Fox News held what it billed as a “town hall” with Donald Trump on Tuesday night in Davenport, Iowa, an opportunity for the former president’s devoted acolyte Sean Hannity to emcee what was essentially an hourlong advertisement for the Trump campaign. The audience of red-hatted Trump superfans — Fox couldn’t have found a whiter crowd if it had held the event in Reykjavik, Iceland — wasn’t there to ask questions, but merely to cheer at every applause line and laugh uproariously at the jokes about Joe Biden. Yet, despite Hannity’s best efforts and softest questions, something important actually happened.
The show was taped, perhaps so Fox could edit out anything that would open it up to another damaging defamation lawsuit. Whatever the reason, the network didn’t remove the part in which Hannity almost begged Trump to refute reporting that he’s planning a kind of authoritarian takeover should he be elected next November, to no avail.
Trump clearly didn’t give Hannity what the host was after: a clear statement that the former president is not planning a dictatorship.
“To be clear, do you in any way have any plans whatsoever if re-elected president to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?” Hannity asked. Trump answered not by saying “No,” but with his usual whining about how victimized he is. He then embarked on a lengthy digression about what a terrific mobster Al Capone was, which eventually came around to his point that he has been indicted more times than Capone. True enough.
But Trump clearly didn’t give Hannity what the host was after: a clear statement that the former president is not planning a dictatorship. So Hannity tried again. “I want to go back to this one issue,” he said, “because the media has been focused on this and attacking you. Under no circumstances — you are promising America tonight — you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody.”
“Except for day…
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