Fox News host Sean Hannity compared Trump to Reagan and people have a lot of questions

As more information emerges about Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un’s summit in Hanoi, Fox News host Sean Hannity is being criticised after he attempted to defend its failure – by plucking an event from America’s history as a point of comparison.

Hannity, who often takes to his Fox News program to defend the US president on a whole host of issues, drew a bizarre comparison between Trump’s meeting with Jong-Un and Ronald Reagan’s meeting with Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986.

Speaking at a presser, he said: "Mr. President, thank you. Mr. Secretary, good to see you. Mr. President, if you could elaborate a little bit more."

We have some history. President Reagan walked away in Reykjavik. A lot of condemnation at the time. And it ended up working out very well in the end for the United States.

He went on to ask the president if it had been “his” decision to walk away, to which Trump responded that it wasn’t.

The tenuous historical comparison was shut down by people online.

There are several reasons such a comparison holds no weight, not least because Reagan had sat down with Russia, a superpower at the time, not a rogue state in possession of nuclear arms.

Reagan also managed to clinch a number of key concessions from Russia, including the release of US journalist Nicholas Daniloff, who had been falsely charged with spying.

Despite the fact that negotiations eventually broke down, it became known as one of the most important summits in history, and a year later the US and the Soviet Union signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which eliminated a class of nuclear weapons.

Both Reagan and American diplomats prepared for the summit extensively. CNN national security analyst Sam Vinograd wrote in The Daily Beast:

President Donald Trump's failure to engage in the most basic preparatory work for this summit - and his longstanding penchant for putting personal convictions ahead of his experts' opinions - meant that there was no way that he could have come out of this summit with a denuclearisation deal.