Once ‘Shocked’ by Obama’s ‘Latte Salute,’ Hannity Ignores Trump Saluting North Korean General
In 2014, the Fox News host made a huge deal over Obama saluting his own troops with a cup of coffee in his hand.
Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast
The blatant hypocrisy continues.
In the same week that he was caught lauding President Donald Trump for meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un just a few years after criticizing President Barack Obama for “catering to dictators,” Sean Hannity somehow failed to bring up the awkward moment when Trump saluted a North Korean general in Singapore on Thursday’s night’s show. Instead, he spent the vast majority of the 9 p.m. hour melting down over the new Inspector General report James Comey and Hillary Clinton’s emails.
This is despite the fact that four years ago, Hannity made a huge deal about Obama saluting his own troops with a cup of coffee in his hand in what was memorably known as the “latte salute” scandal.
With Karl Rove as his guest, Hannity said that he found the “latte salute” “shocking,” and asked, “Would President Bush ever do that?”
"Are we surprised? After all we've got a chai-swillin’, golf-playin’, basketball trash-talkin’ leadin' from behind, I got no strategy, Osama bin Laden is dead GM is alive, community organizing commander in chief,” Rove replied, to Hannity’s delight. “How disrespectful was that?"
Asked about Trump’s salute at Thursday’s White House press briefing, Sarah Huckabee Sanders quickly dismissed the controversy, saying, “It’s a common courtesy when a military official from another government salutes, that you return that.”
It wasn’t just Hannity. As of late Thursday night, Trump’s salute received numerous mentions on both CNN and MSNBC but did not come up once on Fox News.
On CNN, former Obama advisor Samantha Vinograd said of the salute, “This was an obvious mistake. I can't think of a single protocol officer, except maybe a Russian one, that would tell the president to salute a North Korea general.” According to another CNN report, Trump was specifically briefed not to salute North Korean military personnel.
During his nightly broadcast on MSNBC, Chris Matthews compared the White House’s response to the salute to a tweet Trump posted in 2012 after Obama was photographed “appearing to bow” to Mexican President Felipe Calderón.
Back then, Trump seemed to think showing any form deference to a foreign leader — be it adversary or ally — was out of line.