As it became clear that Donald Trump would become the 47th president of the United States, mainstream media networks, such as CNN, where forced to contend with a reality check. While former President Trump was sweeping through the battleground states and it is evident that he would win, Republican CNN pundit Scott Jennings pointed out to his co-hosts that the media was completely wrong throughout the race.
Noting Trump’s massive victory, Jennings told the panel, “This is a mandate. He’s won the national popular vote for the first time for a Republican since 2004, this is a big deal. This isn’t backing into the office.” He emphasized that people are demanding that Trump hold true to his promises and get the country on the right track.
“This is a mandate to do what you said you were going to do, get the economy working again for regular working-class Americans, fix immigration, try to get crime under control, try to reduce the chaos in the world this. This is a mandate from the American people to do that,” Jennings continued, illustrating the undeniable energy from American voters.
The pundit further explained that the election was the average American making their voice heard. “I think I’m interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of just a 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 shut up when they have complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives.”
Jennings called out the legacy media stressing that this should serve as a reality check for the media that incorrectly projected so many details about the race. “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. We’ve been sitting around it for the last couple of weeks, and the story that was portrayed was not true,” he said.
He continued, “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 10 walls in the camo hats. Night after night after night. We were told all these things and gimmicks were going to somehow push Harrison over the line, and we were just ignoring the fundamentals, inflation.”
Speaking for the average American, Jennings added, “People feeling like that, they were barely able to tread water at best. That was the fundamentals of the election.” He continued emphasizing that the media must reckon with what went wrong, stating, “And so I think that both parties should always look at the results of an election and figure out what went right, 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 the night and said, we’ve had enough.”
Watch Jennings below:
CNN being schooled live.
pic.twitter.com/dD2HFR7HEU— Rieb van Janbeeck (@RiebvJanbeeck) November 6, 2024
Note: The featured image is a screenshot from the embedded video.
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