Fox News host Sean Hannity worked to earn every penny of his $25 million salary this week, telling his listeners that the hubbub over the stunning leaks by President Trump’s senior national security team was all “breathless hysteria” fluffed up by soulless Democrats.

“The outrage from the left over a reporter being accidentally added, a one-time minor accident . .. is just political show,” Hannity told his 2.4 million viewers. “They want to smear Donald Trump and the White House any way they can.”

Laura Ingraham, another Fox star, suggested that it was a covert operation by a traitorous rat working within the administration who added the address of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic who disclosed all this, to the chain.

“You are rattling the old cage of the establishment defense and national security, imbedded people,” she told her guest, the chief culprit in this episode, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. “The concern is that somebody got involved who didn’t want the president to be successful. And a lot of us are very concerned about that.”

The Deep State strikes again.

Even the “fair and balanced” news reporters at Fox joined in the fun. On Wednesday morning, Goldberg released the entire text chain, showing that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the timing of the attack before it took place, the weapons that would be used, and some of the intended targets. This came a day after Hegseth told Congress the discussion didn’t include “war plans.”

Seems like a pretty clear lie to me. But maybe not, said Fox’s White House reporter, Peter Doocy.

“We know the Pentagon has more detailed imaging and coordinates than that, and there is no imaging or satellite photos or coordinates or targets listed here specifically,” he told viewers. “So when they say they didn’t have war plans, maybe they just mean this text message did not include the full package of everything they knew and everything they could see and hear on the ground. . . I think there’s about to be a big debate about what a war plan is.”

We’ve learned two things this week. One, there is no limit to the incompetence of the Trump administration. It turns out that if you pick your team based on their political loyalty rather than their skills and experience, they’re going to screw up. Call this case Exhibit A.

It’s a blessing the fallout wasn’t worse. The Europeans now know Trump’s team has genuine scorn for them, but that couldn’t have surprised them. And Trump now knows Vice President JD Vance opposed these strikes and that he was “not sure the president was aware” of the implications. No big.

But this breach put American lives at risk. Iran, the sponsor of the Houthi rebels in Yemen, has an aggressive international hacking operation. What if they had gotten hold of this?

“This is a serious security breach,” said Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary and CIA director under President Obama. “If that information is leaked to an adversary, not only does it jeopardize very important intelligence resources that are being used to determine military plans. . . but in addition to that, that kind of leak would give a potential adversary an advantage of being able to strike first, and going after whatever weapons, whatever naval vessels, were going to be used for the attack. So, it could cost lives of our men and women in uniform.”

Remember, we’re just two months into this administration. This crew of misfits might not be as lucky next time.

We also learned this week that there is no limit to the romance between Fox News and Trump, even when something as clearly awful as this happens. That’s no small matter. Fox has a bigger audience than mainstream networks like ABC and NBC, and a vastly bigger audience than its rivals on cable, like CNN and MSNBC.

And from the start, they’ve been at Trump’s service. When he burst onto the political scene in 2011 by spreading the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, Fox gave him a weekly show on Monday mornings to amplify it. Flash forward to the 2024 campaign when Fox News anchor Trace Gallagher told viewers that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were indeed “taking peoples’ pets and killing them and eating them.”

Since winning in November, Trump has appointed 19 Fox News figures to his administration, including Hegseth and Gabbard. The network and the president are braided together.

This is bad news for America. Traditional media continues to bleed jobs and money. The billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post both sold their souls by killing editorials endorsing Kamala Harris over Trump. And ABC News paid $15 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump that many legal experts believe the network could have won. Fox is an extreme case, but it’s not the only media outlet that seems to be losing its moral compass.

All this while more and more voters say they are disengaged from politics. The final poll of last year’s election by NBC news poll showed that these “low-information voters” make up about 1 in 4 voters, and that they went for Trump by a huge margin, 53 percent to 27 percent.

I have no idea how that might change. But it’s a safe bet that Fox News, the big gorilla in the media landscape, is not going to lead the way.

Moran is a national political columnist for Advance Local and the former editorial page editor/columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be emailed at [email protected].