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CNN's resident MAGA defender hints he'll run for McConnell's Senate seat if Trump gives him the thumbs up
A former McConnell campaign adviser and special assistant to former President George W. Bush, Jennings has carved out a niche for himself in recent years as CNN's resident Trump defender. Since the president's return to the White House, Jennings' stock has risen within both MAGA circles and the mainstream media, as he's launched his own daily radio show and been named to the Los Angeles Times' editorial board.
Promoting his new pro-Trump book A Revolution for Common Sense, Jennings dropped by right-wing network Real America's Voice, where he sat down with former Fox News star Eric Bolling on Wednesday.
At one point in the conversation, Bolling noted that a number of Republican candidates have already lined up to take over McConnell's seat, which includes former Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) and Trump megadonor Nate Morris.
'You thinking about it?' Bolling asked the CNN pundit.
'Yeah, I haven't made any announcements about that,' Jennings replied. 'There's three people in the race, I know them all, like them all, have been in and out of their lives in varying degrees over the years. I've supported them all in various endeavors, so I'm confident the seat will remain Republican.'
Adding that he believes that 'politics is a team sport' and 'Trump's the head coach,' Jennings stated that the president will eventually 'weigh in on this' and that Republicans will have to heed his command.
'You know, if he calls a play, we're gonna have to run it,' he said. 'I wouldn't want to run against the president in Kentucky. So, I don't really have any announcement about it at the moment.'
Bolling, meanwhile, straight up asked Jennings 'if Trump taps you, you're gonna run,' prompting the conservative commentator – who recently joined Trump on a rally stage – to ambiguously respond: 'I pay very close attention to everything the president says.'
'That's a good position to be,' Bolling chuckled before moving on to Jennings' book.
While stepping aside as the GOP's Senate leader and announcing that he wouldn't seek another term, the 83-year-old McConnell – who has dealt with increasing concerns over his health amid falls and freezing up during public speeches – has become a rare (if mild) public critic of Trump's among Republicans on Capitol Hill in recent months.
With the former Senate Majority Leader voting against the president's Cabinet nominees and warning against embracing 'right-wing isolationism,' Trump has repeatedly blasted the Kentucky lawmaker and has even suggested that McConnell faked having polio as a child.
'I have no idea if he had polio. All I can tell you about him is that he shouldn't have been leader,' Trump said in February after McConnell declared he would not support Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as HHS secretary due to his anti-vaccine stance.
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Times
an hour ago
- Times
‘I was the Trump team': how the Podcast Election was won
The president's social media strategist has had a busy morning stirring up online outrage. In the past few hours Alex Bruesewitz has condemned Democrats as a 'pathetic group of people', denounced critics of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, as 'far-left maniacs' and shared a post of the 'horrible' liberal podcast host Alex Cooper being booed at a baseball game. Bruesewitz, 28, has been starting arguments like this professionally for a decade but now, sipping a glass of water at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, in a well-fitted navy blue suit, he is relaxed and even polite. He co-founded X Strategies, a company that counsels conservatives on how to win social media wars, when he was 19. Last year he was the architect of the podcast game plan credited with helping Donald Trump to win back the White House. Today he is at the heart of the administration's ultra-combative communications operation, working as a hired gun because he is planning to get married and thinks that it is 'a little bit difficult' to afford a wedding on a government salary. Often the best ideas are not his, he says. Take some of the viral memes — of Trump dressed as the Pope, or Gaza rendered as a holiday resort (Gaza-Lago), or the AI-generated cartoon of a crying migrant — that have driven huge clicks and controversy, amplified by the president's social platforms. Bruesewitz says they are generated by Trump 's fans, whom he calls 'really talented people'. 'These guys make some of the best memes, and they're bus drivers in small towns across the country,' he says. 'And they get off of work and they go home and they open their computer, they tell their wife they love them and they log on to X for the next five hours of their life. And they're making hilarious memes of the president or videos of the president.' But it was podcasts, not memes, that really sealed his reputation. During the 2024 campaign, which became known as the 'podcast election' because of the extent to which the format often seemed to usurp traditional media, Trump appeared on 20 episodes. Most were hosted by young men and popular with young men. These appearances reached 23.5 million Americans in an average week, compared with 6.4 million for his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Subsequently 56 per cent of men aged 18 to 29 backed Trump in 2024, up from 41 per cent in 2020. Trump's podcast circuit has been depicted as a long pitch to the 'right-wing manosphere'. Bruesewitz thinks this is unfair. 