Fox News star Sean Hannity led the show Monday by interviewing GOP golden boy Ron DeSantis, relegating a conversation with Donald Trump to a much later slot.
Kicking off Sean Hannity’s 9pm show on the once-Trump-leaning network, Hannity previewed what was to come in his hour-long broadcast, including an “exclusive” interview with the former president.
However, less than 20 minutes into the broadcast, there was no sign of Trump.
But Republican golden boy DeSantis, who is currently the governor of Florida, was given free rein to discuss his anti-wake-up crackdown on Fox’s millions of conservative viewers.
The incident will likely anger Trump, who has openly insulted DeSantis ahead of a likely run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Fox News appeared to distance itself from former President Trump by giving Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a decent amount of air time ahead of Trump’s interview on Monday.
Trump declared his intention to run the day after the midterm elections, in which the Republican candidates he endorsed fared poorly.
DeSantis has yet to come forward, but it seems highly likely that he will in the coming months, with a primetime appearance on Hannity providing invaluable free publicity.
During the interview on Monday, the Florida governor did not say whether he could run for president in 2024, instead insisting that he is “laser-focused” on the state of Florida. But he refused to deny that he has plans to do so.
‘Give us a few months and we’ll be in a better position to make a decision about the future.
“I think it’s fair to say that I have people come up to me and ask me to do it all the time. I am very good at putting one step in front of the other and concentrating on the task at hand. I don’t get too into the field with anything. I have to execute the mission here. As we go further, we’ll take a look.
Fox, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and fueled Trump’s rise from real estate developer and reality star to the White House, now regularly bypasses him in favor of showing other Republicans.
Hannity’s Monday show was one example of the network effectively displacing him from his favorite place: the center of the news cycle.
Ultimately, the network, while teasing an exclusive interview with Trump, only replayed a broadcast of his earlier phone call to Sean Hannity’s radio show.
Ultimately, the “exclusive” interview with Trump turned out to be a repeat of the previous one when the former president phoned into Sean Hannity’s radio show on Monday afternoon.
Skepticism toward the former president extends to the highest levels of the company. The Murdochs’ discomfort with Trump stems from his still refusing to accept his electoral defeat.
Fox News is currently fighting a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion, which makes voting machines used in the 2020 election.
Dominion says Fox smeared his company by allowing key Trump advisers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani to suggest his machines were rigged to ensure Biden’s victory.
Fox News, once skewed towards Trump, now regularly features other Republicans like DeSantis
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend in Maryland
Rupert Murdoch recently testified about the lawsuit, admitting ‘with hindsight’ that the network’s stars should have pushed harder against the voter fraud allegations.
But Fox says the law allows it to air such claims if they are newsworthy, and it denies all the claims made in the lawsuit.
It also accuses Dominion of grossly overinflating the company’s value by the amount it seeks in damages from Fox News.
In remarks released last week, Murdoch argued that Fox as a network did not back the claims, but that some of its commentators — Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity — occasionally did.
Murdoch was among several on Fox who privately said they did not believe claims by Trump and his allies that widespread fraud cost him re-election.
Fox News now appears to have pushed Trump out of the center of the news cycle. He appears here during a March 2020 Fox News Channel town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
During the interview on Monday, the Florida governor did not say whether he could run for president in 2024, instead insisting that he is “laser-focused” on the state of Florida.
In its $1.6 billion lawsuit, voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems argues that Fox News repeatedly aired allegations that the company helped rig the general election against Trump despite the fact that many in the news organization privately believed that the claims were false. Pictured: Dominion Voting ballot counting machines