Not so much "Republican" as anti-everything-else, then?
Fox News-head Sean Hannity gave an interview to
Playboy, presumably because he knows his audience. Amongst the exciting revelations are that "I'm not a Republican, though people often mistake me for one" and that
Playboy interviewers have a deeper understanding of policy issues than most Politico or
Washington Post editors. Also, he longs for a simpler time when 12-year-olds could get good kitchen jobs and can cite Thomas Paine's
Common Sense in support of the decriminalization of marijuana.
This exchange is a bit odd:
PLAYBOY: Trump was one of the most vocal skeptics of Obama’s American citizenship. You’ve also said Obama grew up in Kenya. Do you regret saying that now?
HANNITY: But he did grow up in Kenya, and he told The New York Times that he went to a school there and one of the most beautiful things on the planet is Islamic prayer at sunset.
PLAYBOY: Are you fueling the myth that Obama’s a Muslim from Africa by saying that?
HANNITY: I never fueled the myth. How do you come up with this stuff? He did go to a Muslim school. He writes about it in his own book.
PLAYBOY: He did not grow up in Kenya.
HANNITY: He went to a Muslim school in Indonesia, or wherever it was, Kenya. I forget. Now you’ve got me. I think it was Indonesia. I’m trying to remember his biography. It’s going back so long. He admits he went to a Muslim school. It’s on his audiobook, if you want a tape of it—you can hear him say it himself. […] He didn’t go to a madrassa, which has negative connotations, but he did study the Koran and Islam and learn prayers that he could recite with a perfect accent, according to Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. As for the issue of his birth certificate, I thought that was one of the oddest things, a noncontroversy that the White House easily could have ended but didn’t. If you’ve got the birth certificate, just release it and move on. That’s what I said.
He never fueled the myth, but he
does seem to be crazy obsessed with what a grade-school Obama learned at his not-Kenyan not-madrassa. What's interesting about that exchange his how insistent he is on making it sound ominous while not actually saying what it is he thinks is so very ominous about it. He's got the dog whistle down, that one.
And for the record, he's fueled the myth plenty.