Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

How Trump and Hannity Are Hurting the Republican Party

The Fox News host encourages the former president’s rants — and that's not a winning message for the GOP.

September 23, 2022 at 11:30 AM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

A dysfunctional relationship for their party.
Photographer: Ethan Miller/Getty Images North America

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The relationship between Donald Trump and the Republican-aligned media is symbiotic — and dysfunctional, at least for the Republican Party.

Trump had a bad day on Wednesday, with New York State filing suit against him for inflating the value of his properties and a federal appellate court ruling against him in his battle with the federal government over his possession of classified documents. So what did the former president do? He went on Sean Hannity’s prime-time show on Fox News to complain. He had a completely bizarre diatribe about, among other things, how he could declassify things while president just by thinking it (uh, no) and his even goofier theory that the FBI may have been looking for Hillary Clinton’s emails at Mar-a-Lago.