How the 'Fox News Cabinet' Helped Jumpstart Trump's Iran War
Sean Hannity mounted a full-court press, urging Trump to attack Iran. Plus, another veteran CBS News journalist says goodbye to Bari Weiss, and is Jake Tapper already pandering to David Ellison?
Good evening, and welcome to this week’s ‘Ragebait.’
Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In tonight’s edition, we dig into how Sean Hannity and the “Fox News cabinet” helped push the United States into another Middle Eastern quagmire, whether Jake Tapper is already giving future CNN owners the Ellisons what they want, and Bari Weiss losing yet another high-profile journalist from CBS.
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Hannity, Trump’s Shadow Chief of Staff, Gets His War
Eight months after Donald Trump boasted that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities, the president launched an illegal war of aggression to “ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.”
With much of the president’s “America First” base warning him against setting off another Middle Eastern conflict, who exactly convinced Trump to take action? Who did Trump turn to in order to justify jumping into this deeply unpopular decision?
Well, look no further than the president’s “Fox News cabinet” and his White House shadow chief of staff – Sean Hannity.
One of cable news’s biggest Iraq War hawks, who has since spent the past few years cheerleading Israel’s war on Gaza, Hannity recently devoted much of his energy to laying the groundwork for a full-scale attack on Iran.
“It’s not surprising that Hannity, who was the network’s biggest cheerleader for the Iraq war, is bloodthirsty for another pointless, disastrous war,” one Fox insider told me. “This is a man who praised waterboarding and volunteered to do it for the troops, only to never follow through on it.”
A longtime proponent of military action against Iran, the shameless Trump sycophant began making the case for regime change weeks before the president ordered strikes on Iran – insisting it was necessary to stop the country’s nuclear program that Trump had supposedly already destroyed.
While Hannity had previously parroted Trump’s claims that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “are officially dead” and that the regime “has been totally defanged” back in June, he told Iran’s leaders last month that the “clock is now ticking” because they refused to give up their nuclear program.
“I do have a little advice for the radical leaders in Iran,” Hannity declared on his Feb. 18 broadcast. “You may want to get on that plane to Russia sooner than you think – sooner than later. Now would be a good time.”
The full-court press that Hannity and his Fox cohorts were delivering on air obviously had its intended effect on our cable news-obsessed president, based on what Zeteo’s senior political correspondent Asawin “Swin” Suebsaeng has heard from his well-placed Trumpland sources. Let me turn it over to Swin real quick: