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  For Sunny and Story

  It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.

  —DONALD TRUMP, MARCH 10, 2020

  In serious situations, truth matters.

  —SEAN HANNITY, MARCH 11, 2020

  PROLOGUE

  On March 26, 2020, the people of the United States desperately needed a leader. Instead, they got Donald Trump and Sean Hannity.

  The day began with a dreaded round number: 1,000 confirmed deaths from the novel coronavirus. Every six minutes another American died from the disease, and everyone knew the true number was even higher, since many died at home without being tested. By nighttime, the official death toll reached 1,195. The suffering was most pronounced in Trump’s hometown, Queens, New York, at Elmhurst Hospital Center, where sick residents lined up in the cold and prayed for a chance to see a doctor. Elmhurst was already out of beds, and would soon be out of ventilators too. The hallways were jammed with patients who could barely stand or say their own names. The scene was far worse than any of the vague, hopeful pablum issued by the White House would have led you to believe, and that’s why two young doctors risked their jobs to alert the public. Dr. Colleen Smith filmed inside the hospital on her iPhone and sent the video to The New York Times. Her colleague Dr. Ashley Bray told a Times reporter of the “apocalyptic” atmosphere as patient after patient died despite heroic efforts. Bray’s description on page one of the March 26 edition marked a turning point in the public’s understanding of the crisis.

  But the president didn’t read the story. Months earlier, he’d proudly claimed that he canceled the White House’s subscriptions to the Times. Whenever the paper published a painfully true critique of the administration, Trump and his media allies at Fox News claimed the Times was “fake” and “failing.” But the beleaguered and shrinking pool of committed journalists at Fox knew that was a lie. They wished sources like Bray and Smith would call them instead of the Times, but they knew the misconduct of their prime time peers made that impossible. The rich-beyond-belief stars like Hannity had downplayed the virus and now looked just as ignorant as the president. Fox correspondents tried in vain to report the news anyway, sharing Bray’s “apocalyptic” quote five times on five different shows. But viewers like Trump had been trained, by Fox, to disbelieve what other news outlets said, and they didn’t want to believe it was that bad.

  There was a severe deficit of trust, including at the top. Trump didn’t even trust the news anchors on Fox News. They had a tendency to be “nasty,” he told aides, and some of them belonged on CNN or MSNBC, not on the network he promoted to his tens of millions of followers. To be clear, Trump didn’t jabber about Fox out of the goodness of his own heart. He needed Fox. He depended on propagandists like Hannity to tell him what he wanted to hear. He depended on Fox to keep the walls of his alternative reality intact.

  That’s why the president was scheduled to call in to Hannity’s show at 9 p.m. Eastern time. Nine o’clock couldn’t come soon enough for Trump—that day’s daily press briefing on the Covid-19 crisis had been a disaster. He’d gone out before the cameras at 5:30 and told the public to “relax.” He shared his affections for NFL quarterback Tom Brady. And he attacked the “corrupt” news media. “I wish the news could be—could be real,” he said, insulting the journalists spread out before him in the briefing room due to the government’s social distancing guidelines—guidelines that he flagrantly ignored. After thirty-nine misleading minutes, he left the briefing early, ordered dinner, and waited for his turn on Hannity. The power imbalance was something to behold: The president had the joint chiefs and the cabinet and any number of world leaders at his beck and call, but when it came time for an interview on Fox News, he was just another caller who needed to be patched into the control room switchboard. Hannity started the show with his usual sermon about Democrats endangering the country. On this night, he ripped into New York governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. Hannity accused the two Democrats of “politicizing this national emergency” by criticizing Trump and said “both of you need to stop.” Then he politicized the national emergency himself with the help of his caller, Donald from Queens.

  “Is he there?” Hannity asked his producers. He heard nothing, and momentarily freaked out. He waited for the control room to tell him what to do.

  Then came a Voice of God, just the savior this host needed: “I am, I’m right here. Hi, Sean.”

  “Mr. President!” Hannity exclaimed. “Thank you…”

  And they were off. Trump began by flattering his facilitator: He claimed that he had postponed a critical phone call with Chinese president Xi Jinping in order to talk with Hannity.

  “That shows the power of… that shows you have the number one rated show on television,” Trump said.

  The ratings claim was a lie, since Hannity’s show had always been eclipsed by numerous other television shows, from NBC Nightly News to American Idol, Wheel of Fortune to Survivor. But Trump was only talking about cable. He didn’t care nearly as much about broadcast networks. He was a cable guy. His call with Hannity was the highlight of his day.

  This interview, if you could even call it that, was a love-in and a lie-fest. But there was a little bit of truth embedded in Trump’s first answer. He really did keep the Chinese president waiting. “I am talking to him at ten-thirty, right after this call,” Trump told Hannity.

  Beijing noticed Trump’s televised stunt and kept him waiting for a while after 10:30, according to a White House source. Trump tweeted at 1:19 in the morning, Eastern time, that he “just finished a very good conversation with President Xi.”

