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HANNITY

By the second week of June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were grabbing babies from their mothers. Images of ICE separations quickly became the daily face of Trumpism.

“When that little kid washed up on the beach in Greece”—three-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy captured in a 2015 photo that gained international notice—“that was not the moment when snowflake revulsion called the world to moral attention,” said Bannon, trying to explain the virtues of the new Trump policy of separating parents from their children as families came across the U.S. southern border. “That was the moment when the rest of the world said this immigration stuff is nuts and has got to stop. If you voted for Trump, every picture of a Mexican immigrant, a parent or a child, together or apart, reconfirms that vote.”

Just as immigration had been the overriding issue in 2016, Bannon expected it to be the Trump payoff topic in the 2018 midterm elections. Immigration was not just Trumpism’s sine qua non, it was the fundamental intellectual pillar that any dope could understand. “There are seven billion people in the world, and six billion want to come to the United States and Europe,” said Bannon. “You do the math.”

Immigration had also become, internal research indicated, Fox News’s most consistently reliable prime-time theme. Teasers on Fox for upcoming immigration stories—scare stories—could be counted on to keep restive audiences in place. Channel flipping decreased dramatically during immigration pieces. Sean Hannity had built record ratings off of his holy war against immigration.

Privately, or not so privately, Bannon believed that Trump, if he made it through his first term, would have had quite enough of the presidency by 2020. “Dude, look at him,” said Bannon, who didn’t look all that good himself. In the event that Trump did not run in 2020, Bannon—ever revivified by the daily lurches, catastrophes, and lost opportunities of the Trump presidency—saw himself as the presidential candidate for the populist-nationalist movement and its radical immigration platform. He saw Sean Hannity as his running mate.

A contemptuous Hannity, with grandiose ambitions of his own, insisted that this scenario was ludicrous. He would top the ticket, with Bannon, “if he’s lucky,” taking the second spot.

Hannity was now one of the richest men in television news. In 2017, Roger Ailes, his former boss and the man who had plucked him from a $40,000-a-year television job, estimated Hannity’s net worth at $300 million to $400 million. From his earliest days as a big earner at the network, Hannity had invested in rental properties across the country. “He may own every shitty piece of real estate in America,” said Ailes, fondly. Bannon, never one to miss the obvious joke, wondered, “How many illegals live in Hannity’s rentals?”

For twenty years, Hannity, like most people at Fox News, operated not just with loyalty and gratitude toward Ailes, but with the unambiguous understanding that Ailes was the brains of the operation, the unchallenged arbiter of the conservative political zeitgeist. At Ailes’s funeral in Palm Beach in May 2017, Hannity, who had flown a group of Ailes’s colleagues and friends down on his plane, found his plan to get back home for one of his children’s sports matches delayed by the collective length of the many encomiums at the funeral. Stepping out to speak on the phone with his disappointed child, he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But, hey, wait a minute. Do you like our life? Well, we owe that all to Mr. Ailes. So I’m staying until his funeral is done.”

With Ailes expelled from Fox in July 2016 because of sexual harassment charges, the network needed a new unifying mission and reason for being. For two decades, Ailes had created the messages, tone, and many of the personalities that the Republican Party embraced. Fox became the Republican brand, dramatizing and monetizing politics in a heretofore unimagined way. At $1.5 billion in annual profits, the Fox News Channel was the most valuable part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. But without Ailes creating the narrative and nursing the talent, a significant realignment occurred. Ailes had long warned about the dangers of the network becoming the mouthpiece of the White House: Fox’s value and primacy came from leading rather than following. And, indeed, the Republican Party, and Republican White Houses, had once been beholden to Fox. But now Fox was beholden to Trump, the new zeitgeist mastermind.

After Ailes’s ouster, the leadership at Fox was seized by the Murdoch family, which was ever consumed by its daily squabble about whether the father or one of his two sons had actual control. Rupert himself, after sixty-five years as the most aggressive and successful newspaperman on the planet, still had scant interest in television news; his sons, Lachlan and James, were political moderates and liberal society wannabes, and they were regularly embarrassed by Fox. The entire family, however, appreciated the cash windfall from the network—hence they were stuck, at least for the moment, with the Fox programming point of view. Compounding the leadership vacuum and the brand ambivalence in the months after Ailes’s departure, Fox’s two most prominent and highest-rated anchors, Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly, left the network. Kelly was shunned by many of the network stars and bosses because she had spoken out against Ailes; O’Reilly was forced out in his own sexual harassment scandal.

