Perhaps the most unexpected thing about Sean Hannity‘s hour-long sit down with Donald Trump and Elon Musk — a first — was the initial question that the Fox News host posed to the duo.
“So he’s working for free with DOGE. He’s kind of put a lot of his life on hold. And you sued Twitter a number of years ago. You just made him pay $10 million?” Hannity asked.
Unperturbed, Musk said he had just let the lawyers figure out the dicey legal matter, while Trump claimed that his No. 1 adviser got a “big discount.”
“It’s very low. I was looking to get much more money than that,” Trump said.
Hannity was referring to the latest settlement of a Trump lawsuit, this time from Musk’s X, which earlier this month agreed to pay the sum to the president even if the litigation had long been dormant.
Otherwise, the Hannity interview was what you would expect: The Fox News host is a long-time defender of Trump’s, who once even was called to speak at one of his campaign rallies. This time, though, the intent of the interview seemed to be to soften Musk’s image. And with Democrats trying to bait Trump by referring to “President Musk,” Hannity gave them plenty of time to deny that there is a rift between them.
Trump said, “Elon called me. He said, ‘You know, they are trying to drive us apart. I said, ‘Absolutely.’”
As Musk carries out mass layoffs across the federal government, the pink slips have reportedly gone far beyond faceless DEI bureaucrats but to those in charge of food and air safety as well as those in charge of protecting the nuclear weapons arsenal, a number of whom had to be rehired. Then there are reports of DOGE’s access to government personal data, the latest effort being the IRS, with major concerns over how the information is being used. Before the Hannity interview ran, Kara Swisher told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Musk’s end goal is access to the data. “They are trying to say there is nothing to see here when there is a lot to see here,” Swisher said.
Yet few of those points were addressed during Trump-Musk sit down. Some of those pressing questions, which involve serious issues of privacy and security, were glossed over. Hannity did ask about the potential for Musk, whose businesses hold billions of government contracts, to have conflicts of interest. “Then we won’t let him do it,” Trump insisted.
“I haven’t asked the president for anything ever,” Musk said. “…I will recuse myself if it is” a conflict.
“I’m getting a daily proctology exam here,” Musk said. “It is not like I will be getting away with something in the dead of night.”
Hannity didn’t follow up, but did add, “Welcome to DC. If you want a friend, get a dog.”
During the hour, the Fox News host spoke in awe of Musk’s career, while sharing his incredulousness at some of the Democratic attacks, everything from calling him a “dick” to claiming that the nation was in a constitutional crisis.
“First of all, do you give a flying rip, number one?” Hannity asked.
“They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful, I think,” Musk said, as he railed against the “unelected bureaucracy.”
But there’s still a bit of a mystery over Musk’s bureaucracy. The White House insists that DOGE is transparent, but it’s a bit opaque on who actually runs DOGE, as the Trump administration lately denies that it is Musk.
At the outset, Hannity promised that Trump and Musk have “taken a wrecking ball to the deep state, all while exposing a shocking amount of waste, fraud abuse and corruption at the federal level.” But there were no new bombshell revelations of what DOGE has found. Rather, Hannity’s show ran a scroll of USAID spending, repeating many of the items that the White House had identified last week, some of them sounding like perfectly absurd outlays. But per FactCheck.org, a number of the items didn’t even come from USAID, such as a “transgender opera” in Colombia.
During another part of the interview, Musk talked of his approach as being one of “competence and caring,” which is quite a contrast to any hour on his X feed. A few weeks ago, as agency employees working on humanitarian projects were in the crosshairs, Musk wrote, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
The Trump-Musk interview was taped on Friday, while plenty of other Musk dramas have played out since then, from the exit of a top Social Security official to a woman claiming to have fathered another one of his children. A proclaimed free-speech absolutist, Musk on Sunday called for 60 Minutes journalists to get a “long prison sentence.”
It’s questionable, though, that Hannity would have brought any of that up, as this interview was hardly prosecutorial. At one point, it even seemed as if Hannity was treating the Trump-Musk team like a celebrity couple, helping them refute an onslaught of tabloid gossip.
“I think they’ve proven they have no power anymore, because they threw everything they had at you and they didn’t win,” Hannity told them. “…And now I see, they want a divorce. They want you two to start hating each other.”