  Unfortunately it was his forty-minute chat with Hannity that was more consequential to the body politic. Trump’s remarks proved that he still didn’t fundamentally grasp the urgency of the pandemic. He professed doubt about the computer models that had led Cuomo to plead for thirty thousand ventilators. “I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” Trump said. “I don’t believe you need forty thousand or thirty thousand ventilators.”

  Ultimately the state of New York did not need thirty thousand ventilators—because of heroic actions by healthcare workers and drastic steps taken by millions of other New Yorkers. Without massive social distancing, many more ventilators, and chaplains and coffins, would have been needed. But Trump’s default setting was disbelief. It was where he was most comfortable. When Dr. Bray heard about his denialism, she muttered, “What an asshole.”

  Some of Hannity’s colleagues tried to stand up to the nonsense. Dr. Nicole Saphier, a radiologist who doubled as a medical commentator for Fox News, went on the air the next day and said, “I know that there’s a shortage of ventilators.” Network management encouraged this kind of thing; they wanted guests to rebut the president’s reckless remarks. They wanted to be able to say that Fox was home to all points of view. But they also knew that Saphier’s comments at one in the afternoon were seen by a fraction of the audience that Hannity had. Prime time had the power. And management had no control over prime time.

  * * *

  The day after his on-air powwow with Hannity, the president called the host with a question: “How’d we do?”

  Hannity knew the real meaning of the question was “How did we rate?”
r />   The two men spoke by phone almost every day, but the purpose of this particular call was disgraceful. In the midst of a crippling pandemic, on a day when another 393 Americans would die gasping for air without their loved ones by their side, the president wanted to know about his ratings.

  The ratings for Hannity the night before were higher than usual, but it wasn’t primarily due to Trump’s presence, it was due to the pandemic. On the night Trump called in, Tucker Carlson ended his 8 p.m. hour with 5 million viewers, and Hannity started with 5.6 million, which means about one in ten viewers tuned in specifically to see Hannity and the president. The rest would have been watching anyway. Once POTUS was on the phone, viewership ticked up to 5.7 million, and by the time he hung up, it had ticked down to 5.4 million, the same way some Trump rallygoers always left before the end of the show. The truth was, the president was not a huge ratings magnet anymore. Almost no one flipped from CNN or MSNBC to see him speak on Fox. Trump had a base, the base was hooked on Fox, and the base wasn’t growing. But Hannity didn’t say any of that to Trump. He put a positive spin on the numbers. Then Trump had another question: What about the ratings for his daily briefings?

  Despite the pair’s purported opposition to the Times, someone had slipped Trump a copy of the publication’s story titled “Trump’s Briefings Are a Ratings Hit. Should Networks Cover Them Live?” He wanted to know if the story was legit. To be clear, most people weren’t watching the briefings because of Trump, they were watching because they were worried about their health. But Hannity didn’t tell Trump that—he told Trump that the briefings were ratings sensations. They were even bigger than his rallies!

  And the fact that some newsrooms were having debates about whether to show the briefings? Even better. It was a new episode of Trump Versus the Media. Easy fodder for Hannity, something fun to talk about, a diversion from the vicious virus. Trump went on to tout his ratings (“so high,” “record ratings,” “through the roof”) seven different times during the height of the pandemic. It was grotesque.

  And it was partly Hannity’s fault. On March 26, as on so many other days, Hannity did Trump a disservice by feeding his ego. A real friend would have advised him not to say a word about TV ratings during a national emergency. Focus on the federal response. Celebrate the healthcare workers on the front lines. But Trump and Hannity brought out the worst in one another. Trump programmed Hannity’s show and Hannity produced Trump’s presidency. Hannity fed misinformation to Trump and Trump fed it right back to Hannity. In early 2020 this feedback loop had life-and-death consequences. At a political rally in South Carolina on February 28 the president said, “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it.” He likened the Democrats’ conduct to “the impeachment hoax” and said, “this is their new hoax.”

  It was his new favorite word, on the trail and on Twitter: HOAX. He used it almost every day, and so did Hannity. They radicalized each other and their viewers.

  Trump mostly employed the word in connection with impeachment and Russia. He used it just once in the context of the pandemic, but it was still outrageous. Amanda Carpenter, the Ted Cruz communications director turned CNN commentator who wrote a book about Trump’s make-you-question-your-reality techniques, known as gaslighting, said she thought the “nonsense about calling it a ‘hoax’ initially but then saying he was only referring to the Democrats’ ‘overreaction’ was really strong gaslighting. He clearly wanted the idea of a ‘hoax’ associated with the virus.” And it wasn’t just Trump, Carpenter said; it was parrots like Hannity too: “They were downplaying the threat and acting like anyone who was worried about it wasn’t sincere and this was all a scam to get Trump. That’s something that stuck and did tremendous damage.”

  Indeed, Hannity used the same frame as Trump on March 9, when he bashed Democrats and members of the media for exaggerating the threat of the virus. “They’re scaring the living hell out of people and I see it again as like, ‘Oh, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,’ ” he said.

  “We’ve never called the virus a hoax,” Hannity insisted nine days later.

  No, technically he did not. What he did was even worse.

  “Batshit crazy”

  Sean Hannity is the most powerful person at Fox in the Trump age. When people asked him who was in charge of the channel, he said, “Me.” And most people at the channel agreed with him.

