Sean Hannity reflects on filling in for Rush Limbaugh before pivoting to urgent national security threats, asserting Iran holds 460 kilograms of uranium for 11 weapons and criticizing Democrats for repeatedly defunding the Department of Homeland Security. He defends President Trump's executive order to pay TSA agents while Congress debates funding, warns of potential military operations like "Operation Midnight Hammer" against Tehran, and condemns European NATO allies for failing defense spending commitments and refusing aid in Ukraine. Ultimately, the episode frames these domestic political failures as direct enablers of existential foreign dangers. [Automatically generated summary]
Write down our toll-free telephone number if you want to be a part of the program.
It's 800-941 Sean.
If you want to join us, Linda, I had the best time today.
I did Patrick Bett David's podcast.
By the way, I hate it's very tough when you fill in for anybody on anybody else's show.
And I learned this a long time ago when I filled in for Rush.
Because the minute you come on the air and Russia.
Welcome to the EIB network, telling on loan from God.
You just can't duplicate the person that you're used to hearing every day.
Ah, oh, where's Rush?
Why is Rush taken off?
It's hard to fill in for people.
And he's got the best people around him.
They got a great, great team.
Did you see any of it?
Or you're going to tell me, you know, I have life outside of everything that you're doing in your life, you know.
What are you going to tell me?
You're going to tell me all these things.
That's not true.
You did first.
You did see it.
I saw some of it.
Yes.
Well, listen, I got to be honest with you.
I was shocked when you said you were doing it.
And I was like, wait a minute, what?
You know, so it was kind of a surprise.
And I've actually never seen you.
Well, I've never seen you fill in for anybody.
So that's a first for me.
You know, I mean, all the rush stuff is before my time.
You won't let me, you know, play the Hannity mic drop moment.
You didn't break his microphone, did you?
No, I'll tell the story, but if you there in the studio, wherever you are.
You're not going to play it.
You have.
You warned me about that years ago, so I haven't touched it.
Correct.
No, but okay, the first day I'm filling in for Rush Limbaugh, and I don't get nervous on the radio.
I don't get nervous on TV.
And I was feeling nervous that day.
I'm on 600 radio stations, the EIB network, and I'm filling in for Rush.
And to me, it was a big deal and a big moment of my life.
And I was honored to be able to do it.
But you just know in the back of your head, because I, as a listener, like I always love Walter Williams.
I like when Tony Snow filled in.
I like, you know, there were a number of people that would fill in for Rush that I liked, but they still weren't Rush.
Right.
So if you're tuning into Patrick Bett David's podcast and then, ah, there's Sean Hannity.
Can't get rid of this guy.
It could be frustrating.
I'm just for what we call P1 viewers, listeners, the people that watch and listen to him.
I'm sure for some, it was disappointing.
But I will tell you this.
I'm going to tell you why I did it because you're kind of asking me.
I did it because I love the show.
And there's not many shows that I like.
And I think that a lot of the podcasting world has gotten conspiratorial.
It has gotten angry.
It is, it's not smart.
Not only is Patrick Bett David himself a genius, but his ensemble cast, and then they have guests as well.
I have in the past been a guest on the show.
And he's got, for example, Adam and Vinny.
Vinny's a stand-up comic.
He's funny as hell.
And he's so passionate.
But you know who he reminds me of, Linda?
He reminds me of you.
I like him already.
Sounds like a fantastic guy.
Oh, he brought his mother.
I got to meet his mom, and I think his aunt, and we just had a great time.
And then they have Thomas, for example, is on the show.
Now, the last time I was on the show, they voted that his Clinton was better than mine that really hurt my feelings.
And we didn't do a Clinton off.
We were going to do it, but we never got around to it.
But, you know, this guy's a former CEO, former president, COO, you know, has managed billions of dollars in people's money.
He's an absolute genius.
He has political acumen and instincts second to none.
So you have this great ensemble cast.
Patrick Bett David navigates the whole thing.
You got Adam, who teaches and people how to get to financial freedom.
