I Was Wrong About Scott Jennings; He Shouldn't Be Anywhere Near the White House Briefing Room

When Karoline Leavitt announced she would step down as White House press secretary to raise her newborn son, my first reaction was admiration. It takes a certain clarity of soul to trade the most visible podium in the world for the least visible work in it, and she deserves every good thing said about her. She has been a fighter for this President, and she has done the job with a steel the press corps still has not forgiven. My second reaction was to do what columnists do and offer the President unsolicited advice. Hire Scott Jennings, I argued, publicly and repeatedly on the Third Rail (my weekly livestream with Chris Salcedo). Take the sharpest conservative voice on CNN, the man who wins panel fights 5 against 1 every night, and put his talents to work for the administration directly.

Then a reader sent me a short note. Before you write that again, he said, go read what Jennings wrote about the President and the GOP on January 6, 2021. So I did. This op-ed is the result, and it is not the one I expected to write. I was wrong, and the case against my own position deserves to be made properly rather than mumbled as a retraction.

The podium and the panel look alike if you watch them on television, and that is how a columnist talks himself into a bad hire. A pundit sells independent judgment, and when Jennings sits on a CNN panel, his value comes from speaking for himself and from no one having cleared his talking points. Viewers watch him because they cannot predict him. A press secretary sells the opposite, because she is the President’s voice, and when she speaks from the podium, the government of the United States speaks. Her single professional asset is the audience’s confidence that her words and the President’s mind are the same thing, and whatever damages that confidence damages the job itself. The audience in that room is looking for the President’s mind, spoken aloud.

On January 6, 2021, while the Capitol was still being cleared, Jennings published an op-ed at CNN under a title that did the Democrats’ work for them: Trump caused this insurrection, and every Republican must condemn it. The body delivered on the title. “President Donald Trump caused this insurrection with his lies and conspiracy theories about the election process being rigged against him,” he wrote, adopting in a single line every load-bearing element of the narrative that Democrats and their media allies would spend the next 4 years building against the man he would now serve. That narrative was a political project, designed to brand a sitting Republican president as a criminal and his voters as a threat to the republic, and it ran for 4 years through hearings, prosecutions, and nightly recitations that treated MAGA suspicion of the 2020 count as a moral crime rather than a political argument. Jennings handed them the vocabulary on day one, from a conservative byline.

He did not stop there. Of the election itself, he wrote flatly, “It was not stolen,” dismissing in 4 words the integrity concerns tens of millions of Republicans held then and hold now. Those concerns were not a fever dream cooked up for cable, and a man who wants to speak for that coalition from the White House podium cannot have opened his account of the day by informing those voters that their central grievance was a lie. He blamed the President’s “top advisers” for having “fomented” the madness for months, singling out Rudy Giuliani by name. Of the people who entered the Capitol, he wrote, “These are domestic terrorists, and they ought to be treated like any other terrorist uprising with the full force and fury of the US government.” He told the crowd, “You are no different than any violent Antifa rioter you claim to despise. Today, you are them.” He demanded that Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley withdraw their electoral objections at once, declared the unsecured Capitol “a failure of leadership by the commander in chief,” called the President’s video message to the crowd a “complete failure of leadership,” and closed by announcing he was “ashamed and embarrassed for our country, and for any Republican who fails to condemn this shameful behavior.” That evening, on air with Anderson Cooper, he went further. The President, he said, had “clearly violated his oath of office,” and the day was “a stain on this president, on our party, on our country.”

