The Ben Shapiro Show - July 29, 2026


How America Said Goodbye to Lindsey Graham


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

189.33

Word count

1,543

Sentence count

113


Transcript

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00:00:00.000 Well, a lot of DC turned out yesterday to mourn the late Senator Lindsey Graham.
00:00:03.000 A lot of people were incredibly respectful, spoke very highly of him, as he deserved.
00:00:07.000 And then there were some people who suggested that Lindsey Graham was the devil or some such nonsense, revealing their true cravenness in the process.
00:00:15.000 The thing Lindsey Graham knew better than anyone in American politics is the nature of America's enemies.
00:00:19.000 The Lindsey Graham funeral program did feature the Jerusalem Cross.
00:00:22.000 Now, we are told that the Jerusalem Cross was some sort of Nazi image because Pete Hegseth has a tattoo of it.
00:00:27.000 It, of course, does not.
00:00:29.000 Sort of all the luminaries showed up.
00:00:31.000 For it, Senator John Fetterman put on a suit for Graham's funeral, as you'd imagine.
00:00:35.000 Here he was walking in.
00:00:38.000 How is it to be in a suit for once?
00:00:43.000 I mean, normal, you know, what do you think?
00:00:46.000 I think it looks good.
00:00:47.000 I like you in the hoodie, though.
00:00:50.000 Yeah, well, I mean, now I see people now are wearing shorts now with suits, too.
00:00:55.000 So maybe that's enough to really bring me over to the side full time.
00:01:00.000 Okay, meanwhile, President Trump spoke at the funeral.
00:01:04.000 And he talks about running against Lindsey Graham in 2016 and then how they became friendly.
00:01:09.000 As you remember, Lindsey and I did not exactly get off to the best of starts, running against each other.
00:01:18.000 Back in 2016, Lindsey said something rather nasty on his flight to becoming the next president of the United States.
00:01:28.000 So naturally, I did something that I shouldn't have done.
00:01:31.000 I shared his personal cell phone number.
00:01:34.000 With the millions of people that happened to be watching that particular day as I made a speech, a very important speech.
00:01:40.000 And I remember the number 202-228-0292, if anybody wants to give it a shot.
00:01:48.000 His phone exploded.
00:01:50.000 He said, I had that number for 20 years.
00:01:52.000 His phone totally, I don't know what he did with it, but it exploded.
00:01:56.000 That was the beginning of a friendship in a way.
00:01:59.000 But it was Lindsay who had the last laugh because while I blew up his phone, All for one day.
00:02:07.000 We became great friends, and Lindsay did not stop calling me for the next 10 years.
00:02:11.000 It was not easy.
00:02:15.000 Yeah, the president, honestly, his eulogy for Graham was one of his better moments.
00:02:18.000 I thought that the president was obviously very warm towards Senator Graham.
00:02:21.000 Here he was talking about Graham.
00:02:23.000 It was very funny because obviously somebody else worked on his speech, and he would kind of ad lib in the middle.
00:02:30.000 But no matter how heated things got in Washington, virtually everyone, Republican or Democrat, liked Graham.
00:02:38.000 Lindsey, well, not everybody, but it sounds good.
00:02:41.000 Not everybody.
00:02:43.000 He was a tough cookie, okay?
00:02:44.000 I have to be, I have to veer from this for a second.
00:02:47.000 He was a tough cookie, darling, but he was beautiful.
00:02:53.000 Well, he obviously had a lot of warmth for Lindsey Graham, the president.
00:02:57.000 Sean Hannity, who was also close friends with Lindsey Graham for years, he made a great point.
00:03:01.000 So there are a lot of people who have tried to characterize Graham as, you know, he loved war.
00:03:04.000 He just loved war.
00:03:05.000 Even the president made a joke along these lines.
00:03:08.000 Okay, nobody loves war.
00:03:09.000 Unless you're a complete sicko, you don't love war.
00:03:13.000 Lindsey Graham believed in a muscular American presence in the world and believed, in some ways that I disagreed with, in America's ability to shape conflict to its advantage.
00:03:21.000 I disagreed sometimes on the manifestation of that.
00:03:23.000 But Sean Hannity is right.
00:03:24.000 Lindsey Graham wanted peace, he wanted lasting peace, and he understood that confronting America's enemies was very often the only way to achieve peace.
00:03:34.000 Lindsey, he was often unfairly characterized as a warmonger.
00:03:39.000 I've heard that false criticism a lot.
00:03:42.000 It's not true.
00:03:44.000 The truth was the opposite.
00:03:46.000 Lindsay desperately wanted and talked to the president about a lasting peace in the Middle East.
00:03:53.000 He wanted every region, every country in the region, on that path to peace.
00:03:58.000 That was Lindsey's dream.
00:04:00.000 If people would only listen to what he had been saying.
00:04:05.000 Members of the left decided that now is a great time because when is it not a good time to rip into Lindsey Graham?
