The revelation that Sean Hannity shares an attorney with Donald Trump is … not really much of a revelation. Because Hannity and Trump are already a pair. A team. An anything-but-lean, definitely mean, money-grubbing machine.
For a president who feels, intensely, that he is under siege, Hannity offers what he prizes: loyalty and a mass audience. And Trump, in turn, has directed his supporters to Hannity’s show — urging people on Twitter last week to watch the commentator attack special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who heads the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.
In return—for the low, low price of never disagreeing with Trump and lying to his audience on a nightly basis—Hannity gets not just unfettered access to Trump, but a hand in making policy. Trump regularly checks in with Hannity to discuss the strategy. And often takes his advice over those of trivial officials like his own chief of staff.
When President Trump agreed last month with Democrats to strike a deal granting legal status to so-called Dreamers brought to this country illegally as children, his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, was all for it. Another Trump confidant disagreed: Fox host Sean Hannity made clear in a phone call and on his show that Trump must draw a harder line on broader immigration enforcement as his price.
Trump sided with Hannity, according to a person close to the White House. The result was a list of demands unveiled Sunday night — conditions seemingly guaranteed to thwart a bipartisan deal.
Why was there no DACA deal? Because Sean Hannity made that decision, overruling both John Kelly and the promises Trump made to congressional leaders. It’s not that Trump is running the show and Hannity is his mouthpiece. It’s the other way around.
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All that Hannity had to do was throw some flattery Trump’s way in order to convert the most important job in the world, into the warm up act for a declining pundit. It’s not Trump setting the agenda and Hannity providing the commentary. It’s the other way around. Trump pushes people to watch Hannity. He repeats Hannity’s statements in tweets. He turns Hannity’s show into the core of his own repeated statements. That’s where both Trump supporters and Trump get their marching orders. The view that Hannity and Fox News are shills for the White House has it backward. America’s agenda is decided at 1211 Avenue of the Americas.
Just think of it as one of those carnival sideshows were a chicken appears to play tic-tac-toe. The flattery seed drops out of the chute, and Donald Trump pecks the designated button.
Trump and Hannity usually speak several times a week, according to people familiar with their relationship. The Fox News host, whose show averages more than 3 million viewers daily, is one of the few people who gets patched immediately to Trump. The two men review news stories and aspects of Hannity’s show, and occasionally debate specifics about whatever the president is considering typing out on Twitter. There have also been times when Trump has assessed the merits of various White House aides with Hannity.
Between Sean Hannity in the evening, and Fox & Friends in the morning, they are writing the script for the Trump White House. And not necessarily for the benefit of Donald Trump. Chaos and conflict isn’t something that happens by accident. It’s drama. It’s ratings. It’s one of those things that, when it doesn’t exist, has to be created.
Several West Wing aides and friends of the president pointed to their running conversations — whether they take place over the phone or on the golf course in Florida, as they did in late March — as crucial to understanding this moment in the Trump presidency, when the president is eager to return to the combative and television-infused style of his business career and more isolated than ever from the traditional Republicans who have struggled to guide him.
It’s no wonder that Donald Trump and Sean Hannity share more than one attorney.
Though Hannity says he was never actually Cohen’s client, he does appear to have used the legal services of other well-connected Trump-world lawyers in a different matter a year ago.
They’re not just on the same team. They’re on the same show. But one of them is in charge … and it’s not Donald Trump.