BONUS - Newsletter - A Brief Analysis of The Trump Interview on Hannity
A condensed overview of Sean Hannity's interview with Trump on 9/21 - 9/22
I wasn’t planning on covering Hannity last week but I found out about his interview with Trump immediately after it aired. I decided to go ahead and add two hours (both nights) to my coverage from last week as I knew it would be newsworthy.
Former President Donald J. Trump decided it would be a good idea to talk about the various criminal and civil cases he’s facing on the most popular cable news network last week. Sean Hannity featured a two-part interview with the real estate mogul on Wednesday and Thursday night.
There’s nothing like handing a prosecutor incriminating statements that have already been analyzed and picked apart by the media and legal experts months before a trial.
Only a very stable genius could sabotage his own defense on multiple cases as spectacularly as Trump.
Most lawyers would caution their client against self-incrimination on a national platform, but then Trump doesn’t always pay his attornies.
A detailed fact check of Trump’s ramblings from the interview would exceed the character limit for an article on Substack as every other sentence in this rambling diatribe was a misstatement, delusion or blatant lie.
This is just a brief breakdown of some of the most egregious moments.
The Interview
The following are select quotes that I’ve broken up to make them easier to read. Not only did Hannity not push back or challenge anything Trump said, he praised and fawned all over him the entire time.
Trump started with an attack on the Attorney General of New York who just filed civil charges against him and some of his adult children.
“Leticia James. She just talked about Trump and we're going to indict him. We're going to get him. She knew nothing about me. I never heard of her,” said Trump.
Somehow it was important to Trump that Leticia James wasn’t important because he didn’t know who she was. He also spoke of himself in the third person a few times during the interview.
He then claimed the entire investigation was more political persecution.
“Just a continuation of a witch hunt that began when I came down the escalator at Trump Tower,” said Trump.
When Trump made the transition to his financial affairs he got noticeably panicked.
“I have very little debt, unbelievably little. A powerful company, a company that's very lonely, leveraged,” said Trump.
A lot of what he said during this segment didn’t make a ton of sense.
“I built a great company, a powerful company, a company that's very lowly, leveraged with among the best assets anywhere in the world,” said Trump.
It’s estimated that Trump could owe over $1 billion in debt on his properties but of course to him that might be considered “lowly leveraged.”
Then of course there was the incident with the FBI.
“Sir, the FBI just came in. I said, What? The FBI. Who? And they go, The FBI? And I said, How many people? Many, many people, sir. Many, many people. There are people standing at the gates with AK 47 or some kind of a very sophisticated gun . . . So they go into the rooms like my bedroom, my office. They go into the room . . .The wife's closet . . . a photo of Hunter Biden and Barron. Trump. Barron looks so innocent,” said Trump
His persecution complex continued.
“They went to a magistrate that hates me . . . They hated Trump and we had boxes. And again, many of these boxes had other things as happens to a former president, etc. etc. I hate to use the word former because I have a lot of problems with what happened, said Trump”
Trump did refer to himself as a former president so he could be making progress accepting the reality that he did not win the last election.
Then Trump implied the FBI planted evidence.
“They won't let anybody near them. They wouldn't even let them in the same building. Did they drop anything into those piles or did they do it later? Well, there's no chain of custody here with them,” said Trump.
To which Hannity asked, “Wouldn't that be on videotape?”
Trump responded, Potentially, but no, I don't think so. I mean, if they're in a room.”
I would think having a camera in a room would make it easier to see if agents planted any evidence but Hannity just let that statement stand unchallenged.
Trump thinks he can declassify things with his mind.
After Hannity asked Trump about his process to declassify documents Trump responded with a puzzling statement.
“As I understand, that doesn't have to be if you're the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it's declassified, even by thinking about it,” said Trump.
Then the former president implied he might have documents in another location.
“Because you're sending it Mar-a-Lago, or to wherever you're sending it. And there doesn't have to be a process. There can be a process, but it doesn't have to be. You're the president. You make that decision. So when you send it, it's declassified,” said Trump.
