Fox News host Sean Hannity all but stopped talking about Iran on his primetime show in recent weeks, after President Donald Trump called off further escalations in his six-month-long war. It’s a remarkable shift for Hannity, who is the network figure closest to the president and whose repeated calls for U.S. military action against Iran apparently helped sway Trump’s final decision to launch hostilities in February.

Hannity declared at the top of his July 23 broadcast that the “gloves” were “about to come off” and the U.S. would soon be “launching a massive attack on Iran,” citing comments Trump made to Axios that day.

“We're talking about bridges, power plants, airports, roadways, checkpoints, Kharg Island, the nuclear site at Pickaxe Mountain, everything now on the table,” Hannity exclaimed. Introducing correspondent Kevin Corke for a report, the host commended: “Kevin, remember the scene in Gladiator? ‘At my command, unleash hell.’ That's what it sounds like to me.”

"Before Epic Fury, I was warning Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, because there were reports that a jet, probably with a lot of money on it, [was] waiting to take him to Vladimir Putin's Russia,” he later added. “I would advise the heads of the IRGC similarly, maybe they want to get on a jet themselves and do it pretty quickly. Just a guess. What do I know? I'm just a little old talk show host. I'm, you know, just guessing.”

“Good guess,” Corke replied.

It was not a good guess: Two days later, Trump reportedly “set aside” the escalation plans due to fears about diminished U.S. munitions stockpiles and the potential for a widening war.

Hannity’s war is such a debacle he’s stopped talking about it

Hannity’s only extensive discussion of the Iran war on his Fox show since that July 23 broadcast came during an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he aired on July 28, according to a review of the Nexis database. Since then, he’s offered nothing more than a few stray comments.

There’s been plenty of news about the Iran war for Hannity to discuss since then — it just all makes him look bad.

The following week, Trump again threatened a massive attack before again backing down on August 1, this time publicly citing concerns from Persian Gulf states and claiming to have the “perimeters of a deal” with Iran that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

But no deal has since materialized, and while Trump and Iranian leaders trade public demands for war reparations, Iranian and Omani negotiators are closing in on an agreement that would impose transit fees for passage through the strait, leading the Gulf states to reportedly conclude “that Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz will become permanent, disrupting their oil and gas exports and global energy supplies indefinitely” — and that further escalations to the war would be worse.

Meanwhile, experts reportedly fear China or Russia could seek to take advantage of the depletion of U.S. missile supplies caused by the war.

Amidst this omnishambles for U.S. strategic interests, Hannity has been all but silent about the war he encouraged Trump to launch.

One explanation for Hannity’s reticence to defend Trump’s war could be that he is beginning to fear its potential blowback for the GOP’s midterm hopes. GOP strategist Matt Towery warned that the war is creating a headwind for the party in a Monday interview on Hannity’s radio show (where the host has discussed the war somewhat more frequently than he has on Fox).

“This thing has got to conclude because every week we go by that the president says well, we're going to bomb the hell out of them and destroy them, and then two weeks — two days later, we hear well, we're in talks, and then the Iranians pulled the rug out from under him — it weakens the president in the eyes of his supporters,” Towery told Hannity’s radio listeners on Monday. “And so it's time to put up or go home, in my opinion. That's just my advice.”

“The president … has to be able to put Iran aside and say, ‘look, we dealt with it’ one way or another,” Towery later added. “If we go into these midterms with Iran still hanging over everybody's head, I don't think — there'd be a lot of states that would be lost and unnecessarily so because the president's record has been obscured by all this.”

It’s also possible that the situation has become so bleak, and the president’s leadership so shaky, that even Hannity is having trouble defending it. After all, Hannity sold the war to his viewers — and to Trump — on the grounds that it would be a quick and easy response to an existential threat, with no regard for the likelihood that Iran would respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz.

It might also be awkward for Hannity to explain to his audience why the war seems no closer to being finished in August than it did when he told his radio audience on March 30, “It's going to be on the verge of wrapping up no later than three weeks from today is my prediction.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters