--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hello? Is this Roshan Karman?
--:-- Roshan Karman: This is Roshan Karman.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you're a friend of mine who I've heard through the grapevine is having mattress problems?
--:-- Roshan Karman: Yeah, actually I am.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was wondering if I could hear your mattress problem for a new segment we're doing over here at Today Explained called Mattress Problems.
--:-- Roshan Karman: Sure, I'd love to tell you about my mattress problems.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, great. Well, before you do that, I'm just going to tell you that you can go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast and use the coupon code podcast10 to get 10% off a mattress.
--:-- Roshan Karman: That sounds good.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, Nicole, I want to play like a little free association game. You down?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: I mean, I love free association. I say a name and you just say the first thing that comes to your mind, like one word.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right. I'll try to keep it to one. Okay, cool. Here we go. Start with a big one. Rush Limbaugh.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Kingmaker.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ann Coulter.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Immigration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Glenn Beck.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Conspiracies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bill O'Reilly.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Loud.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Laura Ingram.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Guns.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tucker Carlson.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Populism or bow tie. But he lost the bow tie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's right. That's right. That's why I had to go with populism. And saving the best for last, Sean Hannity.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Loyalist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hmm. Since Donald Trump was elected president, Sean Hannity has become much more than just the host of Hannity on Fox News.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Yeah, well, he has a desk in the Oval Office, if you will believe the way that other presidential advisors talk about him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When she's not teaching at the University of Virginia, Nicole Hammer watches a lot of Fox News. And then she writes about it.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: That image of him sort of being part of the internal close advisors to the president, that's the image that he has now, that he has Trump's ear, that he has Trump's eyes when it comes to the primetime programming at Fox News.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you have the president's ear, when you're one of his closest advisors, there's a lot more scrutiny on the stuff you do, like the real estate holdings you have.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: A detailed report released by The Guardian says Hannity spent the last decade buying homes in seven states. More than half of the money Hannity borrowed came with help from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or the lawyer you use. Cohen only has three clients, one of whom we've learned today is Sean Hannity.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And that's why it's important to understand where Sean Hannity comes from.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think one of the things that we see with Hannity is that while he is a self-described conservative, and sometimes I think he really does think that he is an ideologue at heart, what we've seen with his career is that he attaches himself to powerful Republican men.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And while in the 1990s and much of the 20 aughts, those men were conservatives, we've seen with the Trump era that that's not necessarily the most important thing to Hannity, that power might actually be more important.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Where does Sean Hannity come from? Another planet? California?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Yeah. So his early days, and I actually think this is important, are in New York. He grew up, I believe, in Long Island.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he grew up in kind of the same outer borough environment that Donald Trump did.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And he was more or less like a blue-collar guy growing up, which made him a little different from Donald Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. And then he went out to Santa Barbara to host a show on a college radio station.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: He ends up getting fired from that because he made some pretty offensive, even for the 1980s, comments about gay men and women.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, I don't understand it, but they won't let you say that they have a disease.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: They won't let you say it's a gay disease and they won't let you examine the practices that have caused.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just to be clear, is that something Sean Hannity would not say in 2018?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: He would not say it in 2018. In fact, he has now said that he's really a libertarian when it comes to gay rights.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, again, like this shifting with the times, but also, you know, he's a very wealthy New Yorker who runs in both conservative and liberal circles.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: He runs in elite circles. And you just can't get away with that kind of rhetoric anymore and still be granted access to those places.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After he gets fired, he goes to the South where his shtick is a little more accepted.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And he winds up in Atlanta. And he's a big Atlanta radio host in the early 1990s.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he makes connections with another famous conservative Georgian, Newt Gingrich.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: I will tell you that there is no brighter philosopher, no greater conservative voice in this country than Newt Gingrich.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right on. And this is right around the time Newt's about to become Speaker of the House?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Right. And this is really important for his kind of entree to power.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, the first place we kind of see Hannity popping up in national Republican circles is as the emcee for Newt Gingrich's victory party in 1994.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And so is that to say also that this is the first time his sort of like his maybe burgeoning loyalty ideology sort of pays off for him?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that's exactly right, right? Gingrich wins the election and now all of a sudden Sean Hannity is connected to possibly the most powerful conservative politician in America at the time
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: There were kind of two huge conservatives in 1994 when it came to the Republican Revolution It Newt Gingrich in the Congress and it Rush Limbaugh on the radio
