Trump
Retreats to His Hannity Bunker
Beaten by the pandemic
and down in the polls, a President and his propagandist create an alternate
reality.
June 26, 2020
The general theme of
Trump’s conversations with Sean Hannity has been the President’s increasingly
urgent need to tout his own brilliance at handling the coronavirus.Source: Fox News / YouTube
June began poorly for President
Trump, and it’s ending worse. Despite Trump’s optimistic
pronouncements about the coronavirus,
the pandemic is surging across the American South and West. His poll numbers
against Joe Biden are cratering. His former
national-security adviser is selling a book that calls him a corrupt fool who’s
unfit for office. The number of jobless Americans continues to climb. But,
luckily, there are some things Trump can still count on—like the Fox News host
Sean Hannity.
On Thursday night, with
America deep in a crisis that shows no sign of easing, Trump appeared at a Fox
News “town hall” led by Hannity. It was a reassuringly safe space for the
President. There was not a single mention of the terrifying spike of covid-19 cases in Texas or Arizona or anywhere else. No
one so much as alluded to the hundred and twenty-five thousand or so Americans
who have already died from the disease. And Hannity—Trump’s close friend and
confidant, who has been called his shadow White House chief of staff—refrained
from citing the recent wave of national polls, including one by Fox, that show
Trump losing to Biden by double-digit percentage points. The audience of Trump
superfans, many of whom wore pro-Trump “Make America Great Again” gear, obliged
as well. When Hannity got around to taking questions from them, twenty-five
minutes into the forty-three-minute broadcast, a woman named Linda asked Trump,
“What do you think is your greatest accomplishment?”
Hannity’s latest in-kind
contribution to the Trump campaign was perfectly predictable, of course. The TV
host, who is paid twenty-five million dollars a year by Fox,
is so reliable a wingman to the President that my colleague Jane Mayer reported that Trump bragged he
was a ten out of ten on the loyalty scale. Before the 2018 midterms, the
President had Hannity appear onstage at his big preëlection rally, a faux pas
even for Fox that earned Hannity a reprimand from his bosses. Before Thursday’s
event, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump hosted Hannity as his guest on Air Force
One, and photographers snapped a picture of U.S. Marine guards saluting as
Hannity walked on the tarmac to the plane’s steps. In a pre-town-hall
interview, at a Wisconsin airplane hangar, the two looked like co-stars in a
buddy movie; they were even dressed in matching long red ties and dark suits.
When the show got going, Trump saluted Hannity as a “great journalist.”
Hannity’s show is the Fox bunker that Trump retreats to when everything else is
going wrong.
Not surprisingly, some
of Trump’s most outrageous comments about the ongoing pandemic have been
uttered on Hannity’s program. In early March, just a little over a week before
he declared a national emergency and shut down the country, Trump told Hannity
that the coronavirus was “very mild,” that it was similar to the annual flu,
and that hundreds of thousands of people could recover from it while still
going to work. On March 26th, the President touted the malaria treatment
hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug to combat the coronavirus. “This could be
the big answer,” he told Hannity. On April 7th, Trump was back on the show,
promoting himself and hydroxychloroquine. “We have millions of doses that I
bought,” Trump said, before correcting himself, “that the country bought.” He
added, “It’s not like it’s something unsafe.” A few weeks later, medical
studies suggested that the drug was risky, and U.S. government health officials
recommended it not be given to covid-19
patients. The general theme of all these conversations with Hannity—which are
better characterized as rambling monologues by Trump in which Hannity
occasionally figures—has been the President’s increasingly urgent need to tout
his own brilliance at handling the pandemic. “We’re way
under . . . in terms of death,” he told Hannity, in April. But it
wasn’t true, then or now.
In the past three months
of the pandemic, Trump’s virus-spin cycle has become as familiar as it is
mind-numbing, an endless loop of denial, magical thinking, blame-shifting, and
fearmongering. Often, he seems to do all of this in the same day: We beat the invisible
enemy. The country is transitioning to greatness. The virus is fading away.
Cases are only going up because we are testing more. A miracle vaccine will be
ready soon, probably, maybe, likely by the end of this year. People are wearing
masks just because they want to hurt me politically and the media is lying to
them. We did a great job. It’s the “kung flu.” It’s the “ChinaVirus.” These are
all real points the President has made, just in the past few days.
The virus, however, does
not care what Trump has to say about it. It’s a virus. It doesn’t watch Fox or
care about ratings. “The virus is not going to disappear,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s chief
infectious-disease expert, said, at a congressional hearing on Tuesday. “We
have a long way to go,” Admiral Brett Giroir, the Administration’s testing
czar, said. The virus has “brought this nation to its knees,” Robert Redfield,
the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said.
