Sean Hannity Will Be Trump’s ‘Special Guest’ at a Rally, Violating Even Fox News’ Low Standards

Trump’s national campaign tour in support of his Republican Nationalist Party is reaching a fever pitch as we approach the last few days before the election. In a late breaking press release, Trump has announced that he will have two special guests joining him at his cult rally in Missouri: Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

Donald Trump Sean Hannity

Of course Limbaugh and Hannity are not exactly a match for Oprah and Obama. But there are other contradictions in this turn of events that deserve attention. For instance, a few years ago Limbaugh soured on the GOP and promised to never carry water for the party again. Apparently he got over it.

A bigger problem is Hannity’s addition to this reality show lineup. That’s the same Hannity who Trump calls before beddy-bye every night. And this isn’t the first time that Hannity has unethically stumped for Trump. He was even admonished by his bosses at Fox News for it. If you can believe it, Fox News has some journalistic standards that are obviously rather low, but they exist. Or so we thought. Back in 2016 Fox rebuked Hannity for appearing in a Trump campaign video. This is what News Corpse published at the time:


Hannity taped a tribute to Donald Trump that appears in a new web ad. Curiously, he is identified only as “Sean Hannity, TV personality.” Not only did they leave out his Fox News affiliation, but they reduced him to the status of Kim Kardashian or Ryan Seacrest. In the clip Hannity unequivocally states his support for Trump and outlines his reasons why.

“One of the reasons I’m supporting Donald Trump this year is number one, he’s going to put originalists on the Supreme Court. People that believe in fidelity to the Constitution, separation of powers, co-equal branches of government. He’s a guy that will vet refugees to keep Americans safe. And of course he’s gonna build that wall. He says he’s gonna have Mexico pay for it. That’s fine, as long as we secure the country and, of course, we don’t want people competing for jobs. He said he will eliminate Obamacare, make us energy-independent, and as somebody who’s been a marksman since I’m 11 years old, protecting our Second Amendment rights are paramount to me.”

This list of right-wing tripe is typical of the propaganda that Fox and Hannity regularly dispense. Nothing in it varies from the conservative politics that dominate the network. What’s unusual is that Hannity delivers his testimonial in an official Trump advertisement. Along with fellow asshats like Ted Nugent, Hannity plants a wet kiss full on the mouth of his hallowed hero. Unfortunately, he failed to get permission from his Fox bosses before contributing his services. That reckless disobedience resulted in Fox News taking swift disciplinary action:

“We were not aware of Sean Hannity participating in a promotional video and he will not be doing anything along these lines for the remainder of the election season.”

Well, that ought teach him. While distancing themselves from Hannity’s impropriety, Fox firmly forbade him from further misconduct. And that appears to be the extent of his punishment. He wasn’t suspended. His pay wasn’t docked. There doesn’t even seem to be a demand to remove his segment from Trump’s ad. What’s more, they gave him permission to continue his partisan antics after the election.

This absence of consequences isn’t the least bit peculiar. Why would Fox News punish Hannity for doing in an ad what he does everyday on his program?


Everything written at that time applies perfectly today. Hannity is still a Trump-fluffing shill, and Fox News still doesn’t care about upholding any journalistic principles. Nothing changes for these dishonest, unethical propagandists who are now working for the State. Pathetic.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

UPDATE: Both Fox News and Hannity made statements that he was only going to Missouri to interview Trump and would not campaign on stage with him. They lied. Not only did Hannity speak at the rally, but so did Fox’s Jeanine Pirro. More proof that Fox News is the State TV affiliate of the Trump White House.

UPDATE II: Fox News finally commented on this with a weak, meaningless statement saying only that it “does not condone any talent participating in campaign events” and that it “was an unfortunate distraction and has been addressed.” Addressed how? Fox doesn’t say. Hannity also posted a thoroughly dishonest tweet (which he later deleted, but is preserved here) saying that his appearance “was NOT planned.” Yeah right. It was literally featured in the White House press release saying that he would be a “special guest.” Is he trying to tell us that he was the only person who didn’t know that Trump would call on him (and Pirro) to speak?

Trump Brags About the ‘Great Honor’ of Record Approval in a Fox News Poll that Doesn’t Exist

Trying to analyze the presidency of Donald Trump gets harder with each passing day. The primary difficulty is attempting to discern whether Trump is lying or stupid or suffering from senile dementia. The unarguable signs of one or more of all three of these Trump deficiencies are evident in nearly everything he says. Although, in the end, it hardly matters which one stands out at any given time because they are all alarming and unacceptable traits in an American president.

Donald Trump

Case in point: On Sunday morning Trump awoke and took to his twitter machine to communicate directly with his Deplorable cult disciples. He re-tweeted some twenty previous tweets from last week, including the most flagrantly racist campaign ad ever produced. And mired in that muck of mainly endorsements of Republican Nationalist Party candidates was this display of Trump fluffing his own ego:

Any conscious observer would recognize right off the bat that there is something terribly wrong with this tweet. Trump’s actual approval rating among African-Americans is in single digits. A recent Washington Post poll put the number at three percent. Even a Trump-friendly Fox News poll last month reported that all non-white respondents combined totalled only Twenty-nine percent approval.

However, an even more troubling part of this tweet is Trump’s assertion that the forty percent approval among African-Americans came from a Fox News poll. The only problem with that is that no such poll exists. So this is Trump either lying, being too dumb to understand simple news reporting, or sinking into a blissful dementia.

There is, however, some evidence that stupidity is the cause of this particular mental failure. There was a segment on Trump’s favorite Fox program, Fox and Friends (video below), wherein contributor Deroy Murdock cited a poll that did put Trump’s African-American approval at forty percent. The program blasted a full screen graphic of this “news” to introduce the Murdock interview. But right at the bottom of the graphic was an attribution of the polling data to Rasmussen Reports, the notoriously right-leaning survey outfit that exists only to give conservatives some positive poll results when reputable pollsters have none. Murdock repeated the number in the interview, but neither he nor co-host Pete Hegseth bothered to identify the utterly non-credible source.

So apparently Trump was engaged in his customary practice of watching hours and hours of Fox News and happened to see this bogus story on how much African-Americans adore him. Then he had to immediately share this falsehood with his (many fake) Twitter followers. It’s cute that he feels “honored” by the imaginary approval that he thinks he has among a demographic group that almost universally despises him and his racist agenda. But it’s disturbing that he continues to have such an acutely distorted perception of the nation he is supposedly leading.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.