Exclusive | Heres why MAGA-world wants anyone but rumored frontrunner Scott Jennings as next WH press secretary
WASHINGTON — CNN pundit Scott Jennings has become Washington’s most talked-about contender to replace Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary, but some of President Trump’s fiercest allies are trying to derail Jennings over his longstanding ties to Sen.Mitch McConnell, The Post has learned.“It’s not going to be him,” one person close to the administration insisted.Weeks before Leavitt announced her departure effective at the end of this month, Jennings, 48, boasted of his decades-long bond with McConnell (R-Ky.), who opposes many of Trump’s second-term legislative priorities and whom the president has mocked as an “Old Crow.”Trump’s would-be chief spokesman gushed on live TV last month that McConnell was “my mentor” and “changed the trajectory of my life.”The Kentucky-raised Jennings studied at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville and managed the future Senate GOP leader’s successful 2002 re-election campaign.MAGA sources noted that Jennings’ commentary about Trump in the wake of the Jan.
6, 2021, Capitol riot aligned with McConnell’s assessment that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the violence.Jennings penned a CNN op-ed declaring that “Trump caused this insurrection with his lies and conspiracy theories about the election process being rigged against him.”“These are domestic terrorists,” he opined about the participants, whom Trump mass-pardoned upon retaking office last year, “and they ought to be treated like any other terrorist uprising with the full force and fury of the US government.”When contacted by The Post Thursday for comment, Jennings responded by texting a gif of Patrick Swayze’s character James Dalton in the 1989 film “Road House,” with the caption: “Opinions vary.”Although Trump values loyalty, he’s forgiven past criticisms by many of his appointees — most notably selecting JD Vance as his running mate in 2024 despite Vance musing in 2016 tha...