Gen, Jack Keane and Brian Kilmeade
With U.S.-Iranian negotiations stuck in purgatory, the hawkish hosts and contributors whom President Donald Trump listens to at Fox News have been weighing in on a potential peace deal. While the group was united in urging Trump to launch the war, it is now fracturing over whether or how to bring the conflict to an end.
Prime-time Fox star and full-time Trump propagandist Sean Hannity is ready to brand any agreement the president makes as a victory. But contributors Jack Keane and Marc Thiessen and Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade are all calling for further military escalation if Iran won’t agree to Trump’s maximalist demands in exchange for minimal returns. And host Mark Levin has suggested that any negotiation that leaves Iran’s regime in place is a failure for the U.S.
Axios reported Thursday on purported progress toward an agreement to end the three-month-old war between the U.S. and its ally Israel against Iran, the latest reiteration of a familiar pattern. “U.S. and Iranian negotiators have reached an agreement on a 60-day memorandum of understanding to extend the ceasefire and launch negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, but President Trump has yet to give his final approval,” the outlet’s Barak Ravid reported.
Trump subsequently met with top aides on Friday for a two-hour meeting in the Situation Room but “did not reach a decision on any new deal.” Since then, the U.S. and Iran have reportedly traded new negotiating points and military strikes.
The president regularly shapes national policy based on what he sees on Fox, and he leaned on the network in deciding to go to war in the first place and over the subsequent months. But a social media post Trump issued just after 1 a.m. ET on Monday may suggest some frustration with the Fox Cabinet members whose counsel he typically seeks.
Trump, in that post, promised that Iran would agree to a “good” deal and said that unnamed “political hacks” should “just sit back and relax” rather than telling him to “move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”
(Iran’s state media reported hours later that “Iranian negotiators will stop exchanging messages with the U.S. through intermediaries in retaliation for ongoing ceasefire violations” and its forces would again fully close the Strait of Hormuz.)
Hannity predicts “a major geopolitical win”
Hannity has torn up every media ethics rule in the book as he pursues his dual role of Fox host and Trump political operative. A longtime friend and confidant of the president, he has at times been so influential White House aides described him as the “the ‘shadow’ chief of staff.” Trump reportedly cited commentary from “Sean” in internal deliberations with U.S. officials in the lead-up to the war.
The Fox propagandist is cheering on any prospective deal as a significant Trump victory — and preparing his audience to do the same.
Hannity opened his Friday show by announcing “terrible news for Democrats who are limping into the midterms: President Trump is now poised for a major geopolitical win in Iran. News of a significant deal is already driving down dramatically the price of oil while sending the stock market to one record high after another after another.”
Later in the program, Hannity touted the president’s negotiating abilities and Iran’s purportedly weak position.
“They're in desperate need of cash and one of the things the president is saying is you don't get any of your own money or to sell anything until we get the dust, the strait is open, the mines are removed, and if it doesn't work, I'm just going to blow you to smithereens,” he said, adding, “I don't think the president I would hesitate a moment if he felt the deal was falling apart.”
Keane, Kilmeade, Thiessen: “We can go back to military operations” if Iran doesn’t bend
Trump has consulted Keane, a retired Army general and Fox senior strategic analyst who sits on the boards of multiple defense contractors, and Thiessen, a Washington Post columnist and Fox contributor, about the Iran war, according to an April Axios report. Kilmeade, meanwhile, is the senior co-host on Fox & Friends, the Fox morning show that shapes Trump’s worldview.
Keane frequently calls for further military escalation against Iran in his Fox appearances, and he stressed last week the need to return to full-scale military operations rather than accepting an agreement that fails to meet the maximalist
“No matter what deal we put together, at the end of it, they are going to want to recover everything that they're losing and go back to their original goal,” he said on Friday’s Fox & Friends. “So, in the deal … we have got to have the provisions in there to prevent as much of that as possible from happening.”
He further suggested that “we can go back to military operations” if Iran did not agree to relinquish “fees” and “the implication” it controls the Strait of Hormuz, as well as “all” its uranium stockpile “regardless of the percentage” of enrichment, while receiving no “money upfront” in sanctions relief.
Likewise, when Kilmeade interviewed Thiessen on Monday, the pair touted Trump’s demands while mocking the Iranian responses as unrealistic.
Thiessen emphasized that providing Iran with access to money should be a nonstarter, saying that “the big problem with even a good deal” in which “we get the nuclear dust, we end their nuclear program, and possibly even get the Arab states to join the Abraham Accords” is that “if we give them money, it gives a lifeline to the regime.”
Each pointed to escalations the U.S. could take in place of accepting a negotiated settlement, with Thiessen saying that “we can open the strait by force if we want to” while Kilmeade suggested “we could stop them getting resupplied through land.”
Mark Levin: Iran won’t honor any “paper agreement,” and its regime “must be destroyed”
Levin reportedly helped bring about the June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities by convincing the president over a lunch at the White House that the country was just days away from getting a nuclear weapon. Trump has urged the public to watch Levin’s program for the host’s commentary on the U.S.-Iran war.
Levin typically lavishes Trump with praise for his decision to attack Iran — but as the network’s most hawkish figure on the war, he wants it to end with Iranian regime change, not a deal.
“Our government needs to understand that no paper agreement, no matter how good the terms seem, will in the end be honored by this enemy,” he explained on Sunday night’s Fox show, which aired hours before Trump posted on social media.
“The Iranian regime is at war with us, whether we like it or not,” Levin later added. “They are at war with us whether we are at war with it, whether we sign agreements with it as we have in the past, and there is nothing that’s going to change it. Nothing!”
“Let me repeat, nothing — except its destruction,” he continued. “That’s it. This is why, in my view, it must be destroyed, where I feel it will never be destroyed, least not with some great, massive military operation, the kind of which we do seek to avoid.”
Levin concluded his monologue by describing Trump as “a courageous man, he's a moral man, and he cares passionately and compassionately about us, his fellow Americans. What I know is that he loves our country, and he will do the very best he can to safeguard it. That I do know, and that allows us to sleep at night.”
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