Even Sean Hannity cant get Trump to back away from wanting revenge

Fox News host Sean Hannity has been involved in politics for a long time. His success stems, in part, from being a conduit between the fervors of the Republican base and the centers of Republican power, effectively conveying messages back and forth between those groups to keep things on an even keel. It was derivative, but it worked.

Then along came Donald Trump, who took a different tack: Trump embraced the rhetoric of the base, rhetoric that itself was largely driven by the fringe-right sources of information and misinformation that the base and Trump consumed. That fringe right was already a problem for Fox, but Trump was a bigger one. Hannity did a quick temperature check and went all-in on the soon-to-be president.

That was a while ago. Since 2016, we’ve seen Trump evolve, gaining confidence in his ability to navigate political waters. He’s still more attuned to negative feedback than many people assume, but he also acts — justifiably — as though the risks he faces come from an erosion of his base, not from a failure to make that base bigger.

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Hannity, though, hasn’t entirely adapted. He still plays the role he’s played for past prominent Republicans and even for Trump in the early days, helping them scale back or reword controversies by setting them up with easy lines or points of agreement. As the 2024 election has unfolded, Hannity has more than once tried to steer Trump away from what outsiders view as Trump’s most fraught comments. But, unlike in years past, Trump has been less willing to do so — because the fraught stuff is what the base wants.

Before this week, the best example of this dynamic came from a town-hall discussion between Trump and Hannity in December. Hannity wanted Trump to disavow any intent to subvert democracy and seize power, to kneecap the hand-wringers on the left and in the old guard who were offering warnings about Trump’s second term.

“Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight,” Hannity lobbed to Trump, “you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody.”

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“Except for Day One,” Trump chirped, to the amusement of the audience. Trump has since argued that this was just a joke, just a bit of whimsy about how he wanted to have absolute power for a short period to effect change. You know, like Julius Caesar. But this was not the answer Hannity was seeking. The Fox News host spent decades tuning his antenna to understand what candidates should and shouldn’t say and was trying to keep Trump on-radar. He failed.

Then came the interview that aired Wednesday. Again, Hannity overtly wanted Trump to assure viewers and America that he wasn’t going to target his political opponents if reelected — an assurance, in effect, that he would close the barn door even though the horse was well over the horizon.

“My question is a very serious one,” Hannity said. “People are claiming you want retribution. People are claiming you want what has happened to you done to Democrats. Would you do that ever?”

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“Look, what’s happened to me has never happened in this country before,” Trump replied, “and it has to stop, because—”

Hannity jumped in.

“Wait a minute!” he interjected. “I want to hear that again. It has to stop.”

There you go! Trump said the thing that will give him enough cover for the next few months. Whew. But then, as when Trump was asked about Jeffrey Epstein this month, the former president kept talking.

“Focus on those that want people to believe that you want retribution, that you will use the system of justice to go after your political enemies,” Hannity repeated after Trump had gone on a tangent about how he’s “a very legitimate person.”

They’re wrong, Trump said, repeating the line Hannity enjoyed that it had to stop. Uh, but!

“I would have every right to go after them,” Trump continued. “And it’s easy, because it’s Joe Biden, and you see all the criminality, all of the money that’s going into the family and him, all of this money from China, from Russia, from Ukraine.”

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Another tangent, this time accusing Biden’s family of taking money from a Russian woman, which isn’t true. (“Turned out to be true,” Trump said of the story, without Hannity offering any objection.)

More riffing from Trump and then Hannity tried again.

“Will you pledge to restore equal justice, equal application of our laws, end this practice of weaponization?” he asked. “Is that a promise you’re going to make?”

“Well, you have to do it,” Trump replied. “But it’s awful.”

Then he gave the game away.

“Look,” Trump continued, “I know you want me to say something so nice.”

“No, I don’t want you to say!” Hannity objected, a claim that you may evaluate for yourself. “I’m asking.”

“But I don’t want to look naive,” Trump continued. “What they have done to the Republican Party, they want to arrest on no crime. They want to arrest the person that won the nomination in a landslide.”

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He’s popular, the indictments are bad, etc., for a while. And then:

“I will do everything in my power not to let — but there’s tremendous criminality here,” Trump said. “What they’re doing to me, if it’s going to continue, we’re really not going to have much of a country left. It’s really — it is weaponization. You call it ‘lawfare.’ You call it — some people call it just ‘warfare.’”

He insisted that the country wouldn’t want Biden to leave office and then, two days later, be indicted, any more than they would have wanted Hillary Clinton targeted with legal challenges. But as president, Trump pushed his first attorney general to have Clinton investigated and saw his second attorney general actually investigate her. His allies are pledging to set up — and are setting up — conduits for criminal responses to the Bidens. The bitterness with which Trump describes his situation is perhaps a better guide for what he intends than his reticent acquiescence to the point Hannity wants him to make.

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Trump, by now, is certainly aware that his political strength derives from his base of support, a base that responds when he positions himself as a victim of powerful, Deep State oppressors. Hannity is used to smoothing out Republican candidates so that moderates or even some Democrats will give them a look, to applying a dollop of establishment sensibility to rough-hewed up-and-comers. But Trump is beyond that, as his dismissive agreement makes clear. And his base is a base that believed Biden should be charged with a crime for having classified documents at his house.

Asking Trump to disavow retribution because it’s better for him politically is a misread of Trump’s relationship with his supporters and of the fervency of his anger at Biden (who, of course, is not the reason Trump faces indictment). By now, Hannity should understand that the landscape has changed.

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