On Wednesday, the U.S.
set a record for new coronavirus cases, according to the covid Tracking Project, of 38,672.
The previous record was set two months ago, on April 26th. American deaths from
the virus are, by far, the most that have been recorded anywhere in the world,
and are predicted to reach some two hundred thousand by October. The curve has
not flattened. There is no summer respite. This awful spring, the Trump
Administration declared that the country had “thirty days to stop the spread,”
a chirpy slogan repeated by Trump, Vice-President Mike Pence, and the rest of
the coronavirus task force back in March. But the thirty days ended and the
spread did not. America failed.
No wonder Trump
retreated to his Hannity bunker on Thursday, to talk about the border wall and
Barack Obama’s “treason” and the deep state. About the “persecution” of Michael
Flynn, and how much of a “disaster” his former Attorney General, Jeff Sessions,
was. About the “rioters” and “terrorists” destroying America’s cities in the
wake of George Floyd’s killing. This is a week when even
Trump ought to have a hard time denying the reality of the disaster the country
is facing, and his own political predicament. The virus is spiking in
Republican-led states, such as Arizona, South Carolina, Arkansas, Florida, and
Texas, which are must-wins for Trump in the fall. Texas alone reported six
thousand new cases on Thursday, and its Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who
had spent months aligned with Trump in downplaying the threat, is now urging
state residents to shelter at home. On Thursday, he announced that he was
pausing the state’s plans to reopen. So did the equally pro-Trump Republican
governor of Florida. Not exactly on-message for their President.
Shortly after 6 p.m. on Thursday, Trump sent out a
tweet promoting his conversation with Hannity, taped earlier that day in
Wisconsin, where a new Times poll shows him trailing Biden by
eleven points. Minutes after Trump’s tweet, Fox News released the results of
its own new poll in key
battleground states. It showed Trump behind Biden in every single one,
including, for the first time in a Fox News poll, the Republican bastion of
Texas. In the lead-up to Trump’s Hannity interview, Tucker Carlson’s show
opened with this banner: “president trump
may lose this election.”
All of this is why I can’t stop thinking about
that catastrophic rally on Saturday in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, the heart of Trump country, when an anemic turnout left Trump ranting
to thousands of empty seats at an event meant to mark his triumphant return to
pre-pandemic politics as usual. The photograph of a dejected Trump as he left
Air Force One on his return from Tulsa was an instant classic. There was the
blustery salesman slumped over in defeat, tie off, head hanging, for once, not
bothering to sell us his bullshit. One can only imagine the rage and fury that
Trump had vented at his aides for the rally debacle. The photograph showed him
as a cranky, exhausted septuagenarian coming home in the middle of the night
after a terrible day on the job.
Did the picture mean
that Trump knows what trouble he’s in? Was it a sign that he realizes his act
is wearing thin, that his flimflammery might no longer be working? Is it
possible that he might be a bit more reality-based than his ridiculous all-caps
tweets and absurdist public discourse suggest? Several times in his
conversation with Hannity on Thursday, Trump seemed to acknowledge that Biden
might be beating him. “It’s so crazy, what’s happening,” the President said, at
one point. Referring to Biden, he added, “Here’s a guy, doesn’t talk. Nobody
hears him. Whenever he does talk, he can’t put two sentences together. I don’t
want to be nice or un-nice. O.K.? But, I mean, the man can’t speak. And he’s
going to be your President because some people don’t love me, maybe.”
Certainly, it’s a
different moment for Trump from a couple of months ago, when the Washington Post reported that
he had recoiled in outrage and disbelief when presented by his campaign with
internal polls that showed him losing to Biden. Perhaps even more revealing was
Trump’s answer when Hannity asked him what should have been an easy question
for any candidate: What, exactly, does he plan to do in a second term if he
wins? Sometimes, even propaganda can be unintentionally revelatory. Trump had
nothing to say, no agenda to offer, only recriminations and some vague words
about “experience”—and a reassurance that everything “will be really great.”
The weary post-Tulsa
photograph of Trump shows the President as a man alone, a narcissist in trouble
with no one to blame but himself. If Trump ultimately does lose to Biden this
fall—and that is still a big “if”—I believe that we will look back on June as
the month when it really began to unravel for him. The huckster showed Sean
Hannity on Thursday night that he is still selling the same old, same old
message of lies, hate, and division, but it may be that America is finally
wising up to the con.
