Sean Hannity is solely preventing President Trump from following in the footsteps of former President Richard M. Nixon, his Fox News colleague Geraldo Rivera said Tuesday.
Mr. Rivera suggested during an appearance on Mr. Hannity’s prime-time opinion program that his show is singlehandedly responsible for keeping Mr. Trump in the White House.
“If it wasn’t your show, Sean, they would destroy him absolutely. You’re the difference between Donald J. Trump and Richard Nixon,” Mr. Rivera said on “Hannity.”
“In Nixon’s case, if he had someone that stuck up for him, he wouldn’t have been motivated to cover up that burglary, he would’ve let the perpetrators get their just desserts,” added Mr. Rivera, referring to the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters that resulted in impeachment proceedings against Nixon and his eventual resignation.
Mr. Hannity said he was not on the same page as Mr. Rivera, however.
“I don’t necessarily agree with your analysis,” Mr. Hannity replied. “But I will tell you, they lie. I’m sick of it. They’re hurting the country, I’m sick of that, too. And their double standard is repulsive at this point.”
“Everything you say is absolutely true,” Mr. Rivera responded, “But watching your show and watching your producers work and seeing these packages where you put the lie exactly to what they’re saying — who else is doing that? The nation is being fed this constant stream of propaganda and impeachment. Some of these people have been calling for his impeachment from the microsecond he was elected. This is an absolute all-out war. This is politics by another name. This is warfare directed at the president, and they won’t give him a breath of air. You’ve got to watch his back.”
Mr. Hannity, an unabashed ally and defender of the president, has previously claimed to be Mr. Trump’s biggest fan at Fox News, where his prime-time program has aired nightly for more than a decade.
Mr. Rivera, a Fox News contributor-at-large, similarly credited his colleague last year with keeping Mr. Trump in the White House, telling him then that “Nixon never would have been forced to resign if you existed in your current state back in 1972, ’73, ’74.”
More recently, Democrats on Capitol Hill moved last week to start an impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump, making him only the fourth president in U.S. history — and the second since Nixon — to risk being removed from office by Congress.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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