by Rick Wilson
All it took was cashing in all his conservative priors. As with so many other on-air “conservatives,” Sean Hannity bailed on the tenets of conservative orthodoxy he claimed to advocate on his rise to influence them. Hannity smelled something in the wind as Trump rose in the polls in 2015 and switched into overdrive. Without missing a beat he’s become the loudest voice on Fox—and therefore in the one media silo that matters to Trump—as the proselytizer and enforcer of Trump juche. He even spends his evenings on the phone with the president.6 I can’t help imagining them like a pair of teenage girls on their Princess phones: “You hang up first.” No, you hang up first.” “Love you.” “Love you more.”
It’s paid off for Hannity in spades. His evening Fox show is the highest rated on cable news. His radio show draws in 13.5 million listeners.7 Sean Hannity’s combined daily reach is more than 13 million Americans, and these days they’re there for one thing and one thing only: unconditional love for The Donald and Sean’s daily Two Minutes of Hate for anyone and anything not on board with Trump.
Sure, Hannity’s populist woke workin’ man shtick rings a bit hollow now that he lives in a multimillion-dollar mansion and owns a private jet, but the man is a profit-making machine for Fox and for Premiere Radio Networks.
Republicans have long engaged in hissy-fits over the relations between Democratic elected officials and the news media. Hell, there’s a cottage industry of books blaming this bias for every failing of the conservative movement for the past 60 years, and plenty of grist for the mill, though the case is often rather wildly overstated.
In my 30 years in political consulting I’ve pushed back on hundreds of stories that I believed were biased, sloppy, or based on dumb predicates. I also praised good reporting, even from folks in the media I knew were wildly to my left, and maintained good relations with reporters and editors because I went at the facts, worked the details, and pushed back like a professional.
Making the rookie media mistake of confusing correlation for causation is sine qua non for Republican media critics. Early in 2015, I realized that Republicans were using the media bias angle not to get their side of an argument into the media ecosystem but to create a hermetic bullshit bubble of confirmation bias. I looked back at some writing I’d done in the past couple years about the media and found I’d been falling into that same trap.
Many times critics of the press have been right to note the cultural and social connections and affinities between the elite media and liberal politicians. Cozy relationships between the powerful and those who report on them have been an obsession for conservatives since Ben Bradlee and John F. Kennedy chased tail and drank too much in Washington. The marriage and family relationships of Obama administration officials to reporters covering the White House were the subject of much conservative hyperventilation.
Sean Hannity is the frenzied end point of this particular flavor of conservative hypocrisy. The role he plays for Trump would launch a thousand screaming Media Research Center and Breitbart articles if the partisan brogue was on the other foot.
Imagine for a moment the Republican meltdown that would have come to pass if—hypothetically—Joe Scarborough had spent weeks advising Barack Obama on how to respond to the Benghazi investigation, or if Jake Tapper had counseled Hillary Clinton on her email server scandal. The incandescent, ass-on-fire meltdown would have been one for the ages.
Oddly, conservatives saw absolutely nothing wrong when Hannity’s role as a Trump campaign advisor leaked out in the midst of the 2016 campaign.8 Hannity spent every night grunting out a relentlessly pro-Trump message on television, while also serving as an advisor to the campaign. As an entrepreneurial power play it was the marriage of a reality-TV show candidate to a talk show host. Trump loved it because Hannity never shaded his coverage in any direction but full-on Trumpisma. Hannity loved it because it was a ratings bonanza, and Trump was whispering about a post-Fox Trump TV project.
“I’m not hiding the fact that I want Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States,” Hannity told the New York Times. “I never claimed to be a journalist.”9
Oh, we understood that part, Sean. Trust me.
The New York Times reported the Fox host “peppered Mr. Trump, his family members and advisers with suggestions on strategy and messaging.”10 Hannity’s massive platforms delivered the Trump message to the GOP primary audience, undercutting many of the formerly rising stars of the party whom Sean had highlighted for years. In Hannityland, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and the rest were reduced to afterthoughts at best, targets at worst. Fox favorites like Ben Carson also disappeared from the network’s most watched hour of television.