Everybody should pay attention to this because I think financial freedom is critical.
I always say money does not make you happy, but money equals what, Linda?
What is my mantra?
Freedom is always the same.
Freedom.
Yeah, it's you and Mill Gibson.
Freedom.
I know.
Okay.
The prisoner would like to say a word.
Freedom.
It definitely makes them mad when he does that.
So I had a chance to do it.
I was very, honestly, I was humbled and honored that they asked me, and I had a great time doing it.
I see you didn't get the memo, though, about the jacket.
No, I'm not.
I asked them the day before.
I said, I know you guys get dressed up for your podcast.
Do you care if I dress like myself?
And they started laughing.
They said, no, I'm not sure.
Listen, they got the black button down and not the ripped t-shirt.
So, you know, they did all right.
That's true.
I mean, you know the real me because you've been hanging out with me forever.
We talked about a lot of stuff.
We do spend a lot of time on Iran, what's next, and stuff we're going to talk about here in a second.
We talked about the shutdown.
We talked about elections.
We talked about a whole bunch of stuff.
But you can watch it anytime.
It's on Patrick Bett David's YouTube page and wherever you get your podcast.
But I just had a great time.
I like being around smart people.
I find it challenging.
I find it rewarding.
I found it fun.
And I was just honored to do it so that the answer to your question, but filling in for people is hard.
And this is the lesson I learned with Rush.
And it wasn't until many years later.
This is kind of odd for me.
And that is that I knew I was disappointed on days other people filled in for Rush.
So I just instinctively thought, believed that people would be a little disappointed if Rush was out and I was filling in.
And here's the funny part.
It was years later that people would say to me, oh, I first got introduced to you when you filled in for Rush, and I always liked when you had a chance to fill in.
But that didn't develop till years later.
You have to kind of build up, I guess, a little bit of trust with the audience.
And then I went on Fox, and I guess my profile went up a little bit.
So you always kind of take a risk by doing somebody else's show because everyone, Patrick Bett David doesn't take off.
He's like us.
He's a workaholic.
He works night and day and a brilliant business guy.
And Vinny does stand-up comic.
He is a character.
He's you.
Except he doesn't curse as much.
Well, we don't know that.
We don't know that he curses or he doesn't curse because he's, you know, he doesn't curse during the show.
I don't think he does.
I can't remember.
You can.
You can curse on YouTube, which is nice.
It's very, very refreshing.
The Nuclear Threat Fact00:16:03
And you don't have all the stop sets and everything else that goes along sometimes.
It disrupts a conversation.
But we had a great two hours.
I had a great fun.
I'm very grateful.
Thanks to all those guys for being so welcoming to me.
And we did cover a lot of important ground.
I'm going to get to the whole shutdown issue because there's a lot of ambiguity about what's going on.
The House is now going to pass a short-term spending bill that funds all of the DHS.
The president last night signed an executive order on this.
The Senate passed their bill.
Speaker Mike Johnson is livid, apoplectic about it.
That's why it's going to be short-term.
What frustrates me about all of it is the only reason any of this activity is going on at all is because these guys want to get the hell out of town and they don't like to miss their vacation.
That is the God's honest truth.
They honestly, these politicians, the Democrats that voted five times against funding the Department of Homeland Security, they could care less about you and your family waiting four or five, six, seven hours in line, you know, just to get wanded and go through a metal detector so you can get to the gate and get on your plane and get to wherever the heck you want to go.
And with Easter coming up, it's that much more difficult.
Now, to the president's credit, he's declaring this an emergency and he's saying, okay, well, we're going to pay the TSA agents anyway, which I think is good.
But I think there's something here that we got into in great specificity, great detail as it relates to Iran.
I have, and I've been saying this, Linda, and you know I mean this.
If you wanted to book somebody that disagrees with me on Iran, don't waste my time.
If I have to convince you or convince an individual, and there are people that no matter what, are going to believe something that's complete Adam Schiff, Adam bull shif, and that is they're going to believe that Israel made Donald Trump do this.
