For three years, a documentary crew followed Lindsey Graham everywhere, right down to the morning American bombs started falling on Iran.
“I talked to Trump this morning; he’s jacked. He said, ‘Best thing I’ve ever done.’ He loves blowing stuff up,” Graham told filmmaker Alex Holder’s team in February, according to footage reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. As Trump appeared on television announcing the opening strikes, Graham watched and laughed, saying: “Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried. How long have we been pushing this?”
In a separate clip, he went further still, comparing Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, calling Trump “a great wartime president” and adding, “He hasn’t tweeted much at all. No drama.”
He also made a prediction that hasn’t aged well, given how the war has actually played out since.
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“In three to four weeks, we’re going to have them in a spot where they start losing control of some cities,” he said. “Get the Arabs more openly involved tomorrow, and then have almost irreversible momentum.” Five months later, that timeline isn’t close to holding up.
The footage also shows how far Graham was willing to push things behind the scenes, including plans to fly to Mar-a-Lago in March specifically to lobby for expanding the war into Lebanon against Hezbollah, a trip he scrapped only after Netanyahu personally warned him that widening the conflict further would be premature.
Lindsey Graham was absolutely thrilled when the U.S. started dropping bombs on the Islamic Republic of Iran. A documentary crew that had spent years following him captured those moments.
Laughing, Graham says: “Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried. How long have we been… pic.twitter.com/1GSOVsp8iC
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) July 27, 2026
Not everyone around Trump appreciated Graham’s involvement.
Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett got straight to it: “Lindsey hasn’t seen a fist fight he hasn’t wanted to turn into a bombing raid.” Several Bush-era Republicans reportedly grew irritated with Graham repeatedly showing up uninvited at Mar-a-Lago to make his case directly to the president.
The war itself has not followed the script Graham predicted back in February.
This week marks five months since it began, with at least 18 U.S. service members dead and more than 600 wounded. Oil prices have climbed as a result, pushing gas up roughly a dollar a gallon compared to a year ago, according to AAA. The Pentagon estimates the direct cost so far at a minimum of $37 billion, though analysts believe the actual figure runs higher, and Trump has repeatedly declared the war effectively over, only for the fighting to continue each time.
Graham died earlier this month at 71 from an aortic dissection. Holder, who spent more than 400 hours filming him over three years, said Graham signed off on the project so people could understand his career, describing what he’d built as something he liked to call “a game.” Holder is now assembling the rest of the footage into a full documentary titled “Lindsey’s Game,” expected in the coming months.
Featured image via X screengrab