  He worked from home most days, thirty-eight long miles from Manhattan, in a $10.5 million mansion on the North Shore of Long Island. Hannity loved it out there. There was only one way in and one way out of his village, and a police station that kept track of every car that drove by. Billy Joel lived half a mile down the road. Hannity was close to his favorite fishing spots and the airstrip where he kept his private jet. He had a pool and a boat dock in the backyard, and a tennis court nestled in the woods nearby. One of his favorite toys? His helicopter.

  Hannity originally wanted to be a radio star. In the early nineties he was a Rush-Limbaugh-in-training—a right-wing radio host who hoped to be a tenth as rich as Rush someday. A Long Island native with a blue-collar New York accent, he learned the medium at UC Santa Barbara, where he landed a weekly show on the campus radio station. If you scour the university’s website now, you’ll find no mention of this famous ex-student, one of the most influential men to ever walk the quad. That’s because he never graduated from Santa Barbara, or any other college. In 1989 his radio show was halted when he made anti-gay remarks and claimed “the media” was covering up the truth about AIDS. When this controversy resurfaced in 2017, he expressed regret for “ignorant” remarks in the past. But at the time he used the episode as a launchpad. Hannity billed himself as “the most talked-about college radio host in America” and scored a hosting gig at a right-wing station in Huntsville, Alabama. That’s where he met his wife, Jill. After two years he moved to a bigger market, Atlanta, where he shouted into a mic about Bill Clinton every day and snagged the ear of the second most important person in his life: Roger Ailes. Fox News was in need of a young Limbaugh. Ailes shipped him up to New York for a tryout. “He saw something that I didn’t even think I knew I had,” Hannity told me in a 2011 interview.

  Hannity’s Long Island mansion and his oceanfront Naples, Florida, penthouse are two über-expensive symbols of how Ailes changed his life. Nowadays, Hannity is a living connection to Fox’s past—he’s the only prime time host at Fox News who was there on launch day and is still there nearly twenty-five years later. His tenure and ratings give him tremendous power. He can get almost anything he wants. In a mid-2010s contract negotiation, he won the right to work from home: Fox installed a state-of-the-art studio so that he could helm his nightly TV show from his mansion, the same way he already did his afternoon radio show. Radio kept him tethered to Republican voters—and TV kept him tethered to Trump. He did it all in relative seclusion; by 2019, he rarely ever came into the office. “Sean hosts from Long Island most of the time,” a Fox executive said. But most viewers had no clue. When the great shutdown began in March 2020, it was a good thing to have—Fox scrambled to set up home studios for forty other hosts and guests, and Hannity already had one.

  Hannity’s friends told me that he was burnt out for long stretches of the Trump presidency. Being the president’s “shadow” chief of staff, as he was known around the White House, could be a thrill, but it was also a serious burden. He counseled Trump at all hours of the day: One of Hannity’s confidants said the president treated him like Melania, like a wife in a sexless marriage. Arguably he treated Hannity better than he did the First Lady. Hannity’s producers marveled at his influence and access. “It’s a powerful thing to be someone’s consigliere,” one producer said. “I hear Trump talk at rallies, and I hear Sean,” a family friend commented.

  Hannity chose this life, so no one felt sorry for him, but the stress took its toll. “Hannity would tell you, off off off the record, that Trump is a batshit crazy pers
on,” one of his associates said. Another colleague concurred: “Hannity has said to me, more than once, ‘he’s crazy.’ ”

  But Hannity’s commitment to GOP priorities and commitment to his own business model meant that he could never say so publicly. And if one of his friends went on the record and quoted Hannity questioning Trump’s mental fitness, Hannity would end that friendship.

  Early on in the Trump age, Hannity gained weight and vaped incessantly, both of which some members of his inner circle blamed on Trump-related pressure. “If you were hearing what I’m hearing, you’d be vaping too,” Hannity commented to a colleague. He was very sensitive to trolls’ comments about the added pounds, especially from his chest up, since that’s all viewers saw of him most nights, when he was live from his palace. (For the record, I can relate to stress eating.)

  Hannity’s calls with POTUS were a never-ending stream of grievance and gossip. Trump was a run-on sentence, so prone to rambling that “I barely get a word in,” Hannity told one of his allies. He sometimes spoke with the president before the show and again afterward, usually in the 10 p.m. hour, when Trump would rate his guests and recommend talking points and themes for the following day. Trump wanted more of Gregg Jarrett, more of Dan Bongino, more of Newt Gingrich—in other words, the toadiest toads.

  Hannity swore that no one knew the truth about his relationship with Trump and sneered at reporters, such as yours truly, who described his essential role. He certainly didn’t disclose his role in Trumpworld the way a media ethicist would recommend. But once in a while the curtain slipped and his own colleagues pointed out the extraordinary position he held. As the coronavirus crisis deepened in March 2020, Geraldo Rivera said to Hannity on the air, “I want you to tell the president, when you talk to him tonight, that Geraldo said ‘Mr. President, for the good of the nation, stop shaking hands.’ It’s a bad example. We don’t need it.”