Let us begin with the fact that they advertised it.
On August 1, Sean Hannity’s account posted a preview clip from his podcast, Hang Out, with the caption “He may only have 3 months left,” teasing the full episode dropping Tuesday on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. The line belongs to Dave Rubin, and the “he” is the President of the United States, and the three months refers to the period remaining before the midterm elections potentially strip him of the House and, in Rubin’s telling, the Senate.
This is not a leak. This is not a hot mic. Nobody caught anybody. The most prominent primetime host in conservative media took the segment in which his guest predicts the collapse of the movement, cut it into a clip, and posted it as a reason to tune in on Tuesday. The panic is the product. The panic is what they are selling this week, in the same way that last week they were selling something else, and next week they will sell whatever generates the click after the panic stops performing.
Rubin’s actual words, since they deserve to be preserved: people really better understand that it is not that Trump has two and a half years left, he may only have three months. If Republicans lose the House, he gets hung up in impeachment. He will be impeached but probably not removed, because the Senate votes will not be there. But the process to end these last ten years of MAGA and everything that has happened since 2015 will begin.
Then Rubin reached for a metaphor, and the metaphor is the reason we are here.
