{"id":10084,"date":"2018-04-18T22:35:22","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T22:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=10084"},"modified":"2018-04-20T23:13:32","modified_gmt":"2018-04-20T23:13:32","slug":"is-sean-hannity-the-new-shadow-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=10084","title":{"rendered":"Is Sean Hannity the new shadow president?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sean Hannity talks and Trump listens hard, it seems. Look again at Hannity here…SeaCourtesy imgflip.com<\/em><\/p>\n

CULTURE CURRENTS MEDIA WATCH\u00a0\"Celestron<\/strong><\/p>\n

April, 18, 2018<\/p>\n

Regarding the new controversy in TV-besotted Trumpworld: Fox talk show host Sean Hannity\u2019s evidently increasing closeness and influence over Donald Trump and his \u201cthinking,\u201d ie. his tweets and even policy behaviors.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s impossible to overstate how much influence Sean Hannity has on Trump and the White House,\u201d says a pundit on a show Wednesday afternoon, hosted by Nicolle Wallace, a Republican talk show host on MSNBC.*<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s innocuous, because it\u2019s so transparent, \u201c says Donny Deutsch, an advertising executive and former talk TV host, who\u2019s a curious sort of pundit on serious politics. He seems to take a quasi-aesthetic\/ political gamesmanship angle, the kind who manipulates mirrors to see things, then “re-focuses” to his curiously skewed viewpoint. He\u2019s the sort of \u201cliberalesque\u201d guy who might be liked by Trump (See Deutsch\u2019s controversies below 1<\/strong>)<\/p>\n

\u201cHere\u2019s where it\u2019s dangerous,\u201d Wallace quickly countered. \u201cFox isn\u2019t state-run media; the state is run by Fox\u2026It\u2019s dangerous, Hannity has accused of Bob Mueller launching a war on Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wallace has become one of MSNBC\u2019s most watchable and compelling hosts, even though she\u2019s a bit buried in the middle of the daily afternoon slot. I\u2019m fortunate that I work largely at home, and can catch her from time to time. And she’s worth political reflection for not being an obvious liberal, like most MSNBC hosts. I admit I seem to be a clear liberal now, having been pushed further left in recent decades by Republican corruption, inhumane destructiveness, and now a sort of presidential insanity and the\u00a0<\/span>pervasive\u00a0<\/span>spinelessness of\u00a0Republican Congress members.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Similarly another Republican commentator frequently on MSNBC, former George W. Bush strategist Steve Schmidt is, for my money, among the most lacerating, illuminating,\u00a0and eloquent critics of Trump. He’s a paragon of a true Republican patriot, and could be a strong\u00a0(R)\u00a0<\/span>presidential candidate, if he were so inclined. 2<\/strong>)<\/span><\/p>\n

Back to the exchange on the Wallace show: Deutsch\u2019s waffling-banalities-disguised-as-bright-ideas\u00a0continues: \u201cA poll says half of Republicans say that Fox News is the most reliable source of information\u2026I think Fox viewers accept whatever Trump has to deliver. He\u2019s a master communicator.”<\/span><\/p>\n

To me, “master communicator” is an utterly grandiose way of putting it (or driving it when he should be putting it, to use a golf analogy Trump might understand).<\/p>\n

A “master communicator” cannot persistently be a \u201cyou know what I mean\u201d president, as Wallace again pithily nailed Trump as, versus one who can actually study, understand\u00a0and articulate a viable, humane, democratic, and coherent policy. We’re increasingly frightened by Trump’s\u00a0dangerous,\u00a0<\/span>by-seat-of-his-pants “foreign policy.” What’s left of my hair turns whiter daily.<\/span><\/p>\n

To me, Trump is not “such an idiot\u201d as a friend of mine recently said, in understandable exasperation. More precisely, Trump is an idiot savant, of sorts. And it\u2019s quite clear by now that his \u201cgenius\u201d is his ability to toy with his 30% voter lemmings, the base group called \u201cThe Base\u201d \u2013 and<\/em>, sadly, manipulate the daily news cycle, with his irrepressible and typically semi-articulate Twitter bleats. So yes, there’s also some strange breed of fox in this orange-haired Fox suckler.<\/p>\n

Another dangerous aspect of the Hannity-Trump \u201csymbiotic\u201d relationship (as these pundits agreed on) is that not only is Hannity the “unofficial Chief of Staff’ as White House insiders now call him. With John Kelley seriously on the outs (and Trump following the advice of no official staffer, except maybe<\/em> his newbie nuclear-tipped plaything John Bolton), Hannity might be morphing into the type of presidential whisperer that Dick Cheney was: in effect, the shadow president<\/em> when George W. Bush was nominally president.<\/p>\n

Bush implicitly admitted this, by having to repeatedly assert his independence from Cheney by calling himself \u201cThe Decider. \u201c The problem, and danger and tragedy (see: The Iraq War, and the unleashing of Middle East chaos, which continues exacerbated today) was that W.\u2019s decisions stood on the hyper-macho mountains of bullshit built \u2013 and fed to him \u2013 by Cheney, and the nuclear tomahawk who is now Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton.<\/p>\n

Lord (if you’re paying attention anywhere), have mercy on us!<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t watch Hannity enough to give him a pointed or pithy labeI, or characterization. \u00a0I\u2019ll leave that up to others. Thoughts?<\/p>\n

Respond on Facebook, preferably, or on the comments section here.<\/p>\n

____________<\/p>\n

*<\/strong>I apologize, I turned away from the TV to begin typing notes for this post, so I missed the name of this quoted commenter. If any reader can identify him, please do!<\/p>\n

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  1. In 2014, Deutsch was ordered to pay a real estate broker a four percent commission for the 2010 sale of his $30 million home in the\u00a0Hamptons<\/a>area of New York. He was ordered by the\u00a0New York Supreme Court<\/a>\u00a0to pay $1.2 million to\u00a0Sotheby’s<\/a>\u00a0for his breach of contract with broker Edward Petrie.[19]<\/a>[20]<\/a><\/sup><\/li>\n
  2. Schmidt\u2019s comments often provide striking historical perspectives, like his acidic but imaginative tweet posted Wednesday: \u201cUnderstanding what Trump did to (UN Ambassador Nikki) Haley requires a leap of imagination to the surreal where after Adlai Stevenson delivers his brilliant exposition of Soviet lies, Bobby Kennedy calls the Kremlin and says don\u2019t worry about it, we don\u2019t mean it, and then JFK takes Zorins\u2019 side.\u201d\u00a0(Valerian Alexandrovich Zorin<\/strong>\u00a0was a\u00a0<\/span>Soviet<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>diplomat<\/a>\u00a0best remembered for his famous confrontation with\u00a0<\/span>Adlai Stevenson<\/a>\u00a0on 25 October 1962, during the\u00a0<\/span>Cuban Missile Crisis<\/a>.)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    . Sean Hannity talks and Trump listens hard, it seems. Look again at Hannity here…SeaCourtesy imgflip.com CULTURE CURRENTS MEDIA WATCH\u00a0 April, 18, 2018 Regarding the new controversy in TV-besotted Trumpworld: Fox talk show host Sean Hannity\u2019s evidently increasing closeness and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-2CE","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10084"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10101,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10084\/revisions\/10101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}