The Trump-Fox feedback loop
BY TINA NGUYEN
FEBRUARY 2, 2018 3:12 PM
... the president regularly starts his mornings with several hours of tweets responding to Fox & Friends, and ends his days with online musings about the latest talking points in primetime. In .. a year, Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity have become .. some of the most powerful people on the planet. Behind the scenes ... Trump has lately evolved into a .. de facto head of programming at Fox, calling hosts to praise their analysis or to suggest new messaging. "What he usually does is he’ll call after a show and say, 'I really enjoyed that,'" one former Fox anchor said. "The highest compliment is, 'I really learned something.' Then you know he got a new policy idea."
... Fox — and then the White House — seized on a memo, compiled by staffers of .. Nunes, that purports to show FISA warrant abuses ... White House aides reportedly worried that the document .. would be a dud, and .. John Kelly had cautioned the president ... But Hannity, who had called the memo "the biggest political scandal in American history," was adamant that it be released ...
... The fact that Hannity had predicted the memo would "shock the conscience," and that its revelations would make "Watergate <look> like stealing a Snickers bar from a drugstore," appeared to have more currency than Kelly's notes of caution ...
... One senior adviser joked .. that Hannity has .. become a "senior counselor to the president." But Hannity's political calculus and incentives differ from those of the White House, which must now contend with a compromised relationship with the intelligence community ... Hannity closed the circle, but .. may also have done irreparable harm to its most crucial link ...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/sean-hannity-donald-trump-nunes-memo
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