If you haven’t watched Sean Hannity interview Donald Trump, it’s hard to overstate how sycophantic the entire effort is. The Fox News host is an old friend and ally of Trump’s, 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 “town hall” erupted into boisterous cheers of support for Trump.
“This is a very tough interview,” Hannity said in response, an apparent admission that it was anything but.
As a result, Hannity’s 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’s comfortable enough with the venue to offer his unvarnished thoughts.
What was striking about Trump’s 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.
“This is a woman who is dangerous,” he said at one point of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. “I don’t think [she’s] too smart, but let’s see. But she loses her train of thought a lot.”
That was why Harris “doesn’t do interviews,” he continued. “Can you imagine her doing an interview like this or like any of them?”
That train-of-thought line, though? That is … quite an indictment for Trump to make.
“We had a good debate, and it was a fair debate, and he was down like 18 or 19 points after the debate,” 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, “And I hate mosquitoes.”
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 — and plenty of other examples of Trump leveling criticisms against Harris that had been applied against him and his campaign.
For example, he said of Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D), that “there’s something weird with that guy.”
Walz, of course, famously applied that label to Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).
“He’s a weird guy,” Trump continued. “JD is not weird. He’s a solid rock. I happen to be a very solid rock. We’re not weird. We’re other things perhaps, but we’re not weird. But he is a weird guy. He walks on the stage. There’s something wrong with that guy.”
He kept going, even as Hannity attempted to interject with a question about Harris. The effect was similar to Trump’s awkward rejoinder to Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate of the 2016 election cycle. When she described him as a “puppet” of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump replied, “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet!”
Trump, you see, was rubber, while Clinton was glue. Speaking to Hannity, Trump (not for the first time) claimed that “nobody was tougher with Russia than me.”
The effort to rebound “weird” against Walz, incidentally, came right after Trump celebrated that Walz’s brother had publicly offered Trump his endorsement. Meanwhile, Trump’s niece Mary L. Trump has created something of a career out of opposing her uncle.
There are other recent examples. When his campaign faced criticism for filming campaign material at Arlington National Cemetery — and for allegedly tussling with a cemetery staffer — Trump attempted to accuse Harris of “politicizing” the cemetery event.
He also criticized Harris recently, saying that “the way she treated Mike Pence was horrible.” 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’s life on Jan. 6, 2021.
Speaking to Hannity, Trump also reiterated another rubber-and-glue claim related to the Capitol riot: that Biden’s decision to step aside was a “coup” against him. This bit of rhetoric has the obvious goal of drawing equivalence between Harris’s ascent and Trump’s 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.
That’s 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’t have to be convincing. Just has to muddy the water.
And there is no better place to do that than during a campaign event. Even one with occasional breaks for Fox News’s advertisers to promote their products.