Controversial radio titan was diehard Trump supporter
Talk show host among most influential in U.S. airwaves
Rush Limbaugh, the talk titan who made right-wing radio financially viable in American media and himself a Republican kingmaker years before Fox News, died Wednesday, after he revealed in 2020 that his lung cancer was terminal. He was 70.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Kathryn, at the beginning of Limbaugh’s Thursday radio show, from which he’s been absent for almost two weeks.
A longtime cigar smoker who stocked the humidors in his homes and studios with the finest, Limbaugh succumbed to cancer after battling drug addiction and loss of hearing earlier in his career (he was deaf by the end and broadcast his daily show in spite of it).
A Republican conservative and diehard supporter of former president Donald Trump to the end, Limbaugh was among Trump’s most important enablers of his failed effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election with baseless claims of voting fraud.
At one point in December, Limbaugh declared he thought the country was “trending toward secession,” then had to walk the comment back the next day. He wasn’t advocating another civil war, he was only repeating what he had heard being said, he told listeners.
After a mob of pro-Trump extremists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, provoking outraged sputtering from Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives alike, Limbaugh stood out in dismissing the controversy.
“We’re supposed to be horrified by the protesters,” Limbaugh scoffed on his program on Jan. 7. “There’s a lot of people out there calling for the end of violence ... lot of conservatives, social media, who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable regardless of the circumstances ... I am glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual tea party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord, didn’t feel that way.”
Love him or loathe him, few would deny that Limbaugh was one of the most influential commercial broadcasters, if not the most influential, in American history, says Michael Harrison, founder and publisher of Talkers trade magazine, which covers talk-radio.
Harrison believes Limbaugh’s legacy — his impact on public policy, on the national culture and on GOP politicians from the presidency on down — remains unmatched.
“Rush Limbaugh actually made radio ... important and kept it influential as a public platform. All of us in the radio business owe a debt to Rush Limbaugh for making radio matter. You cannot avoid or ignore that truth,” he said.
Journalist Ze’ev Chafets, whose 2010 biography of Limbaugh (“Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One”) grew out of a New York Times Magazine cover story in 2008, says Limbaugh was one of the top two or three most important figures in Republican politics in the 1990s.
“The reason is his show was heard in every congressional district in the country, and certainly every state, by a huge number of Republicans who almost entirely made up his audience,” Chafets says. “He was able, at a granular level, to affect elections. The year Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House (1994), he gave Limbaugh an honorary membership in (the Republican caucus in) Congress because of his influence.”
“Coastal Americans” who didn’t listen to Limbaugh had no idea of his “gravitational pull” because they underestimated his talents and his smarts, at least initially, Chafets said.
Limbaugh’s show was the most listened-to talk radio broadcast in the United States, with an estimated cumulative weekly audience of 15.5 million listeners at his peak, according to Talkers’ tracking. “No one beats Rush in the political-news talk-radio format — he’s No. 1,” Harrison said.