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is kind of the environment in which Sean Hannity is coming up.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And then he attaches himself to another very important conservative figure, Roger Ailes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so two years after Newt Gingrich wins that election, Sean Hannity is one of the sort of tentpoles of this new conservative television cable news station, Fox News.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Good morning. Welcome to Fox News Channel. This is Fox News Now, all the news you need in 15 minutes.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Good morning, everyone. I'm Alison Costarini.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When does Fox News debut again?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: It debuts in October of 1996.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Hannity's there on day one?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Hannity is there on day one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, in sort of the prospectus for Fox News, his show was Hannity and liberal to be determined.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: So they see it as kind of a face off show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They hire Alan Combs, who I guess counts as a determined liberal.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Does Combs decide that he's no longer into it? Or is he just removed because they decide like, why even make the effort to say that we're like trying to keep this thing as a forum for two different ideologies?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Colmes actually leaves because like Sean Hannity, he has his own radio show.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: He goes off to do his own thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then they realize that they don't actually need to replace him.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Hannity is a much bigger star by then because in 2001, Hannity's radio program goes national.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And very quickly, he becomes the number two conservative talk show host in the nation.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And so by the mid-20 aughts, He is on his own a major conservative personality in a way that he just wasn't in 1996 when Fox first starts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's number two, of course, to Rush Limbaugh.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: That's right. He has remained ever since number two to Rush Limbaugh.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was always the number two guy.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Remember on Fox News, Hannity wasn't the star. Bill O'Reilly was the star.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so he was consistently in somebody else's shadow.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: So Combs leaves the Hannity show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hannity has the second most popular radio show in the country.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: How does his TV show then become one of the most popular news shows in the country?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so his television show was fairly popular for a cable news show early on, right? Because he's sort of dragging off of O'Reilly's audience.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: He was second to O'Reilly, but then Ailes is forced out in 2016.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: O'Reilly is forced out in 2017 for reasons of sexual misconduct, like many other people at Fox News.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Hannity sort of begins to fill that void in a way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The vacuum of having O'Reilly leave actually gives Hannity some more breathing room.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: But that's a very recent development.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You said Sean Hannity's radio show is number two to rush Limbaugh's.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: What did you call Limbaugh up top?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The word I chose for him was kingmaker.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And Hannity was the loyalist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wonder how those two guys really compare.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: That's a good question.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, there are two different things to kind of tease out here. One is their style.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Like Limbaugh is just a funnier, stickier kind of guy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he'll do these song parodies.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: You need to fix your corruption and you need to help yourselves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It'd be great if he would say that here, but that's not what he's saying here.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Here's what he's saying here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is ridiculous.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: What kind of news show does parody songs?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He has this very sort of self-absorbed personality, which may be his actual personality, but he definitely layers on this kind of egotism to his personality as Al Rushbo.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: So he has much more of an entertainer's soul in a way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Where Sean Hannity doesn't.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And so you would expect more innovation and kind of more interesting stuff coming out of Limbaugh.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the kingmaker versus loyalist thing has more to do with their perceived relationship to the Republican Party.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: So let's go back to 1994.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In 1994, Hannity is invited to celebrate the Republican victory, but Rush Limbaugh was credited with delivering it.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: You understood, Rush, where America was before November the 8th.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Many in the liberal media establishment told us that we couldn't win, that we wouldn't win, and that we shouldn't win.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And I'm speaking about the whole class.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But you knew that we could, you knew that we would, and our hats are off to you.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: He was seen as, you know, the guy who was the majority maker, which was one of the labels that he was given by the incoming Republicans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we, as the freshman class, would like to nominate and make Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of our freshman class and present to him today a pin that all the freshmen got called the majority maker because surely he helped us become the majority.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: So he was seen as someone who had real influence and real power and could make and unmake people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right. So they won't cross him.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: If they do cross him, they immediately apologize.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that dynamic does not exist at all with Sean Hannity.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Like there's no sense that like if Sean Hannity says something negative about you, your political career is over.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You make Hannity sound sort of inconsequential compared to some of his peers at least
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: So why is his presence on Fox News so important
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We know that Donald Trump watches a lot of Fox so the fact that Sean Hannity is on television matters a lot
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And also that he is on the phone with Donald Trump, the president.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like that is, that's pretty big influence.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And I think has really changed the way that Sean Hannity is perceived and has actually really changed his importance in the conservative media landscape.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If the reporting is too believed and Trump's view of the world and his actions are shaped by the last person he talked to, if you're someone who has regular access to the president's ear, then you've suddenly become an incredibly powerful person because you're working on someone who is easily shaped on any number of issues.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: After the break, Hannity's gone from covering the news to becoming it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, Roshan, tell me about your mattress problem, please.
