“The conservative movement, led by their chief propaganda outlet Fox News, has a problem,” Seth Meyers said at the top of his latest “A Closer Look” segment Wednesday night. After they “spent years laying the groundwork” for Donald Trump’s rise, he explained, the network’s hosts are now being publicly exposed for knowingly misleading viewers about the former president’s election lies.
Case in point is primetime anchor Sean Hannity, who actually appeared with Trump at a campaign event in 2018. After playing a clip from that rally in which Hannity comes up on stage, calls the reporters in the room “fake news” and then beams at Trump, the Late Night host joked, “He smiles back at Trump the way your 2-year-old smiles at you when they learn to poop in the toilet.”
“Anyway, we now know from a bombshell new court filing and a billion-dollar defamation suit that Hannity, along with other Fox News hosts, are the ones who knowingly lied to their viewers,” Meyers said. Among Hannity’s secret admissions were that he didn’t believe 2020 conspiracist Sidney Powell “for one second” and, according to Rupert Murdoch, was “privately disgusted” with Trump himself.
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“Oh my God, Sean Hannity was disgusted by Trump?!” the host replied. “What else was he doing in private that he wasn’t telling his viewers about? Was he wearing a ‘Resist’ T-shirt and playing with gender-neutral Potato Head dolls? Oh God, was he eating… woke M&Ms?!”
But despite that apparent disgust, Meyers continued, Hannity “didn’t tell his viewers that, just like he didn’t tell his viewers the stolen election narrative was bullshit.”
Ultimately, that brought the host back to the GOP’s “central problem”: “They created this monster, but they don’t control it. They know that. That’s why they’re terrified. Right now, they’re desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle.”
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