Fox News host Sean Hannity enjoys a creepy codependent relationship with President Trump, according to a New York Magzine profile by Olivia Nuzzi. The fact that the president has a close friendship/ unofficial advisor relationship with the primetime cable host who most shamelessly carries his water is already well-known, but the depths of their relationship, as described by myriad sources speaking to Nuzzi, is a little unsettling.
According to NY Mag, Hannity typically calls when the president has left the Oval Office and has cloistered himself away in his bedroom at the White House residence for a relaxing evening of screaming at the TV, usually around 7 pm. It’s not uncommon for Trump and Hannity to speak several times a day, one instance being right after the nightly broadcast of Hannity’s show, before Trump’s bedtime. They typically don’t speak in the morning as to not interrupt the president’s strict regimen of watching at least four hours of cable news and tweeting about it. From NY Mag:
Their chats begin casually, with How are yous and What’s going ons. On some days, they speak multiple times, with one calling the other to inform him of the latest developments. White House staff are aware that the calls happen, thanks to the president entering a room and announcing, “I just hung up with Hannity,” or referring to what Hannity said during their conversations, or even ringing Hannity up from his desk in their presence.
One source claims that Hannity and the president talk as a way to fill the void Melania Trump left given that she and the president reportedly lead separate lives outside of photo ops.
On the phone, he 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 fuck … fucking … fucked … fucker. “He’s not a systematic thinker at all. He’s not an ideologue,” one person who knows both men said of Hannity. “He gives tactical advice versus strategic advice.”
The talks may be more important for Trump than for Hannity in a therapeutic sense, even if it’s nearly impossible to accept what we’re seeing from the president reflects any kind of therapy. “He doesn’t live with his wife,” one person who knows both men said of Trump, explaining that he lacks someone “to decompress” with at the end of the day. When they spoke a few hours before Trump welcomed home the newly freed Americans who’d been held hostage in North Korea, he and Hannity told each other how proud they were, how happy the news made them. “You can’t function without that,” this person said, adding that Hannity “actually likes him” even though “he knows how nuts he is. He’s decided that you’re all in or you’re not.”
Perhaps the notion that Trump “doesn’t live with his wife” refers to the reports of Melania keeping a separate bedroom from her husband that surfaced early into the president’s term, via Us Weekly and were echoed in Michael Wolff’s tell-all Fire and Fury. During the interview Daniels gave to 60 Minutes, she mentioned that Trump and his wife slept in separate rooms in Trump Tower when Daniels visited him after their 2006 tryst at a celebrity golf tournament.
It could also refer to the “persistent” rumor the Washington Post reported, but was unable to confirm, that the first lady, her son Barron, and her parents live outside the White House in the D.C. suburbs. White House officials dismissed the rumor as “an urban legend” and “1,000 percent false.”
Regardless of Melania’s proximity to the president, it’s clear that Hannity is fulfilling an emotional void in Trump’s life, whether it’s to provide a sympathetic ear on the phone or doing full-on PR for Trump by running specious hit pieces on special counsel Robert Mueller on behalf of his BFF.
