Scott Jennings’ appointment as White House press secretary would not be a surprising turn in Donald Trump’s second administration. If the reports and rumors turn out to be right, the choice would say as much about our modern political media as it would about the CNN pundit himself. His is a particular kind of American grift that only cable news could have produced: the professional Trump apologist who spends years building a brand on “reasonable conservative who’ll push back a little,” cashes it in for a White House podium and never once has to explain how those two roles were supposed to coexist.
Jennings has been auditioning for that grift since the day he first told a 2017 CNN panel that Trump deserved a fair hearing. Now, with Karoline Leavitt’s departure at the end of August, he may finally get taxpayers to fund his propaganda.
Leavitt, who has served as press secretary since Trump’s second term began in January 2025, recently announced she would be stepping down to spend more time with her family after the birth of her second child. Her impending exit has kicked off a telling scramble inside Trumpworld, one that has led to a shortlist that apparently includes former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, Trump aide Natalie Harp, White House communications director Steven Cheung, Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle and former Trump attorney Alina Habba. But the name that keeps rising to the top, and the one CNN itself has now confirmed as the “early favorite,” is Jennings.
CNN reported that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles met privately with Jennings at Mastro’s Steakhouse in Washington, with one senior administration official explaining the interest bluntly: Jennings is “competent and good on TV.” Multiple Trump staffers reportedly believe he already has Wiles’ backing. A separate report by POLITICO revealed that Jennings had been sending clips of his CNN appearances directly to senior White House staffers, seemingly campaigning for the job in real time.
Jennings is almost comically suited to the part. Anyone who has watched him on CNN knows the routine. He occupies the familiar cable news position of conservative contrarian, the lone Republican supposedly willing to enter hostile territory and calmly dismantle the liberals around him. While the network presents his presence as ideological friction, Jennings presents it as sober common sense. The result is often that of a major cable news network treating the indefensible as merely another side of a good-faith argument. CNN has unquestionably helped turn Jennings into a national brand.
His defense of the president is particularly naked careerism because Jennings was once an outspoken critic of Trump.
Over the course of Trump’s second presidency, Jennings’ television role has increasingly become defined by outright aggression in his defense of the administration. “I think every president deserves a good, solid defense and someone who can go out there and explain what they’re doing,” he said on CNN this week, calling the press secretary’s work “the conduit to transparency in front of the camera and also behind the scenes.” But Jennings’ behavior on CNN, particularly on “CNN Newsnight with Abby Phillip,” is especially combative, often snapping at co-panelists, and hostile to truth, twisting reality to promulgate the administration’s given narrative. His defense of the president is particularly naked careerism because Jennings was once an outspoken critic of Trump.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Jennings wrote an op-ed for CNN with a headline that could not have been less ambiguous: Trump caused this insurrection, and every Republican must condemn it. “This is literally an insurrection,” he wrote, adding that the failure to secure the Capitol was nothing less than “a failure of leadership by the commander in chief.” He went further, writing that Trump had caused the violence with his lies and conspiracy theories about a stolen presidential election. Jennings said he was ashamed and embarrassed for his country — and for any Republican who failed to condemn what happened. On CNN the following day, he stated unequivocally that Trump had caused the insurrection and criticized Republican senators who continued challenging the election results after the Capitol had been attacked. Nearly six years later, those remarks could be a political problem for Jennings inside the Trump coalition.
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But a capacity for rapid transformation is the premier currency in Trump’s orbit. The president has long surrounded himself with figures who initially condemned him before bending the knee. Figures like Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Vice President JD Vance have calculated that proximity to power and the adulation of the MAGA base outweigh any lingering attachment to personal dignity. Jennings has played this game with cunning precision, much like his mentor Mitch McConnell, who himself condemned Trump after Jan. 6, and described him as practically and morally responsible for provoking the attack.
Neither man’s fury translated into action. McConnell voted the following month to acquit the president of inciting the riot. Trump, for his part, mass-pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants on his first day back in office. Confronted on air in January 2026 about the administration’s recasting of rioters as patriotic protesters unfairly targeted by an overzealous Capitol Police force, Jennings allowed only that he has “a somewhat different” view than the president’s, before pivoting to complain that Democrats treat the anniversary like “a national holiday.”
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Jennings’ Jan. 6 flip-flop is not an isolated point of friction for the pundit. Just this month on his nationally syndicated Salem Media radio show, he aired a heavily edited compilation of leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, accusing Piker of “calling for Black voters to be lynched” and warning listeners that “beneath all the smiles and dancing videos, there’s nothing but hate and violence in the heart of these communists.” Snopes reviewed the original streams and found the clip had been stitched together out of order and stripped of context; Piker’s remarks about lynching were sarcastic reactions to something someone else had said, not an endorsement of anything. By his own account, Piker is now preparing a defamation suit against Jennings and Salem Media, and possibly Fox News, which cited the same debunked compilation. Piker has said the fallout has brought a wave of death threats serious enough that he has tightened his security and cut back on public appearances.
Perhaps that’s why Trump reportedly remains “not quite sold” on Jennings. Despite the president’s apparent misgivings, it makes perfect sense for a man who is facing a defamation lawsuit for airing a doctored video to simultaneously be the frontrunner to become Trump’s official voice to the American public. Scott Jennings’ potential appointment to White House press secretary would be yet another triumphant coup for a MAGA apparatus that demands complete moral surrender from its acolytes.
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by Sophia Tesfaye