Daily operation of the network defaulted to Ailes’s loyal but undistinguished lieutenants, all of whom were accustomed to carrying out Ailes’s directions and had little vision of their own. Fox’s billion-dollar prime-time schedule was left to Hannity, the weaker player behind O’Reilly and Kelly; Tucker Carlson, a second-string replacement anchor; and, after a botched attempt at a panel show, Laura Ingraham, a conservative radio host who had never had a television success.

Hannity disdained Murdoch and his sons, not least because he was quite sure they found him contemptible. He figured they would fire him soon enough. But Hannity was sanguine: he believed his future was with Trump, and soon after Trump’s inauguration he began telling people that he was staying at Fox only to “fight for Donald J. Trump.” This was a programming approach—abject fealty to Donald Trump—that, buttressed by obsessive warnings about the evils of illegal immigration, suddenly turned Hannity into cable gold.

Carlson, a former magazine writer, had migrated to Fox via CNN and MSNBC, where he had struggled in the role of the young old-fogey conservative in a bow tie. As liberal channels shut down even their token conservative voices, he met a predictable end. At Fox, where Ailes saw Carlson as the kind of conservative that liberals like—that is, useful to the network, but not central to it—he warmed the bench for bigger stars who hard-core conservatives liked, each week shuttling up to New York from Washington to do the lower-rated weekend shows.

Off camera, Carlson was a funny, tempered, self-styled libertarian. He enjoyed Washington’s chummy cliques, lunching every day at the Metropolitan Club; only two blocks from the White House, it was among the frumpiest and swampiest clubs in town. Over the years, Carlson had come to know Trump well, and when speaking privately he was a witty guide to Trumpworld outlandishness and lunacy. Inheriting, rather by default, Kelly’s spot in the prime-time lineup, Carlson—with tax problems and financial troubles, and, now, approaching fifty—saw his last real chance to succeed in prime time. Carlson understood that the fight for Donald J. Trump, and the America First defense, provided both a narrative godsend and a clear avenue to big ratings. With a new tenacity and an everyman set of facial gestures—utter incredulity at the foolishness and hypocrisies of the left—he became, finally in his career, a conservative whom liberals loved to hate.

Ingraham, one of the keynote speakers at the 2016 Republican National Convention, might have been the most desperate of the three. Trump himself found her wanting: “She’s never had a hit on television. I would ask, Why? Here’s why: people don’t like her. I like her okay. But I don’t love her.” He complained to both Murdoch and Hannity—“you gotta get me somebody better.” In many ways, her standing at the network depended on an audience of one.

Fox as a coherent network—Ailes’s enterprise was famously top-down, with its themes and messages of the day coordinated across every show—had retreated internally into mixed messages and turmoil. But the three evening anchors were in no way confused: they focused on the Trump message.

Fox was no longer the brand; Trump was the brand.

And the Trump-brand narrative was television genius. The establishment cadres—the elites, the media, the deep state, the great liberal conspiracy—were trying to bring Donald Trump down. At Fox, this was a big-ratings message: he had to be defended. And his most Trumpian instincts, especially those involving immigration, had to be supported, lest he waver from them.

Each of the Fox prime-time anchors privately acknowledged that were Trump to go down, they would likely go down, too. Each acknowledged that if Fox changed course, as they assumed it would, they would be out the door. They were tied to Donald Trump, not Fox.

Together the three—along with Fox’s Judge Jeanine and Lou Dobbs—formed the sort of brain trust of presidential advisers and cheerleaders that heretofore had remained mostly out of view. This was new: the Fox team served as a public channel between the Trump base (the Fox audience) and the Trump White House. Likewise, many of the messages from the Bannon side of the Trump party were delivered through and supported by the Fox prime-time schedule—most consistently and succinctly, the message on immigration. And all this was constantly fed and reinforced by Hannity’s incessant phone calls with Trump.

Two of Bannon’s acolytes in the White House, Stephen Miller and Julie Hahn, the Trump anti-immigration brain trust, often lobbied Trump through Hannity. Indeed, Hahn’s job was now divided between policy and comms, where she was the direct contact with Hannity—not only giving Hannity the White House position, but giving him the Bannon-Miller-Hahn position, which Hannity would recycle back to Trump.

Hannity and the president spoke as often as six or seven times a day. The calls sometimes lasted more than thirty minutes. John Kelly, astounded that there were days when the president spent as many as three hours talking to Hannity, had tried to limit these calls. But Hannity was a calming influence on Trump: he was both a distraction and a willing audience for Trump’s endless complaints about almost everybody. Furthermore, Hannity supplied Trump with an ongoing report on TV ratings, one of the few things that could reliably hold Trump’s interest. As always, Trump was keenly responsive to whatever words and actions might get him better ratings.

