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.
“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”.
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.”
