Sign up for the Today newsletter
Get everything you need to know to start your day, delivered right to your inbox every morning.
CNN pundit Scott Jennings’s election night defense of Trump supporters goes viral
"I'm interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of just the regular ole working-class American, the anonymous American," Jennings said on CNN at 3:38 a.m. Wednesday, in a clip that's been shared widely on social media.
As former President Donald Trump inched closer to the requisite 270 electoral votes early Wednesday morning, CNN’s Anderson Cooper turned to conservative pundit Scott Jennings to weigh in on the presumptive win.
Jennings’s ensuing 3:38 a.m. response has gone viral since, as Republicans have held up his comments as the quintessential rebuttal to liberals, with some even calling for him to be Trump’s press secretary.
Jennings started off by saying that Trump’s decisive win is a “mandate to do what you said you were going to do.”
He continued:
I’m interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of just the regular ole working class American, the anonymous American, who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to — they’re not garbage, they’re not Nazis, they’re just regular people who get up and go to work every day and are trying to make a better life for their kids and they feel like they have been told to just shut up, when they’ve complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives.
Jennings also called the election an indictment of the “political information complex,” noting that the pre-election storylines of Tony Hinchcliffe’s Puerto Rico joke, Liz Cheney’s Kamala Harris endorsement, and “women lying to their husbands” about their vote didn’t end up affecting the outcome.
Advertisement:
“We were just ignoring the fundamentals,” he said. “Inflation, people feeling like they were barely able to tread water, at best, that was the fundamentals of the election.”
In late October, The Washington Post published an extensive profile of Jennings, a past Trump critic and “a former George W. Bush administration staffer and a longtime adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) with a smooth Southern drawl.”
“While he began his tenure playing the role of ‘Reasonable Republican’ on a network accused by conservatives of liberal bias, Jennings has emerged as something of a MAGA champion,” the Post reported, “dropping his ‘happy warrior’ persona and harshly lampooning Democrats, who he said recently appear to ‘care more about dudes who want to become women than dudes who just want to be dudes.'”
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com