulation.
“They’re going to have to make the good case why we need it,” he said. “We don’t want to hinder our AI research. We can’t afford to fall behind China.”
Some, however, are being careful to strike a balanced tone as the AI safety conversation kicks into high gear.
Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House China panel, acknowledged lawmakers “do have a responsibility for public safety” while saying it was also important to “beat China when it comes to the AI race.”
“There’s economic benefits to that,” he said. “There’s national security issues, but we want to have common sense and a deliberative process.”
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), an Intelligence Committee member and a co-chair of House Democrats’ AI commission, said China is “not waiting for anyone else.”
“So you can’t just leave the race, but you need to make sure you do it in the right way,” he added.
Opinions are sharper when it comes to Trump’s upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping next week and whether he should even broach some type of cooperation on AI safety.
“I don’t trust him,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said when asked if Trump should engage with Xi on AI. “I trust Trump.”
But many Democrats say it’s a mistake to engage in an AI arms race, with some explicitly reaching for analogies with the nuclear arms race that ended in Cold War treaties with a former global rival — the Soviet Union — limiting bomb tests and missile deployments.
Rep. Ted Lieu of California, another co-chair of the Democratic AI commission, said Trump could start small by asking Xi to “commit that they’re never going to let AI launch a nuclear weapon by itself.”
“There are things that we can do to get other countries to follow the lead the U.S. has taken in AI,” he said.
House Democrats aren’t letting rogue members off the hook for bucking their party. They hope Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries won’t either.
“Obviously, there’s got to be” punishment for the two Democrats who twice this month bucked their party to advance a slate of Republican priorities, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said in an interview.
“Otherwise, then,” he said, “it’s open season.”
Democrats are watching closely how — and if — Jeffries doles out consequences for Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington who have twice provided the decisive votes for GOP procedural measures this month. Jeffries and his leadership team condemned the two members when they first defected two weeks ago, slamming a “breach of trust” warranting a “serious response” but have yet to inflict any public consequences.
On Tuesday, they defied leadership a second time, infuriating House Democrats and resurrecting questions about how leadership plans to keep its caucus in line — especially if they have a slim majority next term.
“We have to all be united, and I think it’s pretty simple,” said one House Democrat who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “If there’s not [a punishment], I find it hard to see a path forward in the majority, which we’re all pushing for.”
Asked if leadership should punish the two aisle-crossers, Rep. Troy Carter pointed to his time as minority leader of the Louisiana state Senate: “When I had members that did not work within the confines of the philosophical views of our party, I took them off our caucus.”
“I don’t want to second-guess anybody’s timing, but I will tell you that these things cannot allow to fester,” he added. “We have to have a strict message: Either you’re with the team on those fundamental issues of governance or you aren’t.”
Multiple members, including Carter, said that removing Gluesenkamp Perez from the Appropriations Committee should be considered. (While members are just as angry at Golden, they acknowledge he’s beyond punishment given he is retiring at the end of this term.)
“I suspect that there are a number of appropriate consequences that [leaders] could implement,” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) said in an interview. “And, ultimately, it’s their decision. I certainly don’t want that to be a caucus decision. That should be a leadership decision.”
One leader, Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, suggested she is open to removing Gluesenkamp Perez from Appropriations, telling reporters Wednesday morning that “team players get to sit on exclusive committees.”
After the first instance where the two Democrats defected on Sept. 1, Jeffries kicked the matter to a caucus rules panel, saying afterward he wanted to pursue action against the two members “sooner rather than later.” The panel continues to deliberate on what should happen if members vote with Republicans on procedural measures.
Jeffries said that week that he’d had a “productive” and “forward-looking” conversation with Gluesenkamp Perez, but he has said much less after Tuesday’s floor drama.
“I’ll have more to say about the issue when I have more to say about the issue,” he told Blue Light News shortly after the vote.
The House passed the sweeping Russia sanctions bill long championed by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham on Wednesday, sending the legislation to the White House for President Donald Trump’s signature after more than a year of congressional maneuvering.
The 262 to 159 vote ends a nearly two-year lull in Ukraine assistance from Congress, which had not passed any major Ukraine efforts since a 2024 emergency aid package. The bill faced a number of obstacles on the path to the Resolute Desk, including significant opposition from some House Democrats who argued that the bill would give the White House too much tariff power.
After weathering a number of storms to make it out of Capitol Hill, the legislation is all but guaranteed to get Trump’s signature.
The long-anticipated legislation issues mandatory sanctions on Russia’s leadership and energy sector — as well as new sanctions on collaborators in Moscow’s defense industry and its so-called shadow fleet. Advocates of the bill, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have argued it would give the White House necessary tools to squeeze Russia economically, curbing the flow of funds to Moscow’s war machine.
But, to many Democrats’ dismay, the legislation also includes a 100% tariff on top buyers of Russian energy. Opponents of the bill have cautioned that the tariff provision would hand another cudgel for Trump to use against not only U.S. foes but also global allies — an action the White House has repeatedly taken since Trump returned to office.
“We cannot grant more tariff power that we know he will abuse,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) said in comments on the House floor Wednesday.
Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argued that the tariffs would worsen the economic pain already felt by everyday Americans and that without a security assistance package or more air defense, they would not do enough to concretely help Ukraine.
In comments on the House floor earlier Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries outlined why he planned to withhold support for the measure.
“The manner in which this bill has been written doesn’t require the president of the United States to impose sanctions on Russia,” Jeffries said. “In fact, there are so many loopholes written into the bill, I believe, that it’s very unlikely that the sanctions relief contemplated in the legislation will ever see the light of day.”
That disagreement has caused a growing rift among Democrats in recent days. Fifty-eight House Democrats broke with Jeffries to vote yes on the measure.
In a letter addressed to House Democrats, Senate Foreign Relations ranking member Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) urged her colleagues to pass the legislation, warning that failing to do so would send a dangerous message to both Russian leader Vladimir Putin and other international foes.
“Congress’s failure to impose additional costs would send a dangerous signal,” Shaheen wrote. “The Kremlin is watching. Kyiv is watching. Our NATO allies are watching. So are Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang.”
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