Rush Limbaugh, conservative radio titan, has died of lung cancer at age 70

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 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 die-hard 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.