Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and DC's oldest addiction | Opinion

Having lived in Washington, DC, for more than two decades, I've come to believe that what runs this city isn't power or even influence, but rather the fear of losing both: an existential dread of becoming irrelevant. That dread is what makes people do genuinely sad things: Betray principles they once held – or thought they held – and stay in a job years after they should have let it go.

Take Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, who died suddenly on July 11 at 71. Graham spent the early days of the Trump era as one of his sharpest critics, calling him a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" who should "go to hell." After Jan. 6, 2021, he told reporters he was done with President Donald Trump: "Trump and I, we've had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way. ... All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough."

But enough was not enough. Within months, Graham was defending Trump on television and voting to acquit him after the Capitol riot. He later helped run Trump's second-term agenda. It was the same pattern he'd essentially explained years earlier, when The New York Times Magazine's Mark Leibovich asked him in 2019 how he'd become one of Trump's most reliable defenders.

His answer: " 'This' is to try to be relevant."

The fear of irrelevance doesn't only make people betray their principles. Sometimes it makes them refuse to admit their body is failing.

Mitch McConnell and when relevance becomes identity

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, broke a monthlong silence on July 12, revealing he'd fallen at home, been briefly unconscious and dealt with pneumonia.

The U.S. senator also explained the silence by writing, "Folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older."

McConnell, 84, is not even running for reelection. He's already announced this is his last term.

It would be easy to chalk that silence up to a desire for privacy or simple generational reserve. But relevance was never just about holding office. It's also about maintaining the appearance that you're still indispensable.

McConnell, the longest serving Senate party leader in U.S. history, spent four decades cultivating an identity built on mastery of the Senate and institutional power that outlasted half a dozen presidents. Admitting publicly that he is diminished threatens that identity even now, when there's no election left to lose.

He's not alone. Former Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, faced calls to resign as her memory and mental fitness visibly declined. The longest-serving female senator in U.S. history resisted those calls for years. She died in office in 2023 at 90, having agreed only weeks earlier to retire at the end of her term.

And there was former President Joe Biden, whose staff spent years managing what the public was allowed to see. Staff protect ailing politicians because their own jobs depend on it.

Political power obscures reality

Power is addictive. Most of us have never walked into a room and felt it go quiet, all eyes turning to us, just because we walked in. For politicians, that's just Tuesday – and it's very hard to give up.

David Owen, a physician who became British foreign secretary, coined the term "hubris syndrome" for what sustained power does to judgment: It inflates confidence and breeds contempt for others. It can also dull one's grip on reality.

There's a second term for what happens after power is gone: "relevance deprivation syndrome," attributed to former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. It's what happens when people who've spent a career being needed suddenly aren't. The calls stop. The reporters start chasing someone else.

For most retirees, that's an adjustment. For a Senate majority leader of 18 years, it's a kind of amputation.

None of this is really about age. The problem is narrower: What happens to a person's sense of self after decades of being told, constantly, that they matter more than almost anyone else in the country? Walking away from that willingly requires something Washington rarely rewards: the ability to imagine a meaningful life after power. By the time colleagues conclude someone should leave, the damage to the institution, the party or the person's own legacy may already be done.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was urged by friends to retire while President Barack Obama could still name her successor. She refused, betting she could outlast the Obama presidency and retire under another Democratic president. She couldn't.

Ginsburg's refusal helped decide the ideological balance of the Supreme Court for a generation, tilting it against much of what she'd spent three decades on the bench trying to build. That's the cost of believing she could choose the moment of her own departure.

McConnell's absence, meanwhile, has stalled an appropriations process moving through a razor-thin majority.

There's a certain political skill in what Graham and McConnell accomplished. Both survived transformations of the Republican Party that ended the careers of many of their contemporaries, adapting themselves to constituencies and movements they once regarded with suspicion.

But it came at a cost, and Graham's might have been the steepest: Whatever he actually believed about Trump in 2015, he spent his last decade making sure nobody could be certain anymore – including, maybe, himself.

The tragedy isn't that politicians like Graham and McConnell grow old, or even that they're afraid. It's that they built an entire self around a job that was always going to end, and never built anything to stand on once it did.

Daniel Allott, USA TODAY's conservative opinion editor, is the author of the book "On the Road in Trump's America."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and DC's oldest addiction | Opinion

Reporting by Daniel Allott, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published July 14, 2026 at 7:57 AM.