“What’s in Scott is a deep respect for everyday people, a desire to not just agitate, but to educate the person he’s talking to about a different point of view,” Jones adds of his colleague. He also commended Jennings for continuing to show support for Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza by donning a yellow ribbon pin in every segment.
Axelrod, who Jennings says is his closest friend from his tenure at CNN thus far, praised the pundit for his ability to cut “issues in ways that are provocative and go viral,” adding that Jennings has “created these ‘own the libs,’ kind of freewheeling moments, particularly on some of these panels.”
“I don’t always love what he does on TV,” says Axelrod, “but [that’s] not the whole of how I judge him.”
Before making the MAGA case on CNN, Jennings had taken a more traditional path through Republican politics, working for the likes of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Mitch McConnell. During the 2016 race, Jennings referred to Trump in a column as “authoritarian” and called out his “vulgar” and “crude” behavior in another, examples that were pointed out in a Washington Post profile of Jennings, which noted he “changed his tune after Trump took office.”
Jennings says Trump has altered the trajectory of the Republican Party by not adhering to “conservative orthodoxy” on the issues that have shaped the party’s platform. Sometimes on air, that manifests in a fierce defense of the president-elect. Jennings took it upon himself to back Trump’s controversial pick to lead the Department of Defense, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth. Jennings slammed the current Pentagon leadership, saying, “I’ve had just about enough of the so-called insiders running the defense department.”
“Yeah, he’s on TV, but so are the rest of us,” he pointed out, pushing back against his colleagues’ assertion that Hegseth lacks government experience.
There was chatter about Jennings himself joining the Trump administration. He was rumored to be on a short list of candidates to serve as the White House press secretary, a job that ultimately went to Karoline Leavitt. Jennings tells me he was not “actively seeking” a role in the administration and wasn’t behind any campaign suggesting his candidacy. “I have no plans to join the Trump administration right now,” he added.
The press secretary gig would be one in which Jennings presumably couldn’t break with Trump—something he says he’s willing to do on CNN. “There have been times when he has done things, said things, that I didn’t agree with, and I’ve not been shy about saying that on the air,” he says. Following Trump’s appearance earlier this year at the National Association of Black Journalists conference, where Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s race, Jennings did not mince words, saying that Trump did “crap the bed” during the interview: “The only question is whether he’s going to roll around in it or change the sheets.” Axelrod also believes Jennings isn’t “blindly defending everything Trump does.”
“We have free speech in this country, and we have free debate, and we all have to collectively make decisions about how we’re going to govern ourselves,” says Jennings, stressing the need for debating issues in “an honest and open format.”
“I think CNN is doing that,” he says. “I think the LA Times could do that.”
“When Patrick told me what his vision was for the newspaper—report the news and have a balanced editorial page—I thought that’s exactly what media should be,” Jennings says, adding that he doesn’t understand “what’s so controversial about that.”
But Soon-Shiong’s shake-up at the Times has been “controversial,” as his Times itself described it this past weekend. Since the Harris endorsement imbroglio, the Times has seen a steady wave of opinion section departures, leaving only one of the original board members remaining; meanwhile, the Times reported, an estimated 20,000 subscribers dropped the paper. Oliver Darcy, who has been reporting on upheaval inside the Times, framed Soon-Shiong’s actions atop Monday’s “Status” newsletter as “Meddling for MAGA.”
The Times owner touched on the opinion resignations in our interview, saying that “it was clear that there were very strong feelings about this idea of having a balanced viewpoint.” Soon-Shiong says that he felt that the editorial board was “veering very progressive,” and in his mind “it was really not healthy just to have what I call an echo chamber of a single view and almost canceling, so to speak, the views of both sides.”
Soon-Shiong says he is working through a list of around 20 to 25 candidates “across the spectrum from left, center, to right,” who he is contacting personally with a potential opportunity to join the restructured editorial board. While he declined to share any names on the list, Soon-Shiong says it will likely be announced early 2025, once the board is full of new contributors. Jennings’s role, it should be noted, is not a staff position.
“I think what he wants to do is kind of visionary, truthfully,” Jennings tells me of Soon-Shiong’s plans. “The editorial board should not be an echo chamber. There should be views that represent all of America.”
