Senator Lindsey Graham, perhaps unmoored after the death of his close friend John McCain, has spiraled ever more tightly into the emetic orbit of President Donald Trump, a man he once described as a “race-baiting, xenophobic bigot,” but now defends with the sort of ardent passion he previously reserved for America’s forever wars in the Middle East. While both he and McCain began the Trump presidency as sworn protectors of the conservative flame, Graham seemed to recognize the political advantages of sycophancy—or, at the very least, that there were few benefits to sanctimony. While one of McCain’s last acts in the Senate was to cast a decisive vote against the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare, Graham was solidifying his friendship with Trump on the links. “How bad did he beat me? I did better in the presidential race than today on the golf course!” Graham tweeted in October 2017. “Great fun. Great host.” With the exception of Graham’s implacably neocon views on keeping U.S. troops in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, his Twitter account has become largely indistinguishable from any other Trump supplicant—prompting many in Washington to ask, what the hell happened to Lindsey Graham?

Graham offers an explanation of sorts in a weirdly candid interview with swamp chronicler Mark Leibovich for The New York Times Magazine. For one, Graham says he has a duty to his constituents to advance Republican policy, and Donald Trump is a Republican president. More important, Graham argues, his close friendship with Trump has allowed him to influence the president on such topics as Syria (where Trump has agitated to remove all U.S. troops) and Venezuela. “From my point of view,” Graham tells Leibovich, “if you know anything about me, it’d be odd not to do this.” Asked what “this” refers to, Graham responds bluntly: “try to be relevant.”

This isn’t such a strange notion, and it’s certainly something that plenty of Republicans have grappled with in the Trump era. During the Republican primary, the majority of the Washington Establishment rejected Trump and Trumpism. (Rick Perry, who now serves as Trump’s secretary of Energy, previously described Trump as a “cancer on conservatism.” Mick Mulvaney, who is now White House acting chief of staff, called Trump “a terrible human being.”) Since the election, however, the majority of Republican lawmakers have come around to the position that they can get more done working with Trump than against him. Many of them like him, on a personal level. Those who didn’t drink the Kool-Aid, like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, have since retired.

Graham commits some light historical revisionism, however, when he justifies his own transformation by suggesting that McCain—who spent his twilight days assailing Trump’s presidency—would have approved:

Graham told me that McCain understood his willingness to make peace with Trump, though the extent of Graham’s ingratiation bothered him a bit—especially Graham’s over-the-top praise for Trump’s golfing abilities.