Disloyal: Trump Mocks His Top Sycophant Behind the Scenes

Am I laughing?

I’m laughing. A lot.

For three years I’ve been going hard at American Pravda (Fox News, for those of you who’ve missed a few of my columns) for their worshipful, slobbering acquiescence to Donald Trump.

Truly, when there were so many solid, serious conservative choices to be the 2016 GOP nominee, Fox News actively worked to torpedo the chances of all of them, in favor of the barking carnival act.

To be fair, every other news network did pretty much the same thing, but we have to assume with every other network it was some grand, liberal plot to assure the rise of the most awful, useless candidate to ever run as a Republican, in order to make an easy path for Hillary Clinton to the White House.

They didn’t realize how badly that plan would backfire on the whole nation.

Still, only Fox News has benefitted from a Trump presidency, and they’ve shown their appreciation by never questioning him, no matter how bad his calls.

Every bad move or embarrassment on the world stage is met with justifications.

If it’s particularly horrendous, they just ignore it, or dig up the old talking points about Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

What they will never do, however, is hold Trump to the same standard.

It is the opinion show hosts that are the worst. Of those, the most devoted has to be Sean Hannity – and this is in a world where Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs exist.

Hannity acts as an unofficial adviser to the president (a claim he denies), and most of his interviews with Trump are the equivalent of televised tongue baths, consisting of the softest softball questions, and teary-eyed looks of love from the host.

Seriously, if you’ve seen one Hannity interview with Trump, you’ve seen them all, because there is absolutely no risk of hearing anything new or groundbreaking.

So what’s so funny?

The Daily Beast has interviewed three sources who have suggested that President Trump, while he tends to like Sean Hannity, mocks him mercilessly for his dumbed down, on-air bootlicking.

That’s right. It doesn’t matter how loyal you are to Trump. We’ve had multiple examples of this. Loyalty is a one way street in Trump world. He demands total loyalty from his subjects, but if you feel that presidential knife in your back, so what?

Trump has repeatedly—and sometimes for a sustained period of time—made fun of Hannity’s interviewing skills, usually zeroing in on the low-quality laziness of the host’s questions, the three people with direct knowledge tell The Daily Beast.

“It’s like he’s not even trying,” Trump has said, one source recalled, right before the president launched into a rough imitation of Hannity’s voice and mannerisms to complain that the questions about how “great I am” give him nothing to work or have fun with.

He’s even called Hannity’s questions for him “dumb.”

This rarely happens, but every now and again, I agree with Donald Trump. Sean Hannity’s questions for him are dumb.

One of the sources recalls a sustained rant by the president against Hannity’s “dumb” interview, so bad that he started to feel sorry for the host, glancing at his watch, and wondering how to back out of that particular conversation, no doubt.

Here’s an example of what Trump considers to be Hannity’s worthless interview stylings:

“Election Day [2016], I actually called you, I said, ‘You’re gonna get bad news about… 5:15 that afternoon. You lost Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.’ And you won ’em all. Polls don’t mean anything, do they?” Hannity asked during his most recent Fox News interview with Trump this month.

“I lost them based on the fake news,” Trump replied.

“Fake news,” Hannity repeated.

According to one source from the White House, it isn’t just Hannity’s style while on camera that irks the president. He’s just as much a drooling sycophant when the cameras are off. He rolls over and offers his belly to Trump, as a matter of habit. Because of such mewling, beta male behavior, Trump has no respect for him.

That almost seems at odds with what we know about Trump and his demands for loyalty, doesn’t it?

A Trump ally explained it in terms of CNN correspondent, Jim Acosta:

“[Trump] does enjoy the back-and-forth with the press—look at this whole Jim Acosta thing,” said Jeff Lord, a Trump ally and former CNN political commentator. “The president can call on anybody he wants. He could have ignored Jim Acosta. He didn’t do it. And he didn’t do it because… they would have some chance to do some verbal jousting there.”

Lord recalled that when he interviewed the then-future president at Trump Tower in 2014, Trump had enthusiastically promised he would “fight back” hard against the “dishonest” press if he ran for the White House. “Donald Trump delights in the combat with these folks,” Lord added.

So he values conflict, even as much as he requires loyalty. He wants to fight, so he can appear as the tough guy. He’s sending mixed signals and Hannity just isn’t picking them up.

He likes Hannity, but he does not respect him, because he is weak.

A recent example of that was on display, when Trump called Hannity to the mic, during a recent campaign rally, just before the midterm election.

The Trump team had already announced that Hannity would be part of the rally, something he was not supposed to do.

Fox News began telling news outlets the “special guest” designation was wrong, and that Hannity would only be at the rally in Missouri to interview Trump for his show. Hannity himself tweeted the day of the event, “To be clear, I will not be on stage campaigning with the president,” and blamed any confusion on supposedly erroneous “reports” instead of Team Trump’s announcement.

In the middle of the political rally, the president called Hannity onstage anyway and told him to come up to the mic—which Hannity did to campaign with the president he supposedly just covers on air.

It’s kind of hard to claim to be an objective news organization when your top personality is at the beck and call of the administration – but they tried, anyway.

“Fox News does not condone any talent participating in campaign events,” the network said in a statement. “We have an extraordinary team of journalists helming our coverage tonight, and we are extremely proud of their work. This was an unfortunate distraction and has been addressed.”

I wonder how it was addressed? It’s unlikely there will be any real consequences.

Meanwhile, a White House official has said that Trump knew that Hannity was not supposed to be speaking at the rally, per network policy. He just didn’t care.

But truly, if there’s anyone shocked to hear that Trump routinely mocks Sean Hannity, they haven’t been paying attention.

And I don’t feel sorry for the man, at all.