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President Trump paid tribute to his “beloved friend” Lindsey Graham in a warm, funny eulogy that reprised their famous feud over his cell phone from a decade ago.
“He was a force of nature, and I will miss him greatly,” Trump said at Washington DC cathedral.
“As you remember, Lindsey and I did not exactly get off to the best of starts,” the president said in his eulogy.
The two men were rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2016 election, which Trump went on to win.
That primary election was heated and contentious. After Graham insulted him in a television interview, Trump retaliated by reading out Graham’s personal cell phone number at one of his rallies.
“Naturally, I did something that I shouldn’t have done. I shared his personal cell phone number with the millions of people that happened to be watching,” Trump said.
“I remember the number (202) 228-0292 if anybody wants to give it a shot,” he said as the audience at the National Cathedral roared in laughter.
Still, he said, it was Graham who had the “last laugh.”
“While I blew up his phone for one day, we became great friends, and Lindsey did not stop calling me for the next 10 years,” Trump said.
The two men built a strong friendship out of that first conflict. Graham was often at Trump’s side on weekends, joining him golfing at his Bedminster club in New Jersey or at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach.
“He was the first person to make you laugh and one of the last people that you’ve really ever wanted to fight,” Trump said of Graham, who died July 11, 2026, at the age of 71 of cardiovascular disease.
The president remembered Graham’s humor and refusal to rise before 10 am, causing laughter from the crowd when he described the late senator’s quips, including asking the Dali Lama if he could levitate.
“As many of you know, when Senator Tim Scott, a great gentleman in his own right, I can tell you invited him to prayer breakfast at 8:30 a.m., Lindsey told him, Tim, if Jesus himself comes back before 10 a.m., I ain’t going,” Trump remembered.
Graham ended up attending to show up for his friend, Scott said previously.
The president only strayed off script once, calling Graham a “tough cookie.”
“No matter how heated things got in Washington, virtually everyone, Republican or Democrat, liked Lindsey. Well, not everybody, but it sounds good. Not everybody. He was a tough cookie,” Trump said.
Much of his eulogy focused on Graham’s 23 years serving in the Senate.
Graham rose from a small town in rural South Carolina “to become a constant fixture of American politics at the highest level, and a force to be reckoned with all over the world,” Trump said.
“Nothing of consequence happened in this capital without Lindsey Graham knowing about it. Nothing of significance happened anywhere in the world without Lindsey Graham having a view on it, and no bill became law in the most exceptional republic in human history without Lindsey Graham having a say in it,” he added.
Trump used a variety of complimentary phrases to describe Graham, calling him a “force of nature” and a “great figure in Senate history” who “lived life to the fullest.”
“He was a man who gave America the full measure of his good and mighty heart until that heart itself just gave out,” Trump said.
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