It will mark the third time Mr. Trump will do the traditional interview before America’s annual television holiday; he spoke to Mr. O’Reilly in 2017, took 2018 off because the game was aired on NBC, and famously told Margaret Brennan of CBS that he wouldn’t allow his son Barron to play football because it’s “really tough” and “a dangerous sport.”

This year’s Super Bowl comes at an amazing moment, a confluence of political circumstances and events that give this particular bully pulpit a power and a spotlight it hasn’t had in years. With impeachment, the Iowa caucuses and the State of the Union all on deck, Mr. Trump will have a stage, and a famously pliant interviewer, that is unparalleled in American culture. He couldn’t ask for a more ideal year for it to be Fox’s turn to air the game.

It wasn’t long ago that the N.F.L. owners were terrified of Mr. Trump, and with good reason: He called the players kneeling to protest social injustice and police brutality “sons of bitches” and said that owners should “fire” the players and drag them off the field, lighting a fire to an already combustible situation with the league. But the N.F.L., like so many Republican politicians, has largely caved to Mr. Trump’s desires.

And Mr. Hannity is, suffice it to say, unlikely to turn up much heat on the president. It’s worth noting that friendly, back-scratching interviews are much more in the spirit of this tradition — like the one before the “Super Bowl Shuffle” Chicago Bears’ win in 1986 in Super Bowl XX, in which Tom Brokaw asked Ronald Reagan about his own playing career. (The year before, Reagan did the coin flip from the White House.)

It didn’t become a real tradition until Mr. Obama decided to do one every year, with non-sports journalists like Scott Pelley of CBS and Savannah Guthrie of NBC. Mr. O’Reilly brought a more combative, feet-to-the-fire style to his, but still, the general tone of both his interviews was friendly, even cordial, and the subtext was, “Let’s all try to come together on the Super Bowl.”