'None of the podcasters we sat down with during that period were Trump lovers,' he says. Instead, he calls them 'equal-opportunity critics' — hosts who have been critical of Trump on certain issues, and critical of Democrats on others. He also notes that Trump saw a bounce among young women, up from 33 per cent in 2020 to 40 per cent in 2024. Podcasts worked for the candidate because they suited his unique political skills, he says. 'The greatness about President Trump is that he knows all the issues, and he also has charisma that is unrivalled in the political space,' Bruesewitz says. In general, little to no preparation was needed. 'I think over-prepping your candidates is what kind of trips you up.' Underpreparing has its pitfalls too. Rapid rise In the last few days of the election The Atlantic described Bruesewitz as a 'terminally online troll and perpetual devil on the campaign's shoulder' who had urged JD Vance to amplify the lie that illegal Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets. The magazine also reported that it was Bruesewitz who had personally advocated for the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe to appear at a Trump rally days before the election, at which he then called Puerto Rico a 'floating island of garbage' (Bruesewitz says both claims are untrue.) But Trump's subsequent victory cast him in a much more favourable light and Axios hailed him as 'one of the most influential political strategists in the US'. In February the Trump family appointed him senior adviser to the political action committee Never Surrender, entrusting him with running two of the president's social media accounts. His team of five, based in Florida, manage the @TrumpWarRoom and @TeamTrump handles, which are followed by millions (although the president still posts his own messages on Truth Social). Bruesewitz has also found time to meet some British conservatives. He met Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, in London. 'I think she's a good person,' he says, adding that she's got the issues right but is in a tough position. 'The party that she leads now was led by imbeciles before.' On the Reform leader Nigel Farage, he says: 'He's probably the best in the UK and my advice to him has been to make sure you use your momentum and your platform to build up the voices of the next generation because he's not going to be hot for ever.' It all started with a tweet Bruesewitz's career started in April 2015 when he was 18 years old. He was sitting at his high school desk in the Wisconsin town of Ripon (population 7,900), 'and I posted a picture of the Trump Hotel in Chicago,' he says. 'And I said, 'the sign on Trump Chicago would look just as good on the White House'. And the president, then businessman Donald Trump, retweeted me.' Two months later, Trump announced his candidacy. 'And when he announced that he was running, I was sold already. I wanted to be like Donald Trump.' After high school, Bruesewitz skipped college and tried his hand at real estate, having admired the empire Trump had built. 'I didn't do so well in that,' he concedes. Trump's election in 2016 inspired Bruesewitz and his business partner Derek Utley to form X Strategies a year later. Their early clients included FreedomProject Academy, a Christian conservative homeschooling academy in central Wisconsin, and a father who lost his daughter in the Parkland school shooting in 2018. Utley and Bruesewitz represented the latter pro bono as he argued for more school security rather than fewer guns. Then came the 2020 election and Trump's claims of election fraud. Bruesewitz leapt to his defence on social media and made a speech in Washington's Freedom Plaza. When the BBC invited Bruesewitz on air, he argued with the presenter. 'Thank you for having me on,' he said, 'and I just want to make one thing very clear … your country's opinion stopped mattering in our country in 1776.' His sparring eventually got Donald Trump Jr's attention. 'He liked my tenacity online,' Bruesewitz says. 'He found me to be quite entertaining.' The two became friends and Don Jr introduced Bruesewitz to his father. 'I got to spend quality time with the president for the first time at a live golf tournament at his club in New Jersey,' he tells me. 'I ended up spending four and a half hours with the president that day.' They spoke about 'all things' — not just politics. 'And we've had a great relationship ever since.' After that, Bruesewitz poured his energy into attacking Republicans who had backed Trump's impeachment — not as an official Trump appointee but out of 'sheer patriotism and love of nation'. Eight out of ten of those Republicans either declined to stand in 2022 or lost their primary. 'We travelled [around] their campaign districts,' Bruesewitz says. 'I personally picked fights with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger,' he says of the two anti-Trump Republican members of Congress, 'which was also great entertainment. I found great joy in that'. In November 2022, the Trump family finally hired Bruesewitz. His mission? To help beat Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, to the Republican presidential nomination. That worked — and then came the general election. The podcast plan It was Trump's youngest son Barron, not Bruesewitz, who set up the first big podcast interview — with the 24-year-old online streamer and influencer Adin Ross — which proved the power of the format before the election. Bruesewitz calculated that clips from Trump's appearance were seen by 113 million people in the first 24 hours. When Bruesewitz presented the numbers to Trump, 'he flipped through it, and he was like, 'these numbers are massive''. Trump also thanked his 19-year-old son in a Truth Social post. 'And then about four or five days passed, and he kept texting me or calling me about how great that interview was.' Not long afterwards, Bruesewitz was called into the office of Susie