At the top of its 10 a.m. hour on Monday, Fox News played clips from Sean Hannity’s pre-Super Bowl interview with President Trump from Mar-a-Lago. In a “lightning round” of questions, Trump opined on Democratic presidential hopefuls Joe Biden (“I just think of sleepy.”), Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (“I think he is a communist. I think of communism when I think of Bernie. Now, you could say socialist.”) and Mike Bloomberg (“I just think of little. … I would love to run against Bloomberg. I would love it.”).

Yeah, that’s about the extent of the “news” that Hannity, Trump’s No. 1 media cheerleader, was able to wring out of eight-plus minutes with the president. Nicknames and insults, that is.

It was a high-profile disappointment, considering the circumstances: Over the past decade or so, the pre-Super Bowl presidential interview has become an incipient American political tradition. It kicked off with President George W. Bush in 2004, though it didn’t become an annual thing until the Obama years. Trump has continued the tradition more or less, chatting with former Fox Newser Bill O’Reilly in 2017 and then snubbing NBC prior to the 2018 Super Bowl. Last year, he sat down with Margaret Brennan of CBS News.

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The format of the Super Bowl interview may have bewildered Hannity, who has hosted a number of free-flowing conversations with Trump on his show, “Hannity.” Those sessions commonly blow through commercial breaks and can eat up the better part of the hour-long program. Allowed to free-associate, Trump invariably ends up making news.

Not so for the Super Bowl interview, which needs to be short and crisp.

That Hannity wasn’t right for this backdrop was apparent from the start. He was so out of his depth that he forgot to bring verbs for his opening salvo: “Obvious question: Impeachment, third time in history, acquittal pretty much now a formality. Been through a lot. The reaction to all of it?”

The president complained about unfairness.

“Do you see a path that you could work with [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer, [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats?” Hannity later asked the president, with the assistance of two verbs in the active voice.

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Again the president complained about unfairness. “I think they just want to win, and it doesn’t matter how they win,” said the fellow who withheld U.S. aid to Ukraine in an attempt to secure that country’s announcement of an investigation into the Bidens.

Hannity even whiffed the sports/football question, a staple of these encounters: “I love sports. I think sports mirror life. You, know, stripped down — you learn to win, sometimes you don’t always win. I know you’re not sick of winning — would be my guess. But also, the harder you work the better you do. That’s very Americana. What do you love about sports?”

Trump wandered the broad contours of that topic for a moment or two, and the interview concluded.

To appreciate just how uncomfortable Hannity felt in this position, scroll back to his long-form interviews with the president, such as this one from June 2019. It featured this “question” from Hannity:

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HANNITY: You know, Mr. President, I come from blue-collar roots. Ten years in the restaurant business. At 12, I was washing dishes by hand. Ten years in the construction business, every job imaginable. So, I really identify with the forgotten man and women, and I think everybody in this job in the media were overpaid and most of them are lazy. And I just want to — you know, when you think back on those statistics I gave you, it’s 13 million, 8 million, those are real American citizens … real lives and now they are really doing better. And I think one of the best things that is understated is we are for the first time in 75 years, energy independent, which means we don’t have to go kissing the ass of … countries that don’t like us. And we don’t have — we are now a net exporter of energy. And, by the way, if Putin remains hostile and Russia remains hostile, I think we out-produce them and we bring their economy to its knees.

Trump agreed with that sentiment and concluded his answer by saying, “I really believed you would have had a depression or very close had the other side won.”

Now that is a Hannity-Trump interview.

On one level, Hannity’s wooden flop of a performance is encouraging. It demonstrates that if the circumstances are just right, Hannity might just make a halfhearted attempt to impersonate a journalist. Of course, it didn’t work.

Fox News has people on staff with the skills to do this work capably, with “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace being foremost among them. Why not send the journalist instead of the propagandist?

Read more:

Erik Wemple: The comical hypocrisy of Sean Hannity

Erik Wemple: The Grisham Watch: Who needs a press secretary when you’ve got ‘Hannity’?

Erik Wemple: ‘Watch Hannity’: Lev Parnas’s texts reveal role of helpful media in Ukraine scheme

Greg Sargent: Hannity’s ugly meltdown at Romney: Wanting the truth is ‘Trump hatred’

Greg Sargent: Hannity previews Trump’s final defense: So what if he’s guilty?

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