When the election shifted to the general, Hannity went into overdrive. He peddled some of the most batshit crazy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health, echoing the lunatic trolling of lispy lunatic Mike Cernovich and others. The moment the Hannity-Trump marriage was sealed, though, was in the Trump campaign’s darkest hour.
When the world was falling down around Donald Trump’s head in the wake of the Access Hollywood “pussy grabber” revelations, it was Sean Hannity, almost alone in the top ranks of the conservative media, who sprang to Trump’s defense. He turned the story—at least for the tribal base of Trump’s GOP cohort—into a tale of the perfidy of Bill and Hillary Clinton. His full-throated defense of Trump’s “locker room” talk told Trump that Hannity would never abandon him for anything as trifling as the truth, or morals.
It was one thing for conservative keepers of America’s media mores to look away from Hannity’s direct involvement in the campaign of Donald Trump. It was quite another that they saw nothing wrong with the president of the United States of America, the head of the world’s longest-running and most successful experiment in constitutional democracy, taking marching orders from a blowhard talk show host.
Hannity’s role as a political enforcer for Trump was clear within weeks of the election. Lest any Republican voice even the slightest hint of concern over Trump’s policies, statements, or tweeting, they could count on Sean Hannity to hammer them, and for Hannity’s audience to turn their Facebook and Twitter feeds into a nightmare of grammatically challenged but passionate MAGAgasms. One member told me that the one-two punch of a Trump tweet against him followed by Hannity’s follow-on attack made him consider shutting down his social media accounts.
The irony of Hannity going after conservatives like Ben Sasse, Mitch McConnell, Bob Corker, and John McCain was rich. Trump, a man with no ideological moorings, was being held up by Hannity as a paragon of conservative virtue. Watching him rage against Republican critics of Trump reminded me of a quote by a noted specialist in the semiotics, hermeneutics, and metaphysics of Trump and Trumpism, Jacobim Mugatu: “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.”
Noted nuclear weapons expert, Middle East policy guru, and fluent Farsi speaker Sean Hannity also advised Donald Trump on how to handle the continuation of the nuclear weapons deal President Barack Obama struck with Iran.11 I mean, it’s only one of the most consequential decisions a president can make about the future political, diplomatic, and military landscape of the Middle East, so why not consult a talk show host with a high school education? Why not ask for advice from a man who makes even the most superficial talking-head policy lightweights seem like a combination of Metternich, John Foster Dulles, and Henry Kissinger?
A media low point in the Hannity experience came in the wake of the death of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. Rich, who was killed by muggers in Washington, was the subject of some of the most baroque, cruel, and downright insane conspiracy theories ever to hit the Clintons, who are a magnet for this kind of cray to begin with. Hannity jumped in feet first.
Hannity tried to outflank Alex Jones, leading his own network to retract the story that launched this particularly embarrassing line of conspiratorial nuttery. The nut of the claim was that Seth Rich was murdered for leaking the DNC emails to Wikileaks. It was widely, thoroughly, e
xhaustively debunked well before Hannity took up the story again in May 2017. Think of it as Pizzagate, only even more tendentiously stupid, wrong, and cruel to the parents of Rich, who called the garbage theory “something promoted by disgusting sociopaths.”12
David French, writing in National Review, made what I think was a perfect indictment of Hannity’s role in this shameful mess:
It’s a dramatic and lurid misdirection, one that even the writers of House of Cards would find far-fetched, and it has the benefit of tricking gullible Trump supporters into further mistrusting the media. After all, the real story is over at Gateway Pundit or at Breitbart or Drudge, or on Fox News at 10:00 pm. The true facts are known only to those who can perceive the pure evil of the Clintons, the deep state, and the rest of the establishment media.13
None of it stopped Hannity, who enlisted a clown college of Fox contributors like Newt Gingrich and Geraldo Rivera to echo the theory that the Clinton Enterprise had Seth Rich murdered, even reviving the ludicrous 1990s “Clinton Body Count” conspiracy theories.
