CNN’s token conservative commentator Scott Jennings lashed out at MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell for criticizing him, calling O’Donnell an “irrelevant lunatic” who was driven to have a “mental breakdown” on air by Jennings’ mere existence.
The back-and-forth started on Monday, when O’Donnell discussed Jennings on his MSNBC show, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. O’Donnell criticized CNN for “pay[ing] a Trump supporter to lie on CNN every day,” referring to Jennings, who is a political commentator for the news network and a regular guest on NewsNight with Abby Phillip.
“During the first Trump presidential campaign and presidency, CNN regularly paid Trump supporters to lie about Trump on CNN. But the CNN regime then realized that was a mistake, and they stopped doing it. They stopped paying for lies,“ O’Donnell argued.
“But then CNN got a new head, the head of CNN for the last three years, hired by the Trump-supporting owner and operator of CNN, is an Englishman who thinks paying Scott Jennings to lie about Donald Trump is money very well spent.”
O’Donnell went on to explain to his viewers that Jennings, who was once an aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell, used to be “capable of criticizing some of the more extreme Trump positions.”
He continued, “But Scott Jennings figured out where the money is and how he could get his own podcast and decided to become the JD Vance of CNN.”
On the podcast in question, The Scott Jennings Radio Show, Jennings responded to the segment, hitting back at O’Donnell and dismissing him as a “lunatic.”
“There’s this lunatic on MSNBC at 10 o’clock every night named Lawrence O’Donnell. I had sort of forgotten that he was a thing, but I guess he still has a show, and he went crazy, crazy on yours truly, the other night.”
After playing a clip from O’Donnell’s Monday night show, Jennings responded, “Lie? Someone at MSNBC is accusing someone else of lying? From that propaganda outfit over there? They’re accusing me or anyone else of lying? Outrageous.”
Jennings also defended CNN CEO Mark Thompson, the “Englishman” O’Donnell referred to, explaining that Thompson is an American citizen and adding that he’s “not sure what Lawrence O’Donnell was implying by calling him an ‘Englishman.’”
He went on to break down O’Donnell’s “real problem” in his view: “He’s irrelevant, nobody likes his show... He’s up against [NewsNight] and in the month of October, Abby Phillip was kicking his rear end by 30 percent on a nightly basis.”
“Can you imagine having a television show on a network and you spend your precious time on that network complaining about what someone else is doing on another network?”
“He’s a failed media personality, nobody cares what he thinks, his show is failing, Abby Phillip and CNN are kicking his rear end on a nightly basis and so he goes on TV under all this pressure and has a psychotic episode and starts complaining about Mark Thompson and me,” Jennings continued.
Jennings’s final message for O’Donnell was simple: “You’re a failure.”
In terms of overall viewership numbers, O’Donnell consistently brings in twice as many viewers as NewsNight, if not more, making it the second most popular show on MSNBC and the 84th overall on television.
NewsNight, by contrast, is the fifth most popular show on CNN and the 157th overall. NewsNight, however, is more popular with the 25-54 demographic mentioned by Jennings; with that demographic, the CNN program regularly pulls in twice the audience of O’Donnell.
