The Guardian: “The Fox News host Sean Hannity was criticised for appearing at a Trump rally in 2018 but according to a new book he was involved again with Trump’s campaign in 2020, helping write an ad that aired on his primetime show. Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story Of How Trump Lost, by Mike Bender, senior White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal, will be published in August. News of its contents, including ‘some amazingly hilarious revelations” about Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Tucker Carlson, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump “and the rest of the Trump posse’, was reported by Punchbowl News. According to the news site, the ad known to Trump insiders as ‘the Hannity ad’ and ‘the one Hannity wrote’ ran only during Hannity’s show.”

“An anonymous Trump aide is reported as saying ‘Hannity said this is our best spot yet’ but Bender reports: ‘Inside the campaign, the spot was mocked mercilessly – mostly because of the dramatic, over-the-top language and a message that seemed to value quantity over quality.’ ‘Donald Trump himself, in a post-election interview with Bender, did not dispute that Hannity wrote the ad, which called [Joe] Biden a ‘47-year swamp creature’ who had ‘accomplished nothing’ and supported a ‘radical, socialist Green New Deal’.’ Such language attacking Biden’s long career in the Senate and as vice-president to Barack Obama was used by Trump advisers. In October, for example, senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters: ‘The contrast between a 47-year swamp creature in Joe Biden and a businessman in President Trump has been a major theme of this campaign and I would expect it to be so through election day.’ Bender reports that the Trump campaign thought the Hannity ad ‘so useless that they limited it to exactly one show: Hannity… 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. The cost of that investment: $1.5m.'”