Mark Levin Is Livid I Called Him a Trump Kiss-Ass. His Meltdown Proved Me Right.

Mark Levin is absolutely furious with me, and I feel an obligation to set the record straight.

I wrote a column on Wednesday arguing that, amid Trump’s failed Iran War, Fox News hosts have developed an elaborate rhetorical workaround for the Trump era: before raising any concern about the president’s decisions, they must first pay a tribute to his genius.

It’s not a particularly insightful observation; in fact, anyone who watches the network can plainly see the obvious: the more alarmed they actually are, the more praise for Trump has to come first, so as not to risk angering the potential audience of one. I called this bizarre phenomenon the “loyalty deposit,” and I used Levin’s Tuesday night appearance on Hannity as the primary example because it honestly looked like self-parody.

Before Levin could get to his actual point — that the Iran ceasefire may be a historic mistake and Donald Trump cannot walk away from it — he needed several hundred words of “thank God Donald Trump is president,” “his instincts are very, very good,” and “the most brilliant, spectacular military campaign in American history.” It was naked kissassery and/or suckuppery. Take your pick. But only after his public fellation, fully armored in tribute, did his criticism come through.

Though every quote I cited was accurately sourced, Levin did not care for my column. He responded on social media (the post is embedded below) by calling me unethical, describing Mediaite as fraudulent, comparing Mediaite Founder Dan Abrams to Jerry Springer, and noting that I am “an individual who has accomplished little.” He also got my title wrong — my role is Founding Editor, and the esteemed Joe DePaolo is Editor-in-Chief.

But perhaps the most telling detail is that Levin closed his post by demanding I publish it on Mediaite, which is a strange move for a man who claims the site is fraudulent and beneath his attention. It is, however, a very logical move for someone who has previously complained about being left off our annual Most Influential list. He made it last year. Apparently, that wasn’t enough. He spewed all of his venom without first offering a single word of praise for me. He went straight to the verdict, no preamble, no hedging, no loyalty toll paid.

Haters gonna hate. I don’t typically respond to this kind of criticism, and anyone who has helped run a media outlet for fifteen years develops not just a thick skin for it, but a sense of amusement when a thesis-confirming unhingening unfolds in glorious view.

But Levin is not an ordinary critic firing off at a website he dislikes. He is currently one of the most influential voices in conservative foreign policy, he has Trump’s ear, and as I wrote in March, he deserves a significant share of accountability for pushing this president toward a war that is now producing exactly the consequences his critics predicted. When someone who is this consequential attacks your work, the work is worth defending.

And the work defends itself. Because in his diatribe he showed exactly how he could be fiercely critical without a bizarre preamble of sycophancy, Levin perfectly proved the column’s argument in his reply. I couldn’t have scripted it better myself. Thanks, Mark.

But there’s something more interesting going on than simple irony: Levin made me his straw man. A straw man, in the classic sense, is a misrepresentation of an opponent’s argument built for the purpose of easy demolition.

But Levin’s version is more interesting and more cynical than that. He didn’t distort my argument — he used me as a vehicle. By picking a fight with a media critic he claims not to care about, he gets to perform the kind of blunt, unhedged directness he cannot perform toward Trump. He proves to his audience, and to the president, that he pulls no punches and bows to no one. Just look at what he did to that Mediaite guy!

Having established that credibility by attacking me, he can then slide in the real message through the side door: the ceasefire is a mistake, the regime survives, Trump cannot walk away. That’s the column he couldn’t write directly. I was the cover that made it possible.

The Hannity transcript is what makes his bizarre behavior observable rather than speculative. A man capable of calling a media editor unethical and fraudulent without a syllable of warmup is perfectly capable of telling a president directly that his ceasefire is a mistake. On Hannity, he chose not to. He buried the warning under hundreds of words of tribute.

In fact, on his radio show Wednesday, Levin described his own method without apparent embarrassment: “I praise the president, and I raise my questions.” That is the loyalty deposit, in his own words, offered freely, to his own audience. He didn’t just prove my column — he explained it to his own audience like a man reading the instructions on his own leash. The contrast between those two performances — raw and direct about me, elaborately deferential about Trump — is the whole argument, and Levin supplied both halves of it within twenty-four hours

Levin concluded his furious social media message by admitting that he is “a huge fan of President Trump” and doesn’t hide it. That’s more honest than most of his Fox colleagues would be.

But let’s be clear: a fan is not an analyst, and when a fan does analysis on the most-watched cable news channel in the country, the fandom shows up at exactly the moment when straight talk is most needed. When the ceasefire left the administration’s stated objectives unaddressed, the fan in Levin required the elaborate preamble. The analyst in Levin, who is genuinely alarmed, had to wait.

This matters beyond a media spat. In March, I argued that Levin was the loudest, most aggressive voice demanding the U.S. attack Iran, that he had the president’s ear, and that influence at that level carries real accountability on the back end. The war he helped make possible is not going the way he sold it. His response to that reality, both on Hannity and in his attack on me, is the loyalty deposit in action: praise first, concern second, and never quite enough of the latter to constitute a verdict.

As for the rest of his complaints — the leftist agenda, the fraudulence, the accomplishments audit — his lengthy response disputes exactly zero factual claims in my piece. The quotes are accurate. The sequence is documented. A rebuttal with no rebuttal is its own kind of confirmation.

He invited me to post his response on Mediaite. It’s below, unedited, in full — because unlike the subjects of my column, we don’t require a loyalty deposit before saying what we think. He’s welcome to respond on his show. The Iran War he helped start is still going — and going very poorly, I might add.

Mark Levin has Trump’s ear. Based on a failed Iran War policy, approval ratings in a death spiral, and Levin’s Tuesday night suck off? Trump should probably ask for it back.

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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