Netanyahu made him do this.
Talk radio guys made him do it.
Fox News people made him do it.
They don't know what they're talking about.
And we had that definitive interview with Steve Witkoff, 460 kilograms.
I know you hate kilograms, but of enriched uranium, enough for about 11 nuclear weapons.
Now, we also learned something else in this process, that the Iranians had ballistic missile capability that we never thought that they had.
Their range was much further than we believed that they had.
Let me put it this way.
If in the 60% enriched uranium, which could be enriched to 90% in a matter of 7 to 12 days, and that would be weapons grade, 90% enriched uranium, if in fact they got that uranium, that would be enough for 11 nuclear weapons.
And now they have ballistic missile capability, which means they could hit London, which means that they can hit Paris.
You know, as always, these globalist international organizations underestimate the ability of the Iranians.
So that is the existential threat, or what the president ascertained to be the imminent threat.
That's what Ratcliffe was talking about.
That's what Steve Witkoff was talking about.
And that's what Secretary of State Marco Rubio was talking about.
So the question now is, and I think this whole thing is going to be over in a number of weeks.
If I had to guess off the top of my head, I think this is about three more weeks, maybe four, and I think we're getting out of there.
I think the president means it when he says he's not going to support a forever war.
However, he means it also when he says they can't have a nuclear weapon.
I just have no interest in talking to stupid people that don't understand that that amount of uranium enriched at 60%, enough for 11 nuclear bombs in 12 days, coupled with ballistic missiles that have a range much longer than we ever thought they had, is something that we've got to negotiate or debate.
There is no debate here because you're willing to gamble with your children and grandchildren's lives.
I'm not.
And I think we would be failing future generations if we ever allowed that to happen.
And I'll tell you one other thing, politically.
You want to know what Donald Trump's legacy would be, the fact that it happened on his watch, even though the financing really came from the likes of Obama and Biden and cargo planes full of cash and other currency and billions and millions of dollars.
Now, the president had to prove that, in fact, that this was the capability.
That was the tipping point.
My interview with Steve Witcoff for me, and I actually played a portion of this on Patrick Ben David's podcast.
That was it for me.
And the president is really frustrating because people, you know, people that say they support Donald Trump, they know so little about Donald Trump.
They think, number one, that he can be influenced by other people.
He heard from people inside his administration, outside his administration, on every single side of this decision.
But ultimately, he is a man of his own mind.
Anybody that tells you any differently is just outright lying to you.
They don't know him.
I've known this guy for 30 years.
I can't convince him to do something he's not going to want to do.
He just can't.
Nobody else can either.
It's in keeping with the Trump doctrine.
Now, the only questions we now have going forward is, and I think the president's going to be very committed to this, and that is the idea that we're not going back.
And that means that either, and this will be up to the Iranians, and he's extended negotiations now out for 10 more days to give the Iranians an opportunity to agree to the 15-point plan that he had put forward.
I don't know what's in the 15-point plan because it's not been made public.
But I'm sure among them, he said items one, two, or three, they can never have a nuclear weapon.
But I'm sure it also means that we can't allow the 60% enriched uranium, enough for 11 nuclear weapons.
We can't allow that to get in the wrong hands.
That's got to be part of it as well.
And either they'll give it up willingly or will take it, one way or the other.
They'll probably put restrictions on ballistic missiles.
We'll probably have a check and balance system anyplace, anywhere, anytime.
And if Donald Trump has his way, if they make a deal, they'll be paying for this entire operation.
And forget NATO.
We know we need a full, complete evaluation of NATO when all is said and done here.
Their unfettered immigration, no assimilation.
They've neglected national security and national defense, you know, socialism, DEI, climate alarmism.
They bought into all this.
I'm disgusted by all of it, to be honest.
And all of it's so unnecessary.
This is the modern day version of Neville Chamberlain.
And there are some people that are unwilling.
You know, they don't see the wisdom in taking out the threat before the threat could potentially kill millions.
if you want to gamble that way go to vegas why are you making fun of the fact that i didn't get dressed up I asked permission.
