Lindsey Graham is the little war devil on Trump's shoulder

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Lindsey Graham is the little war devil on Trump’s shoulder
The South Carolina senator and noted war hawk pushed Trump on Iran. Now he says "Cuba is next."

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published March 10, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove” brilliantly parodied the lunacy of the nuclear threat during the Cold War. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” says Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Air Force Col. Buck Turgidson, one of the film’s most memorable characters, while agitating the president in the war room for a first strike against the Soviet Union. “But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks.”

Unbelievable as it sounds, Turgidson was based on a real-life war hawk. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay advocated immediate airstrikes and a full-scale invasion to destroy the Soviet nuclear missiles. Even after President John F. Kennedy’s naval blockade proved successful, possibly preventing a nuclear war between the superpowers, LeMay called it “the worst defeat in our history.”

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Lindsey Graham is the contemporary embodiment of this philosophy. As the quintessential Trump suck-up who sees the president as an opportunity to advance his own personal agenda, he knows all too well — like so many other establishment Republicans — that Trump is barely hanging on to sanity at this point, and that he should never be allowed to wield such massive power. But Graham is the Senate’s version of LeMay — a hawk who wants to see the United States use its mighty military to settle scores and punish any and all who have been a thorn in its side. And he has learned how to persuade Trump to be his instrument in that cause.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Graham has been the most relentless and the most successful of all the hawks pushing for Trump to attack Iran. He finds ways to get next to the president on the golf course and at his resorts to lobby for major military incursions, and he’s also been traveling overseas to tutor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on how best to speak to Trump to get him to agree. Obviously, Trump listened. ......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/03/10/lindsey-graham-is-the-little-war-devil-on-trumps-shoulder/