Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, offered a markedly different kind of tribute to Senator Lindsey Graham on Sunday, deliberately setting aside the senator’s more recent political identity as a Trump ally in favor of an earlier chapter of his career. Graham, 71, died Saturday night, July 11, after a “brief and sudden illness,” according to a statement from his Senate office released early Sunday morning. Tributes poured in throughout the day from across the political spectrum, but Hunter Biden’s, posted to X at 8:01 a.m., stood out for its candor about the complicated nature of Graham’s legacy.
“When I heard about Senator Graham’s death last night, the first thing I thought about was not all the things he said and did in service of Donald Trump,” Biden wrote. “I thought of the time before Donald Trump when he was a brother to Senator John McCain.” The reference was to Graham’s decades-long friendship with the late Arizona senator, a bond widely regarded as one of the defining personal relationships of Graham’s career and one that shaped much of his early reputation as a foreign policy hawk willing to break with his own party.
Biden used that memory to draw a broader point about the state of Washington before Graham’s political realignment around Trump. “A time when senators from different parties could fight about politics and still be friends,” he wrote. “A time when a conservative Republican from South Carolina could say of my father: ‘If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.'”
That quotation, attributed by Hunter Biden to Graham, reflects a period of the senator’s career when his relationship with Joe Biden — then a fellow senator and later vice president — was frequently cited as an example of cross-party friendship in an increasingly polarized Congress. Graham and the elder Biden served together in the Senate for more than two decades before Biden left to become vice president in 2009, and Graham spoke publicly on multiple occasions over the years about their personal rapport, even as the two disagreed sharply on policy.
“That is the Senator Graham I will remember today,” Hunter Biden wrote. “Not because I have forgotten what came after.” The line acknowledged, without elaborating in detail, the years following 2016 during which Graham became one of the most prominent Republican defenders of Donald Trump — a transformation that drew criticism from Democrats and some Republicans alike, given Graham’s earlier, sharply critical remarks about Trump during the 2016 presidential primary, when Graham had briefly run for the GOP nomination himself.
Rather than dwelling on that later period, Biden framed his tribute around what he described as hope for a different kind of political culture. “Because in that memory there is hope,” he wrote. “Hope for a country where brothers can fight like hell over policy and still share a meal, and a laugh, and the loss of the people they love.”
Biden closed his post with a statement that doubled as both a tribute and a piece of political commentary. “I will choose to remember the time before Trump,” he wrote. “Because I believe in an America after Trump.” The line positioned Graham’s death within Biden’s own broader public commentary about American politics, using the senator’s passing as an occasion to look both backward, at an earlier era of bipartisan Senate relationships, and forward, toward what Biden described as a hoped-for political future.
Hunter Biden’s tribute arrived alongside a wave of statements from other current and former officials on Sunday, including from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and several sitting U.S. senators from both parties. Unlike many of those statements, which focused primarily on Graham’s recent legislative work or his alliance with President Trump, Biden’s message drew almost exclusively on an earlier period of Graham’s Senate career, before his 2017 rapprochement with Trump reshaped his public image.
Graham’s friendship with the McCain family remained a touchstone of his political identity for years after McCain’s death in 2018, and Graham frequently cited that relationship, along with his earlier ties to Democrats including Joe Biden, as evidence of his commitment to bipartisan cooperation — even as his voting record and public alliances shifted markedly rightward and toward Trump over the following years.
Graham’s office confirmed Sunday morning that the senator had died from a sudden illness and asked for privacy for his family, including his sister Darline, “during this incredibly difficult period.” Funeral arrangements had not been announced as of Sunday afternoon. Additional background on Graham and Joe Biden’s Senate-era relationship, as referenced in Hunter Biden’s tribute, can be found in contemporaneous coverage of their decades of overlapping service in the chamber.