I said, do you need me in a shirt and tie and a jacket?
And they said, no, no, no, just dress any way you want.
I just thought it was funny.
I was looking at that roundtable and I laughed out loud when I saw it.
I was like, of course he's the only one without a jacket.
Of course.
Why would you care about that?
I mean, do you think anyone at home is saying, oh, I'm watching Patrick Bett David's podcast?
Why is Hannity not in a suit and tie?
You know what?
I don't think so.
It's you being you.
At least you weren't in a hoodie with a baseball cap on, you know?
I wear hoodies all the time.
We'll continue.
When news breaks, you get the inside story that no one else has.
And the behind-the-scenes chatter that the mainstream media doesn't even know about.
This is the Sean Hannity Show.
Anyway, so there's so much here that we have to unpack in terms of Iran.
I am predicting three, four weeks, and I think we're going to be on the back end of this.
And I know people's patience is unbelievably short, and I'm not sure what people have been expecting.
But if you don't think that this was the right thing to do, you're entitled to your opinion.
As a matter of fact, I like the fact, and this might surprise some of you.
I like the fact that there are people that were telling President Trump both before and during that they didn't like his decision.
That's a good thing.
That's healthy.
You know, give a president every upside, every possible downside.
And then ultimately, Bush famously, I'm the decider.
He's got to make the tough call.
And he made the call, I think, in keeping with history.
And that's Reagan, peace through strength.
That's the last century.
You know, when you don't act when it comes to threats like Hitler, and I don't use these analogies loosely, or Tojo in Japan, et cetera, then you risk millions of people dying.
And if you have an opportunity to neutralize a threat with the minimal amount of threat to your people, and every life is precious, but you do it with the mindset that you don't want the potential of handing off to your children and grandchildren a potential holocaust in their lifetime, then I think you're making the right decision.
And I think the president's now, the most important thing is that the job has got to be finished as quickly as possible in a way that will prevent America from ever having to go back to Iran in our lifetime because of unfinished business at this point.
We have our military assembled, and first and foremost in my mind is they cannot have nuclear weapons, which means they can't have 60% enriched uranium.
And if they have it, what makes you think they wouldn't use it?
So that's basically where we are.
Did you hear, Linda, that the FBI director Kash Patel, his email was hacked by apparently some Iranians?
I did see that.
There's nothing too compromising in it.
Secretary of State, Mark Orrubio, the U.S. is constantly asked to help in wars, and we have.
But when we had a need, it didn't get a positive response from NATO.
A couple of leaders said that Iran was not Europe's war.
Well, Ukraine is not our war.
Yet we've contributed more to that fight than anyone.
I'll tell you, there is a threat.
I don't even think it's a threat.
I don't think NATO offers us pretty much.
I don't think they offer us anything.
We pay more than every other NATO country combined.
They have been reluctant to keep up with their own defenses individually as countries, collectively as an organization and collectively on their continent.
That's their problem.
That's their mistake.
You know, as the president said, he was on the five yesterday, called into the five.
He said, you can't let a madman, you can't let a bad ideology have a nuclear weapon.
And that's what this came down to.
And European leaders now know that Donald Trump was right and that Iran was, in fact, an imminent global threat.
They didn't know that their ballistic missiles had the reins that they had.
It's frustrating.
Anyway, so we'll see what the next 10 days bears.
The president hoped for a peaceful solution before Operation Midnight Hammer.
The Iranians rejected that.
He gave them time before Operation Epic Fury as he was building up his forces in the region.
They rejected that opportunity.
Now, we don't have the same leadership.
We got rid of the first-tier leadership, the second-tier leadership, the third-tier leadership.
I don't know if we're on the fourth or fifth-tier leadership.
And I agree, there was an article.
I'm not sure where I saw this, on Substack.
Melanie Phillips.
Do you know who Melanie Phillips is, Linda?
I have no idea.
I don't.
But the headline is finished the job, Mr. President.
In the new reality of warfare, winning can be losing and losing can be winning.
