Sean Hannity is Trump's bedtime phone buddy
Part of President Trump's nightly routine, New York magazine reports in a new dispatch published Sunday night, is a phone call with Fox News host Sean Hannity. At about 10 p.m. ET, after Hannity's weeknight broadcast is complete, he dials up the president for a chat once Trump has retired to his private residence for the evening.
The conversation topics are varied but the language consistently profane, New York reports: Hannity "and the president alternate between the 'witch hunt!' and gabbing like old girlfriends about media gossip and whose show sucks and who's getting killed in the ratings and who's winning (Hannity, and therefore Trump) and sports and Kanye West, all of it sprinkled with a staccato f--k … f--king … f--ked … f--ker."
Sometimes, the evening chat may be their second or third talk of the day. So frequently are the two men in contact that an unnamed White House official told New York that Hannity is "the leader of the outside kitchen cabinet." Former chief strategist Stephen Bannon echoed the sentiment, working in an insult for his interviewer ("the f--kin' clowns at New York magazine") in the process.
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Trump's close ties to Hannity are significantly of his staff's own doing, New York reports. The president has a well-known habit of morning television consumption, and former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former Press Secretary Sean Spicer reportedly conspired to push him toward Fox & Friends, which mixes lifestyle topics with pro-Trump news coverage that riles the president less than CNN or MSNBC.
Now, however, Fox & Friends and other Fox shows like Hannity's are with Trump in what a former White House staffer labeled "a f--ked-up feedback loop." Read more about it at New York.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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