00:04:12.000 Stephanie Rule over at MSNBC, MS Now, she kind of implied that Graham may be in hell, presumably for his support of President Trump.
00:04:22.000 Yeah, I'm guessing he and John McCain are having very complicated conversations right now.
00:04:26.000 Absolutely.
00:04:27.000 If they are in the same situation.
00:04:28.000 Yeah, it's unclear.
00:04:31.000 If they are in the same place, tiresome.
00:04:35.000 Chank Weger, who hated Lindsey Graham nearly as much as he hates America, he put out a tweet Here's my eulogy to Lindsey Graham.
00:04:42.000 You were a murderous pig.
00:04:43.000 Even among the warmongers in DC, you stood out for the glee you took in the deaths of so many you orchestrated.
00:04:47.000 You'll be missed by no one outside of Israel and defense contractors.
00:04:50.000 I hope Israel releases the tapes anyway.
00:04:51.000 Of course, his idea is that Israel must have had tapes blackmailing Lindsey Graham.
00:04:55.000 Just a vile human being.
00:04:56.000 Truly a vile person.
00:04:58.000 The United States Senate is going to vote.
00:05:01.000 On a Russia sanctions bill in tribute to Graham.
00:05:04.000 It is well deserved.
00:05:05.000 The president did meet with Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, yesterday.
00:05:10.000 Apparently, it went very well.
00:05:11.000 He also met with the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:05:13.000 Apparently, that went well as well.
00:05:14.000 The president, you know, the reality is that the thing Lindsey Graham understood better than pretty much anyone in American politics is the nature of our enemies.
00:05:22.000 Lindsey Graham understood that Russia is America's enemy.
00:05:24.000 Lindsey Graham understood that Iran, which, by the way, fired missiles at America's bases in Jordan last night, that Iran is our enemy.
00:05:32.000 And that it turns out you might not be able to have nice talks with our enemies.
00:05:35.000 That result in things.
00:05:37.000 You might need to actually try to box them in and fight them economically, diplomatically, as a last resort, militarily.
00:05:46.000 That was the good thing about Lindsey Graham.
00:05:47.000 And if Republicans forget it, along with the Democrats, this country is in serious, serious trouble.
00:05:52.000 Now, again, the sort of slander against Lindsey Graham for years on end was Lindsey loves every single war.
00:05:57.000 He loves every single war all the time.
00:05:59.000 Okay, Lindsey Graham was an interventionist.
00:06:02.000 That did not mean that Lindsey Graham loved every single war under all circumstances.
00:06:07.000 Lindsey Graham was an advocate of the American use of force.
00:06:10.000 He was an advocate for American military buildup.
00:06:11.000 And by the way, I got to say that the stuff Lindsey Graham said about the Defense Department, how we need to strengthen it, how we need to have a better arsenal of democracy, supply lines, all that stuff was true.
00:06:23.000 One of the weird divides in our politics that has emerged on the right, particularly, is this divide between people who would like for the Defense Department to work as expected and are hawkish and people who are sort of isolationist y and then claim that they want the Defense Department to work, but they don't really care about it.
00:06:39.000 It should be that there's like a middle ground where you want the Defense Department to be incredibly well stocked.
00:06:43.000 You want all the interceptors and all the materiel available.
00:06:47.000 But also, you're not quite as interventionist as Lindsey Graham, but it seems to be that there is very little crossover.
00:06:53.000 And I assume that's just because people who think like Lindsey, again, they may not agree on the ramifications of the premise, but Lindsey Graham's premise that America was a power for good in the world and that therefore we ought to have overweening military architecture.
00:07:09.000 And of course, he was right about that.
00:07:11.000 And so I think that if his death is to be a reminder of anything, it shouldn't just be about Russian sanctions.
00:07:15.000 I think that in honor of Lindsey Graham, we should pass that NDAA, we should pass the National Defense Authorization Act.
00:07:22.000 We should radically revise our supply lines.
00:07:24.000 We need to radically increase our production of things like Patriots and Thads.
00:07:27.000 We need to really network with allies who are fighting on the front lines of civilization, like Ukraine, like Israel.
00:07:34.000 Because, again, those people have military tech that we're going to need.
00:07:38.000 We are finding out new things about how technology works on the battlefield every single day from the war in Ukraine.
00:07:44.000 We found that out in the war in Iran, the war in Gaza.
00:07:49.000 And Lindsey Graham knew that.
00:07:50.000 He understood it.
00:07:51.000 And, you know, it's a lesson that I think a lot of people would do well to heed, given the fact that our enemies seem to be flexing their muscle at this point in time.
00:08:00.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:08:02.000 Wasn't that amazing?
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