If you haven\u2019t watched Sean Hannity interview Donald Trump, it\u2019s hard to overstate how sycophantic the entire effort is. The Fox News host is an old friend and ally of Trump\u2019s, and no part of his sit-downs with the Republican presidential nominee would provide evidence to the contrary. At one point in their discussion Wednesday night, the raucous, pro-Trump audience there for what was billed as a \u201ctown hall\u201d erupted into boisterous cheers of support for Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a very tough interview,\u201d Hannity said in response, an apparent admission that it was anything but.<\/p>\n
As a result, Hannity\u2019s interviews rarely generate anything new or newsworthy. They are Trump rallies with a Fox News branding. When news is made, it tends to be of the sort that Trump makes at his campaign events: He says something that raises eyebrows because he\u2019s comfortable enough with the venue to offer his unvarnished thoughts.<\/p>\n
What was striking about Trump\u2019s conversation with Hannity on Wednesday, though, was the extent to which his rhetoric has once again devolved into an effort to accuse his opponent of things of which he himself is guilty.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a woman who is dangerous,\u201d he said at one point of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. \u201cI don\u2019t think [she\u2019s] too smart, but let\u2019s see. But she loses her train of thought a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was why Harris \u201cdoesn\u2019t do interviews,\u201d he continued. \u201cCan you imagine her doing an interview like this or like any of them?\u201d<\/p>\n
That train-of-thought line, though? That is \u2026 quite an indictment for Trump to make.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a good debate, and it was a fair debate, and he was down like 18 or 19 points after the debate,\u201d he said about 30 seconds later, making a false claim about how President Joe Biden fared in the June debate the two of them had when Biden was still running. Then he said, \u201cAnd I hate mosquitoes.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fairness, he was apparently being pestered by a bug when he said it. But there were plenty of other examples of Trump beginning a thought before being derailed over the course of an hour \u2014 and plenty of other examples of Trump leveling criticisms against Harris that had been applied against him and his campaign.<\/p>\n
For example, he said of Harris\u2019s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D), that \u201cthere\u2019s something weird with that guy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Walz, of course, famously applied that label to Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s a weird guy,\u201d Trump continued. \u201cJD is not weird. He\u2019s a solid rock. I happen to be a very solid rock. We\u2019re not weird. We\u2019re other things perhaps, but we\u2019re not weird. But he is a weird guy. He walks on the stage. There\u2019s something wrong with that guy.\u201d<\/p>\n
He kept going, even as Hannity attempted to interject with a question about Harris. The effect was similar to Trump\u2019s awkward rejoinder to Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate of the 2016 election cycle. When she described him as a \u201cpuppet\u201d of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump replied, \u201cNo puppet. No puppet. You\u2019re the puppet!\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump, you see, was rubber, while Clinton was glue. Speaking to Hannity, Trump (not for the first time) claimed that \u201cnobody was tougher with Russia than me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The effort to rebound \u201cweird\u201d against Walz, incidentally, came right after Trump celebrated that Walz\u2019s brother had publicly offered Trump his endorsement. Meanwhile, Trump\u2019s niece Mary L. Trump has created something of a career out of opposing her uncle.<\/p>\n
There are other recent examples. When his campaign faced criticism for filming campaign material at Arlington National Cemetery \u2014 and for allegedly tussling with a cemetery staffer \u2014 Trump attempted to accuse Harris of \u201cpoliticizing\u201d the cemetery event.<\/p>\n
He also criticized Harris recently, saying that \u201cthe way she treated Mike Pence was horrible.\u201d Trump is running with Vance this time around because Pence, his former vice president, broke with Trump after Trump attempted to get Pence to subvert the 2020 election results, leading to threats on Pence\u2019s life on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n
Speaking to Hannity, Trump also reiterated another rubber-and-glue claim related to the Capitol riot: that Biden\u2019s decision to step aside was a \u201ccoup\u201d against him. This bit of rhetoric has the obvious goal of drawing equivalence between Harris\u2019s ascent and Trump\u2019s efforts to retain power after his 2020 loss. Not necessarily because he expects people to believe it, certainly, but at least in hopes that they will perhaps view his own actions in a less dire light.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the pattern here. Not just the steady stream of false claims Trump presented to Hannity (yielding cheers from the crowd and nods from the host), but that any attack on Trump that lands is muted or muffled by an equal-and-opposite attack on his opponents. Doesn\u2019t have to be convincing. Just has to muddy the water.<\/p>\n
And there is no better place to do that than during a campaign event. Even one with occasional breaks for Fox News\u2019s advertisers to promote their products.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
If you haven\u2019t watched Sean Hannity interview Donald Trump, it\u2019s hard to overstate how sycophantic the entire effort is. The Fox News host is an old friend and ally of Trump\u2019s, and no part of his sit-downs with the Republican presidential nominee would provide evidence to the contrary. At one point in their discussion Wednesday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9036,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}