--:-- Roshan Karman: My mattress is so bad, when I get into bed, the springs let out a resigned sigh.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It craters so bad in the middle, you'd think it killed the dinosaurs.
--:-- Roshan Karman: On the plus side, I can't wait to get out of bed in the morning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's kind of a workout in itself.
--:-- Roshan Karman: My abs have never looked better.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'd sleep in, but I'd get more rest standing up on the subway.
--:-- Roshan Karman: My mattress is terrible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It does this little dip thing in the middle, and I kind of roll into it.
--:-- Roshan Karman: Rolling off of it would be a step up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I have to wrestle for space for my dog.
--:-- Roshan Karman: My back hurts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You really do have mattress problems, Roshan.
--:-- Roshan Karman: My wife and I keep talking about getting a new one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we're actually on the market for a new mattress.
--:-- Roshan Karman: We just don't know where to go.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tell you what, when we get back, I'm going to tell you where you should go.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't want to give anything away, but I also just want to mention that you can go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to find a new mattress and use the code PODCAST10 to get 10% off.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram, and I'm talking to Nicole Hemmer about the curiously strong connection between Sean Hannity and President Donald Trump.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: The connection, I think, was probably psychic in some way early on, because as we know, Trump was a big consumer of Fox News.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And these two guys grew up not together, but in the same environment in a lot of ways as outer borough guys.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: But by like 2010, 2011, in that era, as Trump is becoming himself more of a political commentator on Fox News, he's appearing regularly on Fox and Friends, but he's also appearing on Hannity's show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I think looking back 2010, 2011, especially as the birther controversy is growing up, that's when you're seeing much more of Trump on Hannity show.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: So how does this change when Trump starts talking about running for president?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So back in 2011, 2012, Hannity occasionally was kind of boosting Trump as a presidential candidate.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: But it's really as the campaign is taking off, Hannity becomes a big backer of Trump fairly early on, which made him different from other people at the network.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As you'll remember, in early 2016, there was a lot of friction between Fox News and Donald Trump, particularly around Megyn Kelly.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: You know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Hannity during all of that stays a Trump loyalist.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And what you what you see is reporting that comes out in the summer of 2016 tags Hannity as an informal advisor to the Trump campaign.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in a way, that's maybe not surprising because that's also the same time that, you know, as Roger Ailes is pushed out, we start to get reports that Ailes is advising Trump as a kind of a debate coach.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: If you think about the powerful men in Sean Hannity's life, they're all kind of coming together by the late summer of 2016.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The other big thing that Hannity does in this period is he actually appears in a campaign ad endorsing candidate Trump at the time.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: One of the reasons I'm supporting Donald Trump this year is, number one, he's going to put originalists on the Supreme Court, people that believe in fidelity to the Constitution, separation of powers, co-equal branches of government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's a guy that will vet refugees to keep Americans safe.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And of course, he's going to build up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is wildly inappropriate.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And in fact, even for the opinion section of Fox News violates their standards, which they do have some.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he does get a slap on the wrist over that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Fox News hasn't slapped his wrists for sharing a lawyer with the president or not disclosing it when covering the Cohen investigation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What exactly is Hannity's relationship with the president's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: So based on the reporting that's come out in the last few weeks, Michael Cohen is a lawyer who doesn't have a ton of clients.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He has, as far as we can tell, three.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And one of them is Donald Trump and one of them is Sean Hannity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the reason this became a particularly big story is when this third client was announced in the news it was that Cohen Trump lawyer had a third client who was a prominent figure who did not wish to have his name made public
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And so that had built up this kind of mystery around well who is this third client
