Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly last night, was a pivotal citizen of the Washington conversation. He loved being in the mix, slapping bipartisan backs off camera, and then, when the lights came on, cracking wise, weighing in, and, yes, currying favor with a certain Audience of One.

What could be more fitting, then, for Graham—unable to be a participant on this fateful Sunday morning—to actually become the only thing better: the main topic of the news. He died as he lived.

Graham was a complex character—his private life, sudden death, public morality, the whole messy peach of him. Put that aside, though. Or I will (happily), because that will all be covered and uncovered and debated. Already has been.

It is perfectly on the nose that Graham’s departure would occur just a few hours before he was supposed to appear on Meet the Press. It would have been his 64th appearance on America’s longest-running public-affairs program. In the Meet the Press greenroom there used to be a prominent photo of Graham yapping away alongside his Senate sidekick, John McCain. McCain, for his part, appeared 73 times on Meet the Press, more than any other guest in history—something McCain was especially proud of.

In early 2019, a few months after McCain died, Graham joked to me that his main goal in his remaining time on God’s green Earth (or God’s greenroom) was to beat McCain’s record. He never will.

Among active players, Graham was the ultimate “Sabbath gasbag”—the term the writer Calvin Trillin coined to describe the revolving cast of pundits and moralizers who haunted the Meet the Presses, This Weeks, and Face the Nations of our (or our parents’) pixelated lives.

Granted, Trillin came up with that coinage when a lot more people watched these Sunday interviews and roundtables. They used to be a lot more relevant, to deploy what was perhaps Graham’s favorite word in the horde—and pretty much his overriding mission as a United States senator.

“Try to be relevant,” Graham told me in that same 2019 conversation when I asked how he  became such a relentless and essential lapdog to Trump (okay, I didn’t use quite those words). This was an ongoing mystery around Washington, especially given how critical of Trump Graham had been when he (briefly) ran for president against him in 2016.

In Graham’s worldview, “legacy media” remained extremely relevant. This old-timey, perhaps musty conviction served him well in recent years, because Trump, Graham’s lodestar, was the ultimate consumer of “the shows,” as he calls them. No one understood better than Graham that Sunday-morning television could be a fruitful place to “manage the relationship” with the White House.

“Lindsey was really good at this game,” one senior White House official told me during Trump’s first term.

When I asked Graham about his keys to manipulating Trump, he was remarkably transparent about some of his go-to formulas. I was struck by how, in Graham’s telling, Trump was a big, fat mark.

“If you flatter him all the time, he’ll lose respect for you,” Graham told me of the president. If he had a goal of getting Trump to do something, especially if it involved foreign affairs, Graham would just tell the president that his then-predecessor, Barack Obama, would do something that was 180 degrees different.

This method “can be very effective,” Graham told me. “Obama drives him nuts.”

Graham was always a first-class political shape-shifter, easily darting between the smarty-pants of Official Washington and the bare-knuckled MAGA Populists of South Carolina.  This dynamic extended to the on- and off-camera Lindseys: One minute, he would be chumming it up with a Democratic colleague before their “hit,” and then, when the lights came on, he would be breathing partisan fire on behalf of the White House or Trump’s supporters back home.

Graham grew up in the rural town of Central, South Carolina, where his parents ran a divey saloon called the Sanitary Café. It was frequented by small-town eccentrics, good old boys, and other raucous characters. Nicknamed “Stinkball” around the bar, little Lindsey was always the kid-mascot type, tagging along with his father. That became a lasting part of his persona. Graham always sought out powerful, larger-the-life figures to tie himself to: “alpha dogs,” he called them. They would serve as both his protectors and tickets to relevance. They included the likes of his father, McCain, and, in his last public chapter, Donald Trump.

No doubt Graham would have been thrilled that the president took it upon himself to be one of the first to announce his passing. Graham was “one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at 3:21 a.m.

Later in the morning, Trump would go one to call Graham “a great politician, actually.”

Even better, actually, was where Trump said this: Meet the Press