The market did to Hannity what any innate sense of decency could not; as his advertisers started to abandon his show, reality set in. Even Fox News, an organization with a Roy-Cohnesque “never apologize, never defend, never give an inch, punch back twice as hard” PR approach, was forced to apologize and withdraw the story.14 Hannity briefly also became a line of defense for Trump and Bannon’s candidate in the Alabama Senate race, teen-curious and creepy Judge Roy Moore. It was a sign that the moral rot in the conservative media didn’t skip Sean when it came to defending a pedophile. More advertisers bailed, and Roy Moore’s problems were beyond even Sean’s ability to ignore.
Hannity’s role as a Trump advisor and enforcer never varied, and by the end of Trump’s first year in office, the “Fox Feedback Loop,” as coined by Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, was complete. Sherman, describing the cycle, put it like this: “Fox may be Trump’s safe space, but Trump is Fox’s safe space, too. It’s a circular feedback loop.”15 The expulsion and subsequent death of Roger Ailes, a man with a true gift for creating television, meant the network was unmoored. It still had producers and air talent who could play from the songbook Roger left behind, but it lacked a real conductor from that moment forward. Following the Trump wave was its only real option, and one that still made the network over $1.5 billion in 2016.16
Understanding the centrality of Fox News, and Hannity in particular, in the way Donald Trump shapes his message, strategy, and national policy is vital to understanding how deeply broken his presidency was from the start. The institutions of media and government were, in the eyes of the Founders, separate. Even in our darkest hours, our nation has been cautious about the power of state propaganda, as we have been cautious about state-run media. (No, libertarians, Big Bird and NPR don’t count.)
Fox and Hannity have upended that. If you’re a conservative who sees this as a good outcome merely because Fox is nominally conservative, you might want to examine your priors. The president of the United States is addicted to an endless stream of praise from a shallow, dangerously stupid man. That same dangerous, stupid man feeds America’s president a constant flow of conspiracy nonsense, uncritical praise, and uninformed opinion. It’s a disaster in every way but the ratings.
ANN COULTER
Ann Coulter, tales of whom are whispered in dark rooms to frighten children, went from being a snarky, in-your-face hyperconservative to a tiresomely relentless Trump cheerleader based on his promise to deport 13 million people and build the infamous Wall. If there’s one person who displays the ETTD agony of being on a constant roller-coaster ride of Trump adoration to condemnation, it’s Coulter. Her arc, like that of so many Trump backers from the conservative media, could only ever end in one way: hot, angry tears and a morning-after binge of chain-smoking Marlboro Reds, hammering back indifferent box-wine Chardonnay, and devouring the souls of orphans.
Frank Bruni perfectly framed Coulter’s unique position in the Trump media ecosystem: “So Coulter was Trump’s muse. She was also his oracle, predicting his nomination and election back when most others still dismissed him as a joke. And she’s a barometer of, and tribune for, some of his core supporters, including her good friend Matt Drudge.”17
Watching Ann’s on-again, off-again relationship with Trump rise and fall with his positions on immigration has been a genuine pleasure. I can hear her, à la Fatal Attraction, whispering into the phone, “DON, I won’t BE ignored.” It was the definitional issue for Coulter and a handful of other paleo-cons, and the subject of her obsessive, bunny-boiling rages. It showed us just how little the rest of the conservative portfolio mattered to her when she tweeted, “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in the White House after this immigration policy paper.”18
The recursive irony was that she’d helped write the immigration policy paper she described as “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.”19 At the direction of Steve Bannon, Coulter and Stephen Miller had crafted the white-nationalist immigration plan she was praising.
Donald Trump, the king of the political pump-and-dump, would betray Coulter, and she would return the favor. By early 2018, the author of E. Pluribus Awesome: In Trump We Trust was in full-on psycho ex-girlfriend mode. After a year of prevarications, lies, and typical Trumpian bullshit over immigration, Coulter’s patience was exhausted.
