Donald Trump’s close relationship—on air and off—with Sean Hannity hasn’t stopped the president from mocking the Fox News star behind his back for being such a suck-up, according to three sources who have independently heard this mockery....I'm thinking back to early 2016, when Chris Christie dropped out of the presidential race and threw his support to Trump in a very fawning way. Trump went on to publicly mock Christie, then turned him into a literal errand boy, dumped him as head of his transition team, and failed to name him to a Cabinet position.
Trump has repeatedly—and sometimes for a sustained period of time—made fun of Hannity’s interviewing skills, usually zeroing in on the low-quality laziness of the host’s questions, the three people with direct knowledge tell The Daily Beast.
“It’s like he’s not even trying,” Trump has said, one source recalled, right before the president launched into a rough imitation of Hannity’s voice and mannerisms to complain that the questions about how “great I am” give him nothing to work or have fun with.
Trump obviously thought of Christie as a beta male, and apparently feels the same way about Hannity. It's definitely a male thing -- Fox's Jeanine Pirro is as obsequious toward Trump as Hannity is, and Trump has no problem with that. (Trump is, however, an aggressive bully toward any women who challenge him.)
This is why Trump is miserable: He spends all his waking hours obsessing over the score in what he regards as a never-ending competition with every male on the planet, as well as every institution with which he interacts (all of which, in his mind, are essentially male, as most institutions have been throughout his life). He believes that if you aggressively assert your own alpha-male status at all times you'll never lose, and he has contempt for men like Hannity and Christie who don't or can't do that. And yet he's losing -- to Democrats in the midterms, to Robert Mueller, and to "the fake news," which won't run exclusively positive stories about him.
He can't even grasp the notion that America's last three two-term presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, all had egos and alpha-male swagger and yet were perfectly capable of acknowledging a diminution of power after midterm losses. They also didn't regard themselves as competing with subordinates or journalists for alpha-male status. They were all presidents of the United States -- once you've got that gig, you ought to be fairly sure of your position atop the pecking order. But Trump never will be.
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