Mourn him if you wish, but let’s be honest about what he promoted. The longer this thinking lives on, the more peril we will all face

The sudden death over the weekend of the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham is predictably inspiring a slew of tributes to the four-term Republican senator. Donald Trump has already ordered flags be flown at half-staff until Saturday, and Republican politicians across the country are fondly recalling Graham. But so too are the Democrats. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois honored Graham, calling him “a fierce Republican partisan one day and a key bipartisan ally the next”. Senator Adam Schiff of California lauded Graham’s “sense of humor and how he deployed it to move his policy positions forward”.

Through this thick, bipartisan forest of remembrances, however, lies Graham’s concrete legacy. Death has a way of extinguishing uncomfortable truths, but it’s important that we don’t forget who Graham was, what he exactly stood for, and what damage he has done over his political career.

In dueling speeches this weekend, the New York mayor faced a ‘nation of contradictions’ while the president offered a stump speech

If Donald Trump’s address on 3 July from Mount Rushmore will be remembered at all, it will be because that was the day of competing speeches, and competing visions, of the United States. Earlier on 3 July, the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, delivered a speech that was about half as long as Trump’s 28-minute address, but one that offered a far different assessment of the challenges facing his city and our nation.

“We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions,” Mamdani said, while seated at George Washington’s desk and flanked by newly naturalized American citizens. “We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world – one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more.”

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York