Hannity saw the daily talks as quite a professional opportunity; he also considered them a patriotic duty. He accepted Trump’s volatility and his part in keeping the man from losing it.

“I calm him down,” explained Hannity, with solemn modesty, to a group of Fox people about his conversations with the president.

Bannon had a different view. “Hannity’s theories are crazier than even Trump’s,” he said, “so Trump becomes the voice of reason.”

Hannity could press the president to do and say things that would, retold on the news, boost Hannity’s ratings—and, as usually happened, almost everyone else’s. A return in Trump’s tweets to the Wall would often be Hannity’s doing. This was old-fashioned politics, of course, a politician behaving in a way that would please his constituents. But this other angle—a television host directing the president to do whatever might most compel a television audience—took the game a big step further.

In part this was the Ailes formula, politicians doing what television, and specifically a highly targeted television audience, required. But Hannity was working Trump in a way that no president had ever quite been worked. “Trump is the star,” Hannity would say. Hannity, the ultimate let-Trump-be-Trump-er, believed that it was his job, in television as well as in politics, to draw out Trump’s performance—to encourage Trump to be his most Trumpian. Much of their conversations were about how this or that Trump utterance or tweet, or public dis or snarl, had played on television. Trump, rarely studious about anything, was a patient student of what played well.

He listened to Hannity partly because he believed that his own communications department was uniquely unable to offer him useful advice. They were “ignoramuses.” Plus they looked terrible. Hannity was happy to support Trump’s contempt for his own team. The comms department should have stood between Hannity and the president; instead, Hannity stood between the president and his comms team. Hannity was joined in this by Bannon, who saw himself functioning as shadow communications director (in addition to shadow everything else). Both men hugely enjoyed the abuse the comms team was forced to take from Trump. If Trump abused the press, he abused his own press team even more, issuing constant critiques on demeanor, dress, hair, and the passion of their defense of him. “Would you let your life depend on Kellyanne Conway, Mercedes Schlapp, or the Huckabee girl?” Bannon asked rhetorically. “That’s some brain trust.”

In June, Hannity seized the opportunity to push his person into the top comms job. Bill Shine, whom Hannity had been urging Trump to hire for almost a year, had been Ailes’s right-hand man and Hannity’s producer. At fifty-four, he had spent the better part of his career at Fox, much of it carrying out Ailes’s orders. Shine, too, was forced out during Fox’s ongoing sexual harassment scandals in 2017. Hannity’s pitch to the president was that Shine, who officially joined the White House on July 5, not only could be as good a producer for Trump as he was for Hannity—“Lighting, lighting, I need better lighting,” railed Trump—but could basically run Fox from the White House. He would be a pipeline right into the control booth. When Shine went to work in the West Wing, it was, and Hannity made this explicit, the realization of the network’s effective new business model: Fox was the Trump network.

All that was needed now was … the Wall.

The Wall was the key branding element. Trump had at various points theorized about Wall alternatives: fancy fencing, or gun turrets and demilitarized guard posts, or maybe even an invisible wall, a force field that would deliver a shock, like the ones for dogs. But for Hannity, the Wall was literal, just as he believed it was for the rest of the Trump base. The Wall needed to be made of cement—“no virtual shit,” Hannity would say. It needed to be the physical manifestation of Make American Great Again.

The mantra was simple: if there was no Wall, there was no Trump. Stopping immigration was the Trump story. Immigration was the passion. You could not be too tough on immigration. And the tougher you were, the better chance you’d have of winning in November.

Sean Hannity was correct: Rupert Murdoch and his sons could hardly stomach him. But in a sense Hannity was just part of the broader Trump effect on the Murdoch family. Trump had helped turn the final years of the eighty-seven-year-old Murdoch, a towering figure in conservative politics, into a sour time, with Murdoch having to kowtow to Trump, whom he considered to be a charlatan and a fool, and with his sons blaming him for his unwitting part in Trump’s rise.

Murdoch regarded both Trump and Hannity as tabloid caricatures. They were the sorts of figures who populated his newspapers (he continued to think in newspaper rather than television terms); they were mass entertainment. But these were not the people in Murdoch’s world who held power. Power was held by men who understood their own wider interests—and the wider interests of other men who held power—and who did not regularly risk their power. The elites Trump derided, at least the conservative ones, were exactly the people Murdoch respected.

