Linsdey Graham debased himself for power. And then he died.

Graham led a life in the closet, which everyone in Washington knew about, selling out queer people to Christian nationalists and licking Trump’s ass. It got him nothing.

Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly on Sunday morning, was a role model for gay men and all queer people.

Not a good role model, of course, but rather a textbook example of what making a deal with the devil more often than not gets you in the end.

He sold his wretched, closeted self, both to the GOP, which has for decades pushed horrendous anti-LGBTQ policies, and to Donald Trump, whom Graham slobbered over, after first predicting that the GOP “will get destroyed” by Trump.

That 2016 tweet, which lives on—he never deleted it—is the one and only true thing Graham leaves behind, as Trump is sending the GOP into “political oblivion,” as one unnamed House member recently told Politico.

Graham lived for power, obsessed with being part of the “in” crowd in Washington, whatever it might be at any particular time. And I think that’s where his closeted homosexuality comes into play, his desperation for validation amid those who hate his kind. Graham, always described as a “bachelor,” voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, supported George W. Bush’s failed Federal Marriage Amendment, and voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which passed in 2022 to protect against the Supreme Court possibly overturning the Obergefell marriage equality ruling.

All the while, stories swirled around Graham’s sexuality, which he didn’t even do much to hide by having a fake marriage to a woman, as reporters in DC knew the real deal, even though Graham denied it consistently. It came up in his political campaigns, including in 2014 when his Republican primary opponent called him “ambiguously gay.” In 2020, male escorts and porn stars speaking about what they claimed were their interactions with Graham had “Lady Graham” trending on Twitter. It spilled out into the media, including The Washington Post. I wrote all about his “queer predicament” right here at the time, and his story tracked with so many other closeted Republican politicians.

Graham debased himself and, like many a closet case, went to great lengths to prove himself straight, with a “muscular” foreign policy and by identifying as a war “hawk.” Early on, in the pre-Trump GOP, that meant connecting himself to macho war heroes like Senator John McCain—also a homophobe—whom Graham called his best friend, and being part of a bipartisan center of gravity on foreign policy, which included a friendship with Joe Biden.

This determination to be in that center, that in crowd, was part of his obsession with power, trying to prove he wasn’t gay but also feeling the deep inadequacy that self-loathing closet cases experience. And that’s why, after first attacking Trump like so many others from Marco Rubio to JD Vance, Graham became Trump’s biggest cheerleader in the Senate, once again moving with the in crowd and the center of power—and betraying his former friends like McCain and Biden, whom Trump viciously attacked over and over again.

Graham was humiliated by Trump many times, as Trump pointed to Graham’s subservience. But Graham didn’t fool MAGA, which hounded him in airports as a “traitor”after his brief distancing from Trump, condemning Trump after January 6th. Much of the base never trusted Graham again, even as he came crawling back to Trump on his hands and knees. He desperately needed Trump to win elections. In both his recent primacy and his previous one, he had to fight to get over 50%, as MAGA candidates vied for power. But because he slobbered over Trump, he had Trump’s backing to pull him over the line.

But what did it all get him in the end? If Graham was thinking that if he only held on to power past the Trump era, he could then run from Trump —which he briefly did after January 6th—and be part of some new GOP, he was sadly mistaken. Instead, he died—a lesson to Rubio, Vance, and all the rest that it can happen at any time—as a lonely, pathetic human being who accomplished nothing but helping an authoritarian take power.

Even before his body was cold, Trump humiliated him again, turning Graham’s death into something all about himself, bragging in an interview yesterday about how he’d vanquished Graham—how gutless Graham slithered back to Trump after first condemning Trump after January 6th—and then using Graham’s death to push the voter suppression bill, the Save Act, demanding it be passed. Trump claimed, in what seems like another self-promoting lie, that Graham’s last words in the hours before his death were that the Senate should get rid of the filibuster to pass it.

Like the expression goes, ”everything Trump touches dies.”