Reasonable men may differ about tariffs, about Ukraine, about the debt, and a press secretary can have privately opposed a policy she now defends because policy judgments are revisable. What Jennings issued was a moral indictment of maximal severity. He falsely accused a Republican president of causing an insurrection against the United States, accused that president’s supporters of terrorism, and then constructed a loyalty test and applied it to the entire party. Any Republican who declined to adopt his characterization of the day was, by his own published words, an object of shame. He did not ask Republicans to condemn violence, which every decent person does without prompting. He demanded they condemn each other, on his terms, using his vocabulary, or stand accused alongside the mob. That is the establishment reflex in its purest form. Jennings is a Bush White House veteran and a longtime McConnell adviser, and his January 6 language tracked the “practically and morally responsible” verdict his old principal would soon pronounce from the Senate floor. The Bush-McConnell wing has always preferred a managed conservatism that keeps the base at arm’s length, and on that afternoon Jennings spoke in their register.

People change their minds, and Jennings endorsed the President in 2024, writing in the Los Angeles Times that although he “was none too pleased with Trump after Jan. 6, 2021,” he would vote for him as a “bulwark against the cultural and governance excesses of the American left.” Words written in the heat of a chaotic afternoon do not bind a man forever, except these were not written only then. 6 days later, in a calm interview with PBS Frontline, Jennings repeated the whole indictment. Trump was “fully responsible,” he said, “responsible from soup to nuts for that crowd, and I think for the actions of that crowd,” the product of “a days-long conspiracy” to “subvert the Constitution.” That is not adrenaline. It is a considered verdict, delivered twice, and it does not evaporate. A press secretary whose deepest published judgment about his principal is under management is a liability waiting for a hot microphone. On the fifth anniversary this January, he told Kaitlan Collins the whole thing was “a bad day” that “should never happen again.” A man does not get to file the same event as a terrorist insurrection in 2021 and a bad day in 2026 without explaining which filing was the honest one, and Jennings has never retracted the first.

There is also the practical matter, the theoretical matter of wearing work clothes. Imagine Jennings’s first briefing. The Associated Press rises and asks how the man who wrote that January 6 defendants were “domestic terrorists” deserving the “full force and fury of the US government” now defends the pardons of those same defendants, roughly 1,583 of whom were federally charged, the great bulk for trespass and disorderly conduct offenses, with seditious conspiracy charges reaching only about 18 group leaders. The government’s own data never supported the terrorist uprising Jennings described. His rhetoric outran even the Biden Justice Department’s, which spent 4 years trying to make that story stick and still could not produce the uprising he announced on day one. What can he say? Every available answer is a confession. He can say he was wrong then, which invites the follow-up of why his judgment under pressure should be trusted now. He can say he was right then, which puts the White House press secretary on record against the White House. He can dodge, which every reporter will read as an admission that the words still stand. The briefing room runs on leverage, and a press secretary who arrives pre-indicted by his own byline hands the press corps a crowbar on day one. They would open every briefing with it, because they have spent 4 years treating January 6 as the only story that matters.

Some will say this standard is too unforgiving, that conservatism believes in redemption, and so it does. But forgiveness and fitness are seperate questions, and conflating them is a category error. I forgive Jennings, sincerely, and I suspect the President does too. Forgiveness is personal; an office is institutional, and declining to hand a man the presidential megaphone is not a punishment; it is prudence. You would not seat, as closing counsel for your defense, a lawyer who once stood before the same jury and pronounced you guilty. Not because he lacks skill. Because the jury remembers, and his presence at your table converts his old words into today’s evidence.

The qualities that disqualify Jennings from the podium are the qualities that make him invaluable exactly where he is. His willingness to break with his own side in 2021 is the source of his credibility on CNN in 2026. Viewers who would dismiss a loyalist cannot dismiss a man who has drawn blood on his own team. He does a great job there, I mean that without reserve, and conservatism profits more from one persuasive man inside the lion’s den than from another spokesman inside the palace. CNN is his post, and he holds it better than anyone on the right has in years. Conservatives who keep Jennings on CNN rather than in the West Wing are not punishing him. They are putting him where his independence still helps the cause.

I called for Scott Jennings to replace Karoline Leavitt, and I had not done my homework. He should keep doing precisely what he does now, where his independence remains useful. I should have known the difference before I wrote the first column, and I will not make the same recommendation again.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.