Volatility was the enemy of power. Murdoch regarded Trump and Hannity as performers—clowns, both of them. Hannity was useful to him; Trump, before his election, was little more than fodder for Murdoch’s New York Post.

Powerful men are often amused by the lesser attainments of lesser men who wish for power. For both Murdoch and Ailes, Trump and Hannity had been a shared bit of incredulity, a measure of how far you could go on lots of ambition and little brain power.

In 2016, Murdoch had refused to entertain the possibility of a Trump presidency and had directed Ailes to tilt the network’s coverage to Clinton, the expected president. But after Trump’s election, Murdoch, ever the practical man, forced himself into a relationship with the new president, who, in turn, could hardly believe he was finally being taken seriously by Murdoch.

“I can’t get the asshole off the phone,” said Murdoch to an associate after Trump entered the White House, holding out the phone as the president’s voice rambled into the air.

Meanwhile, as a function of both his easy access to Trump and the rising ratings at Fox, Murdoch, now theoretically running the network himself, allowed his prime-time anchors to devote themselves to Trump. This move was bitterly opposed by his son James, who was revolted by both Trump and the prime-time lineup. James, drinking at a heavy rate, became increasingly confrontational with his father. (“His son is a drunk,” Trump would say, rarely missing an opportunity to point this out.) James’s wife, Kathryn, was particularly vocal about how much she detested Fox News, and, indeed, much of the Murdoch company’s politics. Father and son had screaming fights over Hannity and Trump. The Murdoch family had become collaborators, declared the younger Murdoch. The world would remember. The future of their company was at stake.

But Murdoch was, agonizingly, tied to his network’s Trump-dependent and ever-increasing profitability. Some around Murdoch thought that for the first time in his career, business needs and political expediency might be causing him to experience something like a crisis of conscience. He could not give Trump up, yet he could not abide him. He blamed Trump for the increasing estrangement with his son James. It was one more Shakespearean outcome: Trump, in the ultimate Fox result, was now tearing apart the Murdoch family.

Seeing no way to manage his own family’s discord—Murdoch was by this time barely speaking to James, who had long been the designated heir—he began, six months into the Trump presidency, to plan for the sale of his company. His agreement with Disney, announced in December 2017, included most of the assets of the company, except for Fox News, which Disney did not want, and the Fox Network and local television stations, which would have caused issues with regulators. James would leave the company, and the remaining assets would be run by Murdoch’s older son, Lachlan, until they, too, could be sold.

But there would be few corporate buyers for Fox and, the Murdochs believed, perhaps no buyers if Sean Hannity remained a vital part of the deal. Hannity’s conspiracy mongering was not just absurd but intolerable: with his open political advocacy for Trump, he regularly flirted with FCC violations. And in the likely event that Trump fell, Hannity’s value, and the network’s value, would fall, too.

In May 2018, Fox was trying to move against on-air personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, romantically linked to Donald Trump Jr., and before that to Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived Trump White House communications director. (Guilfoyle also spoke volubly about how often she believed Trump himself had hit on her.) Guilfoyle, who would shortly be ejected from the company, was being investigated for, among other behavior issues, circulating dick pics among co-workers. Lachlan Murdoch saw a possible opportunity here: he believed Sean Hannity might be implicated in compromising items that were on Guilfoyle’s phone, which could potentially give the younger Murdoch the leverage he needed to persuade his father to oust Hannity.

But Hannity remained in place. Trump, Fox insiders believed, had interceded on Hannity’s behalf with Murdoch. What’s more, the Murdochs may have cringed at the mere mention of Hannity but he remained their ratings star.

Hannity and Bannon worried that Fox might ultimately insist on dialing down the focus on immigration, no matter its ratings fuel; they both heard reports of Murdoch saying enough was enough. Murdoch, an Australian, hewed to a belief in the ultimate economic benefits of a worldwide labor market. He was, as Bannon would often deride him to Trump, a standard-issue globalist. The conservative newspaper publisher, who had made his fortune promoting working-class xenophobia in multiple nations, was in fact a Davos man.

More critically, Hannity and Bannon doubted Trump’s sticking power on immigration, or at least they could easily see him relenting on the details. The Wall would become an invisible wall, or a wall so far in the future that it would forever be only a theoretical wall. They didn’t doubt Trump’s feelings about the issue—he seemed to have a visceral dislike for and suspicion of immigrants, illegal or otherwise—nor did they believe he was looking for a middle ground that would accommodate all sides. But, as with all issues, the details bored him. Hence, he became extremely susceptible to the last person who sold him on a different mix of details. In particular, Trump was the focus of a concerted effort by his daughter and son-in-law, and by the congressional leadership, to modify and soften the details of his immigration policy.

