Donald Trump surrounds himself with the only the best people. Oh, and Fox News conspiracy-promoter-in-chief Sean Hannity, for some reason.
Mr. Hannity is not only Mr. Trump’s biggest media booster; he also veers into the role of adviser. Several people I’ve spoken with over the last couple of weeks said Mr. Hannity had for months peppered Mr. Trump, his family members and advisers with suggestions on strategy and messaging.
So involved is Mr. Hannity that three separate denizens of the hall of mirrors that is Trump World told me they believed Mr. Hannity was behaving as if he wanted a role in a possible Trump administration — something he denied to me as laughable and contractually prohibitive in an interview on Friday.
Laughable, yes. Contractually prohibitive, no. Possible ... well, Donald Trump isn't known for spreading cash to his hired help, so it would depend on whether Hannity felt like dropping his Fox News show in exchange for the usual Trump offer of three bits of string and a kind word about you during his next speech. On the other hand, Sean Hannity is a Roger Ailes backer, and now that Ailes has gotten himself canned from his position as Fox head over a longstanding pattern of sexual harassment, it's possible that certain other male Fox hosts see the writing on the wall and are considering jumping ship to a Trump-branded, Ailes-run media empire after the candidate gets his ass handed to him in the general election. But first it requires a whole lot of brown nosing.
Mr. Hannity is unapologetic about his aim. “I’m not hiding the fact that I want Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States.” After all, he says, “I never claimed to be a journalist.”
To be sure. In recent years Sean Hannity has ably filled that special conspiracy-theory-of-the-day nook in the Fox News lineup previously covered by ex-Fox host Glenn Beck, after Beck made himself too comical a figure for even Fox News to credibly back. Hannity is not only a ready promoter of whatever the fever swamps of the right have made a fake video about on any given day (latest is that Hillary Clinton is deathly ill because reasons, and he's pumping that one for all it's worth). He was also the Fox host who helped turn conspiracy crackpot and bonafide dangerous person Cliven Bundy into an American household name. You know, until it turned out Bundy was a raving racist. Hannity is quite experienced at pretending ridiculous people are not ridiculous. It is, aside from Trumpian levels of self-regard and self-promotion, his defining personality feature.
Should we tell Sean that the Trump staff, too, is overflowing with raving racists? Nah. He has surely figured it out by now, what with acting as the campaign's top media man for the last few months.