Anything that can be perceived as an attack on Trump—literally anything that can be perceived as a slight against whatever his strange personal narrative of himself is—throws the aspiring fascist into a tizzy. On Tuesday, Trump called in to talk to his bestie, Sean Hannity of Fox News. While the show ran, Trump rambled about this and that and this and that … and this and that.
Hannity and the rest of the misinformation propaganda wing of the Republican Party’s job when interviewing any official is to tee up softball questions that allow said official to go right into a (usually) pre-rehearsed set of talking points. This job is considerably tougher when the official being interviewed is Donald Trump. Trump is a man with a mediocre mind and an aversion to reading I’ve only seen from a 6-year-old who wants to watch Ninjago. This means that craven mouthpieces like Hannity must tee up the softball questions, usually with the actual talking point included, in the hopes that Trump will remember the words and repeat them.
On Tuesday night, Trump didn’t take the miles of runway Sean Hannity laid out for him and instead treated the world to a ramble so incoherent, a saner Republican Party would have him impeached on its transcript alone.
The conversation was obviously supposed to be about Kamala Harris being chosen for the Biden ticket. Hannity’s job on Fox News was clearly supposed to be to attack Harris and Joe Biden, talk about Harris and Biden’s arguments about race, and let Trump win the day. Instead, Trump said this: [Important note: All punctuation here consists of guesses by the author as Trump doesn’t exactly … well, you know.]
“Well, first of all, what you said about Russia: The New York Times is fake reporting, it’s a fake newspaper as far as I’m concerned, and Washington Post likewise. I always try to figure out which is worse. And then you have CNN and frankly ABC, CBS, NBC, and, but you have some good ones in between. Locals are great. Locals we do great in, but couldn’t possibly be here and on social media. I don’t, does anybody do better, in terms of importance of social media? So we get the word out.”
Let’s just take a breather. That’s literally 1/6th of Trump’s breathy, uninterrupted ramble. From here Trump says that there are good journalists who know that Russia was a “hoax,” and then he begins to attack the Pulitzer Prize.
“And a lot of our Congress and Senate, they got it right and they got it wrong, and they got Pulitzer Prizes. The Pulitzer Prize is worthless as far as I’m concerned because when you have the Maggie Habermans getting a Pulitzer Prize and she got it all wrong, she doesn’t. I haven’t spoken to her in forever, she’s like my biographer, like she knows everything about me. She knows nothing about me.”
Let’s take another breather. Trump then goes back into Russia being a hoax and then mentions he didn’t think Susan Rice would have been the vice presidential pick, being she was a part of the hoax. It must be pointed out that technically, the Rice mention is tangentially connected to the Hannity question in that Harris is the vice presidential pick, and Rice was someone people speculated was being considered. Then Trump repeats that this was all a scandal and a hoax and finishes with his newfound fixation on the Pulitzer Prize.
“But these writers, the writers got Pulitzer Prizes, and that shows you a Pulitzer Prize is worthless. And frankly, you ought to start a petition to return the Pulitzer Prize because they were all wrong. They were wrong on this one. The whole subject of Russia Russia Russia was made up, fabricated. It was a crime that was committed, and you look at Hillary Clinton where she paid for the fake dossier, and now the dossier is proven to be totally fake. It’s a disgrace what happened and no other president should have to go through it, Sean.”
Sean, like the bag of dead souls he is, takes Trump’s Russia hoax finish and just regurgitates it back in what is arguably one of the most pathetically groveling performances I’ve ever listened to in my life. Trump is terrified and the only thing he knows is that his base likes hearing him attacking Comey and giving lip service to some faint QAnon conspiracy theory about the world being controlled by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