It became a consistent effort on Hannity’s part, a kind of catechism of his daily calls with Trump. Over and over, Hannity would reiterate and reinforce the policy’s zero-tolerance theme. This was rendered, of course, as effusive praise for Trump. Only he had the guts to stop the endless flow of immigrants across our borders. Only he had the courage to build the Wall.

Trump, galvanized, was suddenly demanding a new executive order that would fund the Wall and stop chain migration and birthright citizenship—“do it all,” he said. Told the order wouldn’t get through the Office of Legal Counsel, he reasoned, “If I sign it, people will know where I stand. I won’t be blamed for the laws.”

By mid-June, however, Hannity’s cheerleading had begun to wear thin, and Trump started to turn on him. The vast disorganization of the zero-tolerance family-separation actions—of lost children, tent city–like facilities, and the prospect of a future of warehoused infants and minors—ought to have been blamed on an inept White House acting without a plan, but instead he blamed it on Hannity.

Once again, Ivanka had persuaded him that his reflexive harshness had to be walked back. He had, just as easily, been convinced—and would be so again—that draconian toughness on immigration had made him president and would keep him president. But now, especially when listening to his daughter, he believed Hannity had stuck him with a raw deal.

For all of Hannity’s flattery, for all of his zealous commitment to the president, Trump, in almost equal proportion, had become disdainful of him. This was partly standard practice. Sooner or later, Trump felt contempt for anyone who showed him too much devotion. “Hating himself, he of course comes to hate anyone who seems to love him,” analyzed Bannon. “If you seem to respect him, he thinks he’s put something over on you—therefore you’re a fool.” Others believed that this was Trump’s power principle at work. He demanded sycophancy from the people around him and then shamed them for their weakness.

And then there was money. Trump invariably despised anyone who came to profit off of him without sharing the financial benefit with him. For Trump, Hannity’s high ratings were really his own; hence, he was being cheated.

In the Trump circle, Hannity was jocular, funny, and generous—the use of his plane was frequently on offer—and he injected a note of both energy and optimism into the nearly always beleaguered Trump camp. At the same time, virtually everybody, including most of the Trumpiest figures in Trumpworld, thought Hannity was a figure of rare daftness and incoherence. Even Trump would shout at his television, “No follow, Sean, no follow.”

Bannon, too, though fond of Hannity and of his plane, was consistently amazed by the bizarre direction of Hannity’s monologues, which echoed some of the most extreme online conspiracy forums. “Dude, dude, don’t go bonkers on me,” Bannon would mutter as he watched an evening broadcast.

The inside joke became—echoing Karl Rove as Bush’s brain and later Steve Bannon as Trump’s brain—that now it was Sean Hannity who had become Trump’s resident genius. Trump had ended up with someone even stupider than he was. Yet this was fitting, because Trump deeply resented the implication that he ever needed to depend on someone else’s acumen or intelligence—or, really, that there could possibly be anyone who was smarter than he was. But with Hannity as his sidekick, he could feel quite certain that no one would think he was relying on someone smarter. (This, in fact, was a frequent internal debate: Who was stupider, Trump or Hannity?)

Then, however, after signing an executive order on June 20 to reverse the family separation policy, Trump fell into a new funk, blaming everyone—though curiously not his daughter—for making him look weak.

But on June 26 the script flipped again when the Supreme Court reversed previous rulings and upheld the president’s travel ban—the same travel ban that had been so contentious and seemed so outlandish in the first days of his administration. Now Trump fumed that if he hadn’t signed the EO on family separation, he would have had a double win. “I would have had the magic touch,” he told one aide. “My magic.”

In fact, although it was known that the case involving the travel ban would be one of the last decided by the Court before its summer recess, no one in the White House was prepared for the decision. Even when handed a victory, there was a day’s delay before a press release went out, and that was preceded by a flurry of squabbling emails in the comms department about who should write it.

Trump, weary of immigration, was suddenly excited, on June 27, to be handed the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the Supreme Court, thus opening a seat for a new conservative judge. Immigration became, overnight, a forgotten issue, and Hannity an annoyance. “Wetbacks, wetbacks, wetbacks. There’s more to the world,” said the president in a complaint to an evening caller. “Somebody should tell Sean.”