Sean Hannity got 16 minutes on Fox & Friends to promote his new book designed to scare voters into re-electing Donald Trump. Yet, other than touting Trump’s partial Chinese ban six months ago, Hannity couldn’t tout a single thing Trump has done since then to protect Americans from the COVID-19 pandemic.
During his 16 minutes, an amount of time normally reserved for political figures, Hannity adored Trump and hated on almost everything else in America. First, he whined about the media: “We have talk radio, a lot of conservatives, and we have Fox, and the rest of them, yeah, they’re all fake news dominated by the propaganda wing of the new Democratic socialist party.” (He forgot One America News Network.)
He called former Vice President Joe Biden “the most radical of any major two parties candidate Joe Biden that we’ve ever seen.” He said it “bodes well for the president and his re-election chances.” In reality, the polls overwhelmingly bode well for Biden right now. But not one of the three cohosts mentioned it.
Hannity sang Trump’s praises as “a transformative president” and ‘the most transparent president in our lifetime by far because everything he said he would do in 2016 he has done.”
“Nobody’s been better for Israel, nobody’s been better for religious freedom," Hannity continued. "He followed through on tax cuts and ending burdensome regulation. He followed through on found a way - he’s building 400 miles of wall by Election day. Judges, you name it, energy independence.” (FACT CHECK: Trump has mostly replaced sections of the existing wall and, despite his promise, Mexico has not paid for it. None of the three Fox & Friends cohosts corrected this lie.)
But what about the pandemic that has killed nearly 160,000 Americans and is raging throughout the country? “He put the travel ban 10 days after the coronavirus started,” Hannity said. “It’s incalculable how many lives he saved. So he’s a guy that’s kept his promises.” Later, Hannity said, “It’s sad he will never credit for what he was able to accomplish with the coronavirus” (via that "travel ban").
FACT CHECK: Trump’s so-called “travel ban” went into effect on February 2. It blocked entry to those who had been in China in the last 14 days but it did not apply to U.S. residents and family members or spouses of US residents or citizens. That may have saved lives but certainly did not prevent the pandemic from exploding since then.
The three cohosts kept quiet about that, too. As the segment closed, Hannity predicted a natural “precipitous decline” of coronavirus cases as if just waiting out the virus, and letting thousands of Americans die in the meanwhile, was the smart way to handle it. “We knew that would happen. It was always when, not if.”
Nevertheless, Hannity went on to attack Joe Biden. “Does he have the mental alertness, the strength and stamina for the toughest, hardest job in the world, and I think the answer’s an obvious no,” Hannity said. “He’s kind of a little creepy to me. … He hasn’t accomplished much and he’s changed his positions.” Hannity also tried to paint Biden as a racist by pointing to a 1977 comment he made in opposition to busing as a means for school desegregation.
Meanwhile, Trump’s “accomplishments” may make him one of the worst-ranked presidents in American history.
Instead of truth, cohost Pete Hegseth repeated Trump’s deceitful attack on mail-in ballots – while ignoring how Chris Wallace forcefully debunked that myth on Fox. Hegseth said, “We’re going to have some serious problems with mail-out ballots that are being pushed out to voters that we can’t account for.”
But with unintended irony, Hannity accused the media and the Democratic Party of having “lied to this country since the day that Donald Trump and Melania Trump came down that escalator.” Then, without saying a word about Trump’s refusal to confront Russia on bounties on U.S. soldiers, Hannity acted as though Hillary Clinton was still running against Trump. “Everything [the media] said about Russia, Russia, Russia was a lie. It ends up there was Russian interference, that was Hillary Clinton’s bought and paid-for dossier that was then used to commit premediated fraud on a FISA court to spy on candidate Trump and then transition team Trump and then deep into his presidency.”
Hannity’s girlfriend, Ainsley Earhardt asked this “tough journalist” question to her boyfriend: “I know when you write books, a lot of thought and time goes into what the cover looks like and what the title will be. Yours is Live Free or Die. Explain why you went with that title and this picture?”
You can watch Trump’s top Fox toadies fail to defend anything he has done to fight the coronavirus in the last six months below, from the August 4, 2020 Fox & Friends.
