Turns out Lindsey is a bachelor. Always has been.

[Mike 03]

10. I don't mind this being a talking point if it bothers Lindsey Graham, but...

He's not that hard to understand. If you read Bob Woodward's book, Fear, he presents this relationship as fulfilling an inner need Graham has always had to have the attention of and validation from a more charismatic, more powerful politician. He loves being the guy that Trump calls in the middle of the night in the middle of an anxiety attack. He loves pontificating and actually having someone take him seriously, and he loves giving advice to Trump on what to do with our troops and sharing his grand vision of foreign relations (probably a lot of which he borrowed from John McCain, who fulfilled the mentor role before Trump did).

Someone also explained Lindsey Graham as being like a pilot fish that attaches itself to a whale for the safety and shelter it provides. That's a good analogy too. Graham is amoral, so he can shift allegiances easily. He loves the attention and adoration of the most powerful man in the world. It's just another peak experience for Graham.

He really is that person.

Ann Applebaum nails it in her mandatory-reading essay History Will Judge the Complicit
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/

For those who have never experienced it, the mystical pull of that connection to power, that feeling of being an insider, is difficult to explain. Nevertheless, it is real, and strong enough to affect even the highest-ranking, best-known, most influential people in America. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, named his still-unpublished book The Room Where It Happened, because, of course, that’s where he has always wanted to be. A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington told me that each time they meet, “he brags about having just met with Trump” while exhibiting “high school” levels of excitement, as if “a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader—the powerful big kid likes me!?” That kind of intense pleasure is hard to relinquish and even harder to live without.

Lindsay Graham is, for want of a better term, a Groupie.