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because the two people that Cohen was representing were people who had alleged relations with either Playboy models or porn stars and needed those relationships hidden.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And so it became obviously like this point of curiosity as to who this third client would be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then it came out in court that it was Sean Hannity.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And I think that the reason that was such a big story was A, it was so unexpected.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like in some liberal reporter's wildest dreams, that client is Sean Hannity, right?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: That's right. You couldn't imagine that it would actually be Sean Hannity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right, exactly.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Because it does seem, I mean, there's a lot kind of caught up in it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's not just that it indicates a real closeness with Donald Trump, right?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: I mean, you and one other person share a lawyer with the president.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That suggests a fairly tight relationship, but also that, you know, Cohen was in the news because he was being investigated for his role in the Stormy Daniels affair.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Hannity had been covering that and he had been bashing the investigators who were going after Cohen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tonight, we have an explosive new chapter in Mueller's partisan witch hunt.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Now, we have now entered a dangerous new phase and there's no turning back from this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is clear, as I have been warning, Mueller is out to get the president and it appears at any cost.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Here's what happened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he had been covering this news story that he was secretly a part of.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So does this pattern of like not disclosing your involvement in the things you're covering lead us to this ongoing Hannity real estate scandal?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: What's that about?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So basically the story is that Hannity ended up being the person behind a couple of shell companies who have bought up in the course of the last 10 years or so over 800 different pieces of property from high-end mansions to low-income rental properties.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And some of these were housing and urban development properties or that needed sign-off from housing and urban development.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Hannity is both friends with the head of housing and urban Development, Ben Carson, who was an erstwhile presidential candidate, sometimes Fox News personality.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And so he has personal connections in HUD, but also covers HUD on his show, generally in pretty unfavorable ways, as you can imagine, for a department that helps with low-income housing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's also this kind of question of how much was he covering something that he himself was involved in without disclosing it.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Does it say something about our particular political moment that, you know, the leading opinion pundit on Fox News and the president of the United States are really close?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that it is the natural endpoint of a relationship that has been growing closer and closer over the past 20, 30 years of conservative media sort of taking up a space within the Republican Party and serving kind of a party function of grooming candidates and bringing them into the spotlight and testing them and backing them.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: In many ways, it's taken over that role for the Republican Party and has become really empowered in that way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I do think that that close relationship is part of it.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: But I think that the other part of it is, I mean, Hannity in a way stands in for the Republican Party more broadly in that here we have someone who is loyal to power.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And one of the things that we've seen over the past few years is that the Republican Party, purportedly a conservative party that looked like it was really doubling down on the conservative ideology with the rise of the Tea Party, has become a party who's much more interested in power than in those principles.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And Donald Trump has really highlighted that in so many different groups, from the conservative base to white evangelicals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so Sean Hannity is sort of an avatar for that abandonment of purported principles.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And at this point, it seems like the only person in the Republican Party who has a vision, is articulating that vision, is the president himself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nicole Hammer wrote a book called Messengers of the Right, Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our editor is Bridget McCarthy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our engineer is Afim Shapiro.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Luke Vanderplug and Noam Hassenfeld produce the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the honorable Breakmaster Cylinder makes music for us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Shoutouts to Ruth Morris for lending a hand on production this week.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: and shout-outs to you for rating and reviewing Today Explained on iTunes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My name is Dylan Tucker.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I am 11 years old.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Follow Today Explained on Twitter at today underscore explain.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Rosh and Carmen, you've told me about your mattress problems.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I want to tell you about a mattress solution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like you could use a bigger mattress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it also sounds like you could use a new one because of the dent in the middle of the mattress you were talking about, not to mention the springs roughing you up and giving you perfect washboard abs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is odd that it's only on my side of the bed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I would recommend you go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast and use the coupon code podcast10 to get 10% off your next mattress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Normally I'd say let me sleep on it, but I think I'd like to sleep on the mattress that I get when I actually do go get a mattress.
