Time Comes for Us All

A note on Lindsey Graham's unexpected passing.

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It’s been a little over 24 hours since we all woke up and learned that Lindsey Graham — not Mitch McConnell — had died overnight. And I keep turning that sentence over in my head because it says everything about where we are right now: a sitting United States senator died, and half the country’s first reaction was… wait, which one!?

That’s a surreal feeling. When someone who’s been a fixture in American politics for decades — whether you liked Graham or not, and mostly I didn’t — is just suddenly gone, it rattles something loose. So consider this my messy, raw reaction to a genuinely weird week in our politics.

Let me state a few things up front. I believe the reporting that Graham died of an aortic dissection. It tracks with his age and his lifestyle. The same thing nearly killed my grandfather. But I want to be equally clear about this: I am not judging anyone who’s questioning the official story. Not after the way they’ve handled McConnell. Not after Epstein. Not after everything else. When you lie mercilessly about everything, all the time, you don’t get to act shocked when people stop believing you — you invited this. At this point, questioning your government isn’t paranoia. It’s basically your patriotic duty because your government, it seems, is lying to you about freaking everything.

But here’s the thing: Graham’s death didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in week four of the Mitch McConnell disappearance — and yes, I’m calling it a disappearance because that’s what it is. We haven’t seen the man in a month. They released a photo yesterday that created more questions than it answered. We’ve had the obviously fake phone calls. The alleged remodel at the house. His wife not flying home after he went into cardiac arrest and was found lying lifeless on the ground. None of it adds up, and everyone can see that none of it adds up, and nobody with any power seems interested in making it add up. Although I appreciated Governor Beshear saying over the weekend that he intends to appoint a Democrat to replace McConnell, defying the state legislature.

And look — I don’t know exactly what’s going on with Mitch McConnell. Maybe it’s all innocent, and he’ll be up and back to work soon. I doubt it. But I know what it looks like, and I know that we shouldn’t have to squint at hostage-style photos of an 84-year-old Senate leader, trying to figure out if he’s alive.

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Here’s the number that should make everyone furious: the average member of Congress is 68 years old. The average American is 38. We are being governed by people who are, on average, 30 years older than the country they represent. And that gap isn’t an abstraction — it produces exactly the outcomes you’d expect. It produces Dianne Feinstein dying in office. It produces Chuck Grassley running for reelection into his 90s. It produces members of Congress who literally vanish for weeks and months at a time — one of whom, we later learned, had been moved into an assisted living facility for dementia. Another disappeared for four months because he was depressed.

And let me be clear about that last one because I don’t want to be misread: depression is real. I’ve dealt with it myself. It’s brutal. And my problem is not that he got the care he needed — he should have gotten that care. Everyone should. That’s actually the whole point.

Because this same guy voted to cut mental health funding in the Republican budget. His party has spent years trying to gut Medicare and Medicaid — the programs that would let ordinary Americans get the exact kind of help he quietly gave himself. And here’s the part that really gets me: he apparently wasn’t too depressed to keep insider trading. Too sick to show up for work, but well enough to abuse his office to make money for himself.

That’s the two-tiered system in practice. If you’re a powerful member of Congress, if you know the right person, if you put enough money in somebody’s back pocket, you get treated entirely differently in this country. You get four months off and a soft landing. Meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck with gravity. When I was going through my own stuff, I still had to show up to work every day because if I hadn’t, there would have been consequences — for my clients, my business, my family. Regular people who get sick and run out of sick days lose their jobs. That’s it. That’s the deal for everyone who isn’t them. And I just think that’s fucked up.

There are no consequences for these people. None. They can disappear. They can lie about it. They can cover it up. They can cheat, they can steal, they can trade stocks based on information you and I will never see, and nothing happens. Donald Trump is the ultimate personification of this — the living proof that if you’re powerful enough in this country, accountability is optional. But he didn’t invent the rot. He’s just the loudest symptom of it.

The strange thing about living through something that fundamentally changes you—whether it’s depression, serious illness, or coming face-to-face with your own mortality—is that an old version of you has to disappear before a better one has the chance to exist. I know that was true for me. You come out the other side realizing how temporary everything is, how fragile we all are, and how much more important helping and healing each other is than winning the next political argument. Maybe that’s the bigger story this week. Nothing lasts forever—not people, not power, not political movements—and that’s not always something to fear.

Sometimes the things that are no longer serving us have to come to an end before something healthier can take their place. I think that’s true for people just as much as it’s true for countries. As this generation of Congress gives way to the next, I don't think we're just watching individual lives change. I think we're watching an entire political era reach the end of its natural life.

Generational change is coming to America whether anyone in Washington wants it or not. Time comes for us all. Time is coming for Donald Trump. Time is coming for Bibi Netanyahu. Time came for Lindsey Graham this week, and it appears to be trying — and so far failing — to come for Mitch McConnell. You cannot fundraise your way out of it. You cannot gerrymander it. You cannot release a carefully cropped photo and make it go away.

I won’t pretend I know that what comes next will be better. History doesn’t owe us an upgrade. But I know this era of American politics — the gerontocracy, the consequence-free ruling class, the pretending this is all okay — is coming to a close. And it’s not ending with dignity. It’s ending like a long, slow, embarrassing, wet fart.

But it is ending. And that means we have a real opportunity — maybe the biggest one in a generation — to reset the course of this country in the next presidential election. A new version of the Democratic Party. A new version of the Republican Party. New people, new fights, new stakes. That’s the work in front of us, and it’s work worth doing.

So that’s my takeaway on Lindsey Graham. I’m not going to lionize him. I’m not going to mourn him, either. He was a man who worked relentlessly for things I spent my career fighting against, and now he’s gone, and the era he belonged to is going with him.

Time comes for us all. The only question is what we build before it gets here.