Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham is taking all the credit for pushing President Trump to launch his unauthorized war with Iran.
Graham, who has long advocated for going to war with Iran, said he played a word-association game to get Trump, 79, on board with a full-scale war in the Middle East.
“I say Franklin Roosevelt, what do you say?” Graham told the Wall Street Journal, referencing Roosevelt’s famous “You have nothing to fear but fear itself” quote.
Graham noted that he worked for months to get Trump on board with the strikes.
Graham first brought up Iran to the president over a round of golf, just after Trump won the 2024 presidential election. He reminded Trump that he had blown up the Obama-era Iranian nuclear deal, and argued that it was now Trump’s moment to shine.
After Trump struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, which he had claimed had left them “totally obliterated,” Graham argued to the president that Iran would just continue to build weapons.
In recent weeks, to make the case to the president about going to war with Iran, Graham made several trips to Israel, meeting with members of the country’s intelligence community.
“They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” he confessed to the Journal.
Graham, 70, noted that he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and told him ways to convince Trump, who has dubbed himself the “Peace President,” to launch military action in Iran.
The South Carolina Senator also said he spoke with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman to get him on board ahead of Trump’s strikes.
“I went to MBS to say, ‘OK, I think this is going down,’ ” he admitted.
Graham also told the Journal that he worked with two other men to make his case: Jack Keane, a retired Army General turned Fox News contributor, and Marc Thiessen, a Bush speechwriter turned Washington Post columnist.
Both Thiessen and Keane wrote opinion pieces and did cable news hits to get Trump’s attention. Trump has posted Thiessen’s articles on his Truth Social platform, including one that argued Iranians could be the “boots on the ground.”
The three men took turns making their case to the president, and when they compared what they had heard, Graham said, “there were not a lot of other voices” making the case for military action like they were.
Graham’s tactics are receiving pushback from Trump’s coalition of the Republican Party that has raged against the “neocons” of the Bush years. One senior White House aide was so ticked by Graham’s pushiness that he called him an “annoying crazy uncle,” as Graham kept making appearances at Trump’s Mar-a-lago club.
“Lindsey hasn’t seen a fist fight he hasn’t wanted to turn into a bombing raid,” MAGA Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett said.
“What are they going to do to me?” Graham said of his critics.
He also said that he believed MAGA, which has been sold on Trump’s “no new wars” campaign promise, would eventually come around.
“What I don’t understand is why more people don’t do it,” Graham said. “Try to shape these events. This is a moment of world history here. Just jump in the deep end of the pool.”
Six U.S. military members have been killed in the war so far, and more than 1,300 Iranians have been killed.
Since he launched the war last weekend, Trump has repeatedly said Americans may die in his war. When asked earlier this week by Time Magazine if the country should be concerned about a potential strike in on the home front, Trump bleakly responded “I guess.”
