Some Republicans have been talking up the notion of CNN analyst Scott Jennings as White House press secretary in a second Trump term after he made a stirring little oration in the 3 am hour of Election Night coverage.
Scott's resume working for George W. Bush and Mitch McConnell might make that prospect surprising. But he's clearly the GOP star of CNN (mostly viewed by Republicans on social media).
A few hours before the race was called for Trump, anchor Anderson Cooper asked Jennings what he expected in the next few months. But after saying Trump had won a mandate, Jennings talked about how the media did a terrible job. The election results were "an indictment of the political information complex."
SCOTT JENNINGS: I think I'm interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of just the regular old 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 have complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives. I also feel like this election, as we sit here and pour over this tonight, is something of an indictment of the political information complex. I mean, we've been sitting around here for the last couple of weeks, and the story that was portrayed was not true. We were told Puerto Rico was going to change the election. Liz Cheney, Nikki Haley voters, women lying to their husbands. Before that it was Tim Walz and the camo hats.
Night after night after night, we were told all these things and gimmicks were going to somehow push Harris over the line. And we were just ignoring the fundamentals. Inflation, people feeling like they were barely able to tread water at best. That was the fundamentals of the election.
And so, I think that both parties should always look at the results of an election and figure out what went right and what went wrong. But I think for all of us who cover elections and talk about elections and do this on a day-to-day basis, we have to figure out how to understand, talk to, and listen to the half of the country that rose up tonight and said, we've had enough.
After Ashley Allison insisted the Democrats are feeling pain, too, Jennings underlined that Vice President Harris will now certify the election of someone she denounced as a fascist and a petty tyrant:
I'm a little concerned about an election in which half the country was conditioned to believe that the person who just won the national popular vote is going to be a dictator, eliminate the constitution, and create a bloodbath, and so on and so forth. So we have to reckon with that and the aftermath of that argument.
