Talk radio host and Fox News star Sean Hannity talked about the 2016 election with SiriusXM host Matt Boyle on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily.
“You know, Matt, we’ve not talked publicly since the election, and I gotta give you a lot of credit,” said Hannity. “I saw you a lot on the campaign trail. You worked really, really, really hard. Like a lot of other people, you took a lot of heat. And you know what? It paid off, didn’t it?”
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Boyle contrasted left-wing efforts to delegitimize Donald Trump’s election victory with Trump’s triumph at the Electoral College, where he won more electoral votes than any Republican candidate since 1988.
“I think he won more counties than anyone since 1984,” Hannity observed. “When you look at the map, and you look at how little blue is in it, and how divided America is between rural America and big cities, it’s pretty amazing. In that sense, that’s where the divide really is. America’s a very conservative country, in terms of just the actual population. It’s the population centers that tend to lean very solidly Left. That is the big cities, and you see people even leaving big cities because of regulation and high taxes, and then they move to states like Florida, and then they bring their liberal policies with them. They try and ruin those states after they ruined New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.”
Boyle asked Hannity how Trump won so big on Election Day, especially in his sweep of the Rust Belt states.
“There are three factors, but I’ll break it down into one, and I would say it’s the ‘Forgotten Man, Forgotten Woman’ election,” Hannity replied. “This is where Donald Trump stood out from 16 other Republicans. He was talking about issues that impact people’s lives.”
“Look, Matt, I spent an entire year on radio and TV giving out statistics,” Hannity continued. “I did it for a reason. It’s not because I want to hear myself talk. I knew the media would never cover it, but when you have in the last eight years, 13 million more Americans on food stamps, eight million more in poverty, the lowest labor participation rate since the seventies, the worst recovery since the forties, the lowest home ownership rate in 51 years, and you’ve got a President that accumulates more debt than every other president before him combined – look, those millions of people, 50 million in poverty, 50 million on food stamps, these are real people, real lives, real suffering.”
“As a conservative, I knew these Obama policies would fail,” he said. “It was as predictable as the day was long. That’s why I tried so hard in 2008 and 2012 to warn people that we’re headed down the wrong road. People might like Obama personally, and polls show that they do, but his record is atrocious. On top of that, I didn’t even mention anything involving foreign policy. I didn’t mention Obamacare, that is a massive failure across the board.”
“If you want to add in other factors, Hillary is a horrible candidate. She’s not viewed as honest and trustworthy,” he continued. “The ethics issues really, really hurt her, and she enriched herself. I would argue that in ’92, Bill Clinton was a change agent. She was, as I said to a friend this weekend, old, she had no warmth, she was cold, and she was ethically challenged.”
“Donald Trump, to his credit, he resonated with the people that lost their jobs, were in poverty, on food stamps, losing opportunity. He was a great candidate, and he simply outworked her. He wasn’t a perfect person or a perfect candidate. One of the things, I think, attracted people to him is that he didn’t spend his whole life thinking he was going to run for president. If he did, he wouldn’t have gone on The Howard Stern Show,” Hannity said.
“That’s the reason to me. It was the forgotten man, the forgotten woman, the quiet suffering that Americans are going through because of big government, huge bureaucracy, and these people get nothing. All they do is get taxed to death, for the most part,” he said.
Hannity said that what we learned about the “radical Left colluding-with-Clinton campaign media” from the WikiLeaks revelations was “spectacular.”
“It is the most underreported story out there,” he declared. “They’re not going to cover the fact that they themselves colluded with Clinton, helped Clinton, in some cases, gave questions to her or sought questions for Trump or for Cruz through the DNC, John Harwood advising the Clinton campaign, moderating a debate. It’s pretty spectacular on Election Night that one of the moderators, Martha Raddatz, cried when Donald Trump had won the election.”
“I mean, they lie. They’re corrupt. They’re dishonest. They collude. They’re all in this hyperventilating mode about ‘fake news’ now, but they are fake news. That’s them. It’s now on display for the world to see,” Hannity charged.
“I just keep pointing out to people – look, people don’t need them any more. They’re done. I suggested the other day that if any of these organizations were involved in collusion with the Clinton campaign, why do they get a seat in the White House press office? Why does Donald Trump need a White House press office? He doesn’t. You know, you can have a pool person that’s standing by if, God forbid, there’s any bad news about the president that the country needs to know, but his own staff could tweet it out, for crying out loud,” he said.
“Things have changed dramatically, with Breitbart, and Drudge, and cable news, and talk radio, and social media – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. People are getting information very differently than they did,” Hannity reflected.
He thought the media lost a vital share of their remaining credibility by getting the 2016 election so completely wrong, remembering how author Ann Coulter was almost “laughed off the stage” on Bill Maher’s HBO program during the summer for saying that Trump had the best chance of winning the election.
“I don’t think they’re laughing any more,” Hannity remarked.
On the matter of Fidel Castro’s death Thanksgiving weekend, Hannity recalled talking to a woman who made him change his mind about little Elian Gonzalez being placed in the custody of his Cuban father in 2000, an experience that helped him understand the magnitude of Castro’s totalitarian evil.
“I was sort of torn because a part of me says all right, well, it’s the kid’s father. I think a child has the right to be with a mother and father. It was more complex, I think, as an issue than people know. She convinced me that this kid would be indoctrinated. This kid would be destroyed. This kid would be brainwashed.”
“I met a guy when I was broadcasting in Huntsville, Alabama,” he continued. “This guy lived in Decatur, Alabama. He had a pizza place; it was called Mando’s Pizza. He was from Cuba, and he was there during the takeover. His family was wealthy. During the revolution, when Castro came to power, he killed all his friends, killed a lot of his family. He stole all of the land. This guy, Armando de Quesada, who owned this pizza place in Decatur, he barely escaped with his life. There’s a reason that people would get in broken-down, dilapidated, rickety boats in shark-infested waters or inner tubes to come all the way here.”
Hannity concluded by calling Fidel Castro “a murdering, dictating thug.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Listen to the full audio of Hannity’s interview above.
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