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Following Karoline Leavitt’s announcement on Wednesday that she will be departing from her role as White House press secretary, one report suggests that the next person for the job could be a MAGA die-hard who frequently defends lies from President Donald Trump, even in the face of live fact-checks: CNN contributor Scott Jennings.
According to a report from The Daily Beast, which cited sources with knowledge of the discussions on who could replace Leavitt, Jennings tops the list of would-be press secretaries for Trump. The pick would be a notable departure for the president, who hasn’t had an older, male press secretary since Sean Spicer during his first term in 2017.
Jennings, who regularly appears as a conservative panelist on CNN’s evening broadcasts, wouldn’t be unfamiliar with working in the White House, as he previously served as deputy director of political affairs under former President George W. Bush.
Asked about the possibility of his becoming the next press secretary on the cable news station Wednesday night, he avoided answering the question entirely, instead praising Leavitt as “maybe the greatest White House press secretary in the last 30 years.”
Leavitt has showcased extreme loyalty to Trump throughout her tenure, consistently parroting the president’s lies to the American public.
For example, Leavitt defended Trump in 2025 when he said he’d “love” the idea of deporting currently incarcerated U.S. citizens to foreign prisons. The outgoing press secretary insisted that such an action was an option for the president to consider, if it is legal — which, of course, it is not.
Leavitt has described reports on the U.S. bombing of a girls’ elementary school in Iran, which killed dozens, as “propaganda,” despite overwhelming evidence showing otherwise. She has also dismissed concerns from reporters about Trump canceling the midterms — even after he said, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have” midterm elections.
Jennings’s admiration for Leavitt’s work suggests that, if he does get the job, he may try to emulate her style of misleading the American people. Indeed, he’s already demonstrated an ability to do just that, in his CNN appearances and elsewhere.
Jennings has claimed to have had direct conversations with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), despite the senator not making any public appearances since a health event in June. McConnell’s long absence (and lack of audio or visual proof of his cognitive state) has led to questions about whether he’s fit to serve out the remainder of his term.
Jennings, who used to be a staffer for McConnell, was asked by reporters on Tuesday whether the senator should put out a video statement. Rather than responding to the reporters, Jennings ignored them and walked away.
The stalwart MAGA supporter has directly misled his viewers, too. During his program earlier this week, Jennings shared a video that supercut statements by progressive commentator and activist Hasan Piker, attempting to tie his words to Democratic U.S. Senate candidate for Michigan Abdul El-Sayed.
In the supercut, Jennings spliced together multiple comments from Piker that made it appear that he was racist against Black people. The edited footage included Piker saying we should “go back to a better time” when Black people were being lynched. In truth, Piker was being sarcastic in his remarks, ridiculing conservatives (including the “Make America Great Again” movement) who frequently say that America was better in the past.
“You got me! You got me because I am a racist person,” Piker said in the mashup of clips, also a sarcastic response.
Pointing out that Piker has campaigned alongside El-Sayed, Jennings used the clips to suggest that Black voters in Michigan and elsewhere should support Republicans instead.
“Every Black voter in this country needs to listen to this. … Might these Black voters find a home in the Republican Party this fall?” Jennings quipped.
In response to Jennings’s supercut of him, Piker suggested that he might sue the conservative talking head. As he explained on his August 12 Twitch stream, Piker said:
I don’t know what opportunities we have for litigation, but it is one of the grossest [out-of-context clip compilations] I have ever seen. I’ll look at what options are available to me. … I think this is consequential. This is clear-cut defamation.
Jennings is frequently fact-checked in real time during his appearances on CNN.
During a panel discussion in late May regarding weight and height requirements for military members attending the Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House that month, Jennings disputed that the restrictions were real, citing a conversation he had with someone in the administration.
“I asked the White House point-blank, ‘Is this true? And I was told, quote, ‘Fake news from The Washington Post,'” Jennings said, adding, “there are no restrictions.”
CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins called Jennings out for that statement.
“There is literally a memo that said ticket recipients are required to meet the Department of War waist to height ratio standard of less than .55 as well as all service-specific physical fitness test requirements,” she said.
In early March, Jennings also asked a panel on the network to “give me one example” of how Trump had been contradictory in the first few days of the war on Iran. CNN political analyst Josh Rogin responded by citing multiple instances of that happening.
“[Trump] said we want regime change, [then] we don’t want regime change. He said we know the people that were going to replace the ayatollah, then he said, we killed the people who are going to replace the ayatollah, so we don’t know them. He said, we want the people of Iran to rise up and free themselves and fight the regime, and then he said, we’re happy to work with the regime remnants, if somebody emerges. He said [the war] could be over in two days to four weeks,” Rogin noted. “He literally said every single option — it’s a total mess.”
But for Trump — whose lies to the public number in the tens of thousands — Jennings’s willingness to mislead Americans might be the very factor making the right-wing media personality a frontrunner for the role.
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