And how do you finish the job here?
What gave the president the impetus was what Steve Witcoff told me, and I think that was the defining interview when I knew what the, I knew without talking to the president, I knew what his decision would ultimately be.
I knew that the president would err on the side of safety and security, and that's what he did.
And I don't think he really had a choice in the matter.
It's unfortunate.
The way the media, by the way, is portraying this is disgusting, but that's second, you know, that's separate and apart from all of this.
All right.
So let me get to this funding bill.
The Senate agreed to fund the TSA and most of the Department of Homeland Security, but not ICE.
The president last night signed an emergency order to get TSA agents paid bypassing Congress as it relates to this DHS shutdown, which is, you know, these people in Congress, they don't really care that you have been so grossly mistreated and inconvenienced, and that these people that don't get paid an awful lot of money and have a very hard job because they're dealing with the public,
and they have to make the public do something the public naturally doesn't love anyway, and that's wan them and make them go through a metal detector.
I would not want to be the TSA agent that got stuck with Linda on my line because I know she's going to be cranky going through that line.
Am I right about that?
I am right about that.
You can admit it.
Listen, I'm looking forward to shaking the hands of the ICE officers that I see as I go through the airport tomorrow.
Okay, but generally speaking, you don't love being online for anything.
You get incredibly impatient and you don't like it.
I don't know that this is an accurate representation of my behavior.
I will say.
I think it's very accurate.
No, I will say that I am typically the person that gets pulled from the line that we're going to do a random check.
I am because you talk so loud and causative.
I don't talk at all.
Normally, I'm alone.
Stop.
You don't stop talking.
You talk in your sleep.
You talk morning.
You talk noon.
I'm sorry.
I'm talking at midnight.
You don't stop.
And by the way, I'm just as guilty of that as you are.
Yes, you are.
Yes, you are.
Funding ICE Through 202900:03:15
That's not war.
Anyway, now, I think there's a little tip-off coming here because they've been sending the Marines in.
So the president is kind of doing what he did before Epic Fury and before Midnight Hammer.
He's positioning people in case he has to make a decision.
Well, Hannity, you said the Trump doctrine is no forever wars.
No, it's not going to be a forever war.
No boots on the ground.
Yeah.
Well, we went on the ground with Maduro, and that worked out pretty well.
But it's always dangerous.
I don't say this flippantly.
I say this, you know, with grave concern for anybody that might have to be involved in a dangerous operation that would obviously be short-lived and obviously be for a specific purpose.
And it's not going to be regime change.
Now, whatever the Israelis ultimately decide to do, I think, is going to be up to them.
And I think the Israelis probably are more inclined to want to push for regime change.
That has never really been the stated goal of the administration.
They have wanted to, more than anything else, their number one goal is to neutralize them.
But anyway, we'll see what happens.
Back to funding for a second.
Joe Scarborough claimed that Trump won't allow funding of the TSA so he can try to rig the upcoming election.
How do these people get away with being so stupid?
And then Scarborough is blaming the GOP over the long lines.
Five times the Democrats in the Senate, five.
They voted not to fund the Department of Homeland Security.
Now they don't want to fund ICE.
Now, we do have a workaround, and the workaround is that Donald Trump was playing chess, and in the one big, beautiful bill, he funded ICE through 2029, which was brilliant on his part.
So, you know, you have the legacy media mob chock full of misleading reports claiming that ICE had been defunded as part of the new DHS funding bill.
The problem with that, and here's one headline, the Senate agrees to fund the TSA and most of the DHS, but not ICE.
That's not exactly accurate in this sense.
I mean, they're right.
They didn't add any more money or any more funding to ICE beyond what is already allocated.
But what they're not telling you in that story is the one big, beautiful bill leaves ICE fully funded through 2029.
And the bill passed by the Senate didn't include funding for ICE and Border Patrol.
Republicans had made provisions to fund those.
I don't know.
Well, Speaker Johnson's not going forward with it.
The president passed his executive order, emergency order to get TSA agents paid.