Apparently it sounds like Trump thinks classified and top secret documents are automatically declassified if he moved them to a location outside a secure government facility.
But her emails . . .
Former Secretary of State and one time political opponent of Donald J. Trump was mentioned a total of eight times in the full hour long interview.
“There's also a lot of speculation because of what they did, the severity of the FBI coming and raiding Mar-a-Lago. Were they looking for the Hillary Clinton emails that were deleted? But they are around someplace,” said Trump.
This alarmed even Hannity who interjected briefly as Trump kept going.
“And a lot of people said the only thing that would have the kind of severity that they showed by actually coming in and rating with many, many people is the Hillary Clinton deal, the Russia, Russia, Russia stuff or I mean, there are there are a number of things, the spying on Trump's campaign,” said Trump
Why on earth would Trump be in possession of the 33,000 personal emails that Hillary Clinton’s legal team deleted from her personal server? If Trump did have evidence or documentation of those emails why would he be holding on to it and not tell the press? How would the FBI suddenly get emails they’ve already searched for?
It seemed more like a desperate ploy by Trump to return to blaming his favorite political villain.
This video is a condensed edit from the first installment on Hannity.
Immigrants are Poison
In a variation of the speech he made when he first announced his campaign for president Trump continued to demonize immigrants.
“Millions of people are in our country now that shouldn't be here. Many of them are prisoners . . .Deport them? Criminals? The bad ones I would deport. Yeah, the bad ones. I went to deport. Millions and millions of people have been poisoning our country, they're poisoning. I'd like to be nice about it. Yesterday I heard that Venezuela is emptying their prisons out into the United States,” said Trump
Russia and poor misunderstood Putin
Alarmingly Russia was mentioned 20 times throughout the interview with the phrase “Russia, Russia, Russia,” repeated three times. President Vladimir Putin was mentioned eight times. In stark contrast Ukraine came up only once.
Trump also reduced the Russian invasion of Ukraine down to,
“As he (Putin) does his war thing,” said Trump.
The former president still seemed to make excuses for Putin rather than defend Europe or Ukraine.
“And he's (Putin) selling it to China and he's selling it to other places. And Europe is going to dump us. You watch because they're not going to allow their people to freeze. So they're going to dump us. We're out there fighting. We're spending many times more money than them. And they're going they will be dumping us,” said Trump
No one in Hollywood could Cast an Actor Like President Xi!
As he ranted about various world leaders he included this about Chinese President Xi,
“I said this year that you could go all over Hollywood and try and get somebody to play the role of President Xi, the president of China. There is no actor like that. There's nobody like that. He's a fierce people. He's a fierce man. He was always a very good friend of his until COVID came in.”
Trump later called COVID a gift from China.
Trump also pontificated about his supposed brilliant deals with the Taliban that allegedly included a terrorist referring to Trump as “your excellency.”
He falsely claimed he sent in the National Guard into Minnesota during the riots that followed the murder of George Floyd. He boasted several times that the U.S. did not have any casualties for 18 months in Afghanistan, which does not line up with information supplied by the Department of Defense.
Trump trashed Biden’s unemployment numbers, boasted that he could get the price of gasoline and inflation to drop and generally predicted an apocalyptic future for the country as a whole if he was not re-elected.
This video is a condensed edit from the second installment on Hannity.
The sniffing, so much sniffing.
Is the former president someone who sniffs crushed Adderral pills? Does he use cocaine? Are his sinuses chronically dripping? Is the sniff just some form of nervous tic?
I have no idea why Donald J. Trump has this strange habit but I decided to edit all the examples I could find. In the words of the great MAGA king, “ENJOY!”
By the Numbers
This is a chart of some of the words used in the interview and how many times they showed up. This list represents both words spoken by Hannity and Trump.
Coming up…
I should publish my weekly newsletter about the week ending 9/25 later tonight. This interview just needed it’s own newsletter since it was so incredibly bonkers.
I've said this on Twitter, and I'll say it here. Thank you so much for doing this, because there is no way in God's green earth that I could sit through an entire episode of anything that shows on F*x.
Yay! I want to read the snarky long comment now after your tweet.