CNN contributor Scott Jennings defended those who voted for former and future President Donald Trump, saying they are “not garbage, they’re not Nazis.”
“This is a big deal. This isn’t backing into the office,” Jennings said.
“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 is a mandate from the American people to do that.” he continued.
“I think I’m interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of just the 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.”
Jennings stated, “And they feel like they have been told to just shut up when they have complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives. I also feel like this election, as we sit here and pore over this tonight, is something of an indictment of the political information complex.”
The contributor noted that Democrats have ignored the “fundamentals” concerning U.S. voters.
“Inflation, people feeling like that they were barely able to tread water at best,” the contributor said. “That was the fundamentals of the election. And so I think that both parties should always look at the results of an election and figure out what went right and 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 tonight and said, we’ve had enough,” he noted.
Jennings added that he is “worried” about how Democrats will react to Trump’s victory. “They’ve been told Trump is a modern-day Hitler, or at least he’s a fascist,” he said, going on to declare that “half the country was conditioned to believe that the person who just won the national popular vote is going to be a dictator, eliminate the Constitution, create a bloodbath, and so on and so forth.”
“We have to reckon with that and the aftermath of that argument,” he concluded.
