Russell Fry says Donald Trump’s endorsement moved away from him and toward Darline Graham Nordone because Lindsey Graham had an outsized hold on the president’s ear in the race to fill Graham’s seat in the 2026 U.S. Senate special election.
Fry, a Surfside Beach, S.C. attorney and second-term U.S. congressman, said he had early signs that he might be the pick before Trump reversed course. He said the change matters now because the race is already defining who Republicans in South Carolina will rally around in 2026, and Trump’s backing still carries unusual weight in the state.
“I’ve always, since the endorsement when I ran for congress, enjoyed a really good relationship with the president,” Fry said, pointing back to Trump’s support in his 2022 campaign against Tom Rice. He said that relationship never disappeared, even after Trump later preemptively endorsed Nordone. Fry also said impeachment was deeply personal to Trump, and argued that the more that comes out about it, the more vindicated Trump feels on those grounds.
That, in Fry’s telling, is where Graham changed the equation. He said Graham was talking to Trump every day, while his own contact was far less frequent. “If I talked to him, say, once a month or once every couple of weeks – Lindsey was talking to him every day,” Fry said. He said Graham’s operation had shifted from being a placeholder and temporary effort to a plan built around a full six-year term, which made the political logic of the endorsement harder to read from the outside.
Fry said he does not know what happened inside the White House or what was said in those conversations, and he was not part of any discussion about whether the White House expected him to step aside. He also said he was not upset by the personal force of the decision. “They were deeply close, they talked routinely – I’m not even upset by it. I get it. I think grief is kind of one of those weird things that affects everybody,” he said.
What makes Fry’s case more complicated is that he is still trying to sell himself as a younger option in a field that could narrow around stronger names. He said voters like that he is 41 years old, that there is a fresh conservative energy that can go toe-to-toe with somebody like Jasmine Crockett, and that there might be an opportunity that he is not just serving one term. Ralph Norman remains another top contender, and both Fry and Norman have been described as holding strong conservative voting records.
The political fight has also taken on a personal edge for Fry through the endorsement from Stephen Federico, whose daughter, Logan Hailey Federico, was murdered sixteen months ago. That support gives Fry another line of argument as he tries to recover ground after losing the Trump backing he once expected. Even so, the unanswered part is not whether Trump changed his mind, but what exactly in the White House conversations made him decide Graham’s circle had the stronger claim on his loyalty.