Hopefully that means an end to the airport misery that so many people have been living through.
And then you have this idiot, Mr. Fang Fang Swalwell.
By the way, Linda, I know somebody is working on that, somebody you know, working on a very, very important project.
It involves Mr. Fang Fang.
We might be breaking news in coming days or weeks about Fang Fang.
Realizing the Jungle Primary00:03:57
And do you realize they have what they call that jungle primary out in California?
Do you realize the two leading candidates, they'll be the ones on the general election ballot in November, Steve Hilton and what's the other guy's name, the sheriff guy, they are now leading one and two.
They're like neck and neck.
And I think the first closest Democrat is like eight points below both of them.
I mean, that would be a game changer, wouldn't it?
It would be amazing.
California's sick of the crap.
I mean, they're ready.
They're ready and they're not.
If it was a general election where you had Republicans and Democrats, I don't think the Republican would win.
Well, I mean, we have to pass the SAVE Act.
If we pass the SAVE Act, then we'll actually have secure elections and then we'll have a real race between Hilton and Bianco and whoever the Dems have.
Oh, no, I'm looking at Fox.
Tiger Woods involved in a car crash on Jupiter Island in Florida.
Martin County Sheriff telling ESPN the crash happened in Jupiter.
Woods' condition not known.
He competed in the TGL championship.
Did you watch any of that?
It was amazing, actually, this week.
Anyway, he's a 15-time major winner.
He was supposed to come out, and I think he was going to play the Masters.
Masters is coming up pretty soon, I think.
He's actually not playing in them.
Donald Trump announced that last night.
Oh, he did.
I didn't see that.
Okay.
I hope there's nothing going on here.
I hate, you know, there are people that thrive on bad things happening to people, and they just take great delight in bad things happening to people.
I don't.
Like, even that lady from the secret lives of Mormon Wives, that woman that was supposed to be the bachelorette and they had filmed the whole season, Taylor, whatever her name is.
You know, I don't really get enjoyment out of people and watching their lives self-destructing before our lives.
I don't get a lot of joy out of that.
I didn't like that they released, I know they have to, the Timberlake, Justin Timberlake video of him, you know, failing a field sobriety test, you know, from a couple of years ago.
I don't know.
I know people are interested in it.
It's not my thing, but people take a lot of delight in other people's misery.
And maybe it's deserved in some cases.
Oh, the funniest video I saw of the day: Corey Booker was at Newark Airport.
There were no lines.
There's nobody behind him.
Nobody.
And he's out there saying, you know, he has got a podium.
He's holding a microphone, claiming Donald Trump has brought chaos to our airports.
There's nothing happening behind the guy.
There's nobody there.
It's empty.
Unreal.
Democratic Representative Delia Ramirez says that if Democrats gain power, they will abolish ICE and dismantle the Department of Homeland Security.
We will melt ice.
We will dismantle the Department of Homeland Security because, frankly, at this juncture, nothing else is acceptable.
I hope people realize how insane this is.
You know, it's pretty funny.
I saw a post on X. Travelers nationwide shocked to realize that ICE agents are actually pretty friendly when nobody's trying to kill them with an SUV.
Ooh, that's cold.
Did you see that?
I don't have any doubt in the Renee Good case.
She accelerated that car.
She was harassing those officers and accelerated it right at that officer.
And the officer had internal bleeding.
I don't think anything's going to happen to that officer in that case.
The other case is still a question mark.
We'll have to wait and see.
It's just upsetting.
It really is.
I think it's ridiculous that they're even in the position they're in.
Stop getting in the way of officers doing their job.
Accelerating a Car at Officers00:00:27
Why don't you stay out of the way?
Don't accelerate your car as a weapon against them.
Yeah, you know.
Novel idea.
Do you remember when Alec Baldwin said I was a former construction worker hack?
I do.
Well, Jimmy Kimmel, now, for a second time, has attacked Mark Wayne Mullen.
You want to know why?
Because he used to be a plumber.
I love plumbers, especially if I need one late at night.