Her own ragetweets started, and their relationship deteriorated to the point of an obscenity-filled Oval Office screaming match. By Coulter’s account, she was greeted by Trump as “the great betrayer” and Trump mumbling, “But Gorsuch.”20 By the time Trump signed the 2018 Omnibus spending bill, the romance was strained to the breaking point.
In a bitter, testy appearance at Columbia, Coulter would say of Trump, “I knew he was a shallow, lazy ignoramus, and I didn’t care.”21 Oh, Ann. You really are in touch with the Trump mind-set.
TRUMPBART
If you’re looking for weaponized, white-hot, immigrant-hating trailer-trash postconservative nationalist populism, look no further than Donald Trump’s loudest screaming section, Breitbart “News.”
How could Breitbart News have risen faster or fallen harder? After Andrew Breitbart’s death in 2012, Steve Bannon became the new capo of the enterprise, marked it with his own special ichor, and went all-in on what became the main operating principle of the new-right media: provocation over reporting, instigation over analysis, and jackassery over all. They were outsider media for an outsider president.
Not everyone inside Breitbart was happy about it at first. McKay Coppins in his 2017 book The Wilderness reported, “According to four sources with knowledge of the situation, editors and writers at the outlet have privately complained since at least last year that the company’s top management was allowing Trump to turn Breitbart into his own fan website—using it to hype his political prospects and attack his enemies.”22
For a time, it looked as if Bannon’s twin bets on the alt-right and Donald Trump would pay off big. As candidate and president, Trump was often presented with glowing Breitbart headlines, which would leave him giggling and smiling like a D student being told he’s brilliant and accomplished. Their turn to Trump was sharply clear in mid-2015, to the point I tore Alex Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief, a new one on CNN, telling him that Breitbart was “Trump’s Pravda.” It hit a nerve.
But Breitbart also fell victim to the Trump curse. They were the id of the right wing of American politics from the beginning of Bannon’s tenure and worked hard to play the “Trigger the lib snowflake tears” game to its hilt. When Breitbart was just Bannon’s troll site, headlines like “Birth Control Makes Women Crazy and Unattractive” might have been laughed off, but as the brand became permanently stained by their close association with the alt-right, anti-immigrant agitprop, and as Donald Trump’s media mouthpiece, trouble appeared on the horizon.
Their self-reinforcing vicious cycle meant it wasn’t enough to be edgy; edgy wasn�
��t going to feed the lunatic comments section folks. Chasing the clickbait dragon meant the headlines got louder, the stories got wilder, and the politics got closer and closer to the fringe:
BILL KRISTOL: REPUBLICAN SPOILER, RENEGADE JEW23
HOIST IT HIGH AND PROUD: THE CONFEDERATE FLAG PROCLAIMS A GLORIOUS HERITAGE24
WOULD YOU RATHER YOUR CHILD HAD FEMINISM OR CANCER? 25
Breitbart had long relied on three revenue drivers: programmatic ad placements by large digital ad agencies, sweet, sweet chunks of quan from Robert Mercer, and Facebook traffic. Breitbart bragged in its public affairs materials about traffic, Facebook engagement, and a whole spectrum of other indicators. One thing they never mentioned? Revenue and profit.
There was always a mystery about just how much cash Mercer dumped into the Bannon version of the House Andrew Built. It was enough that Breitbart’s ad sales and development team were always an afterthought, but not enough to where they could forgo advertising. Those automatically placed ads from digital agencies didn’t look at where the ads were placed; they merely looked at the demographics of the sites and their traffic. It was the power of automated, digital markets operating on autopilot.
Then came Sleeping Giants and their countercampaign. The Chicago Tribune called them “the mysterious group that wants to kill Breitbart’s ad revenue, one tweet at a time.”26 When advertisers a million miles from Breitbart’s political values were notified that they were supporting Trump and the alt-right, the social pressure led to their blacklisting Breitbart. It wasn’t a “free speech” question, as Breitbart’s executives squealed like pigs. It was a market question. Who wants to be associated with a media outlet tied at the hip to the Pepe Brigade and the least popular president in history? No one, that’s who.
