Following Donald Trump, Jerry Seinfeld’s screen parents and other ageing and querulous New Yorkers, Sean Hannity has moved to “the free state of Florida”, full-time.
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“I’ve been threatening now to do this for quite a while,” the 62-year-old Fox News prime-time host said on his iHeartRadio show on Tuesday, “but we are now beginning our first broadcast from my new home and that is in the free state of Florida. I am out. I am done. I’m finished.”
Hannity, a Trump ally so close he has been a campaign rally guest and worked on a campaign ad, said politics was behind the move.
“Finally, for the first time that I can think of in my adult life, I actually have representatives in the state that I’m living in that share my values,” he said.
Florida is governed by Ron DeSantis, a hard-right Republican running for his party’s presidential nomination this year. Attempting to “Make America Florida” by taking his hardline policies nationwide, DeSantis has struggled – in the words of the operative Stuart Stevens, turning out less “Trump without the baggage” than “Ted Cruz without the personality”.
Hannity also name-checked two of Cruz’s fellow Republican senators, failed presidential hopeful Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, who ran a company behind one of the largest Medicaid fraud cases in history, as inspirations for his move.
Hannity recently moderated a debate between DeSantis and Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California. A number of Hannity’s questions focused on population shifts between Democratic- and Republican-run states, citing taxation, crime and other factors behind such moves.
On Tuesday, the now former Long Islander said: “Like so many Americans I left New York for good, and am now in the state with, let’s see: warmer weather, law and order, better education, more freedom, better quality of life – and guess what? No state income tax.”
Democratic-led states like New York, Hannity said, had “high taxes, burdensome regulation, high crime [and] horrible school districts.
“… And if anything, I’m probably late and behind the curve and many others have made the move beforehand and there’s not a single person that I know that made a move like this that is not happy that they’ve made it.”
Hannity has long owned a home in Florida, in 2013 telling Naples Illustrated of his love for his condo in the “Golf capital of the world”, which he said was “definitely my future home”.
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The commentator’s property interests have extended further than a place by the beach. In 2018, the Guardian reported on a property empire which then extended to Georgia, Alabama, New York, North Carolina, Texas and Vermont.
Those operations came to light after Hannity was named in court as a client of Michael Cohen, then Trump’s lawyer and fixer.
Trump made his own Florida move, from Trump Tower in New York City to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, in 2021, after leaving office in disgrace in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on Congress.
On Tuesday, Hannity said: “New York, New York, goodbye. Florida, Florida: if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. But it’s great to be here.”
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