Trump team so angered by $1.5m ‘Hannity campaign ad’ it only ever ran in his show, new book claims

Host has denied being involved in TV spot the president’s team considered ‘useless’

A new book on Donald Trump’s re-election effort claims that Fox News host Sean Hannity contributed to a TV ad attacking Joe Biden – and that the results were so bad the Trump team only ran it on Mr Hannity’s own show.

The ad in question, entitled ‘Swamp Creature’, was brash even by the standards of the Trump campaign’s output. Accusing Mr Biden of supporting trillions of dollars in tax rises and claiming he “turned his back on law enforcement”, it called the former vice-president “radical, corrupt, extreme and dangerous” and described him as “a 47-year swamp creature that has accomplished nothing”.

The story of the ad’s conception and demise was reported by Punchbowl News, which shared an extract from the upcoming book Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story Of How Trump Lost. Written by Wall Street Journal White House reporter Mike Bender, the book draws on interviews with campaign aides, the ex-president’s inner circle, and even Mr Trump himself.

According to Bender’s account, the ad was referred to in internal emails as “the Hannity ad” and “the one Hannity wrote”, and aides explicitly described it as being “approved” by the pundit personally. In the end, writes the author, the Trump team “deemed it so useless that they limited it to exactly one show: Hannity”.

The upshot, he reports, was that the campaign paid some $1.5m to run the ad during the commercial breaks in Hannity’s show during the last phase of the election even as the cash-strapped campaign was pulling down TV spots on other shows and in other markets. “If Trump and Hannity watched the spot on television – and were satisfied enough to stop asking about the commercial – that seemed to be the best result of the ad,” Bender writes.

Hannity has denied any part in creating the ad, and told Bender that he was “not involved” in the campaign, saying that anyone saying anything to the contrary is “full of s***”. However, in a post-campaign interview with Bender, Mr Trump himself did not dispute the reports that the ad was written by Hannity.

If true, the story that the campaign ran the ad to assuage Mr Trump and Hannity matches a theme of the Trump presidency, namely that advisers and fellow Republicans used Fox News as a primary means of communicating with the TV-obsessed president, knowing that an appearance on any of the network’s major shows would almost certainly be seen in the White House residence.

The network’s direct channel to Trump was also exploited by The Lincoln Project, the group of anti-Trump Republican operatives that raised vast sums of money to run ads against him both nationally and in key down-ballot races. The group deliberately placed one of its first ads in the midst of nighttime Fox News programming – and sure enough, Mr Trump flew off the handle, railing against the group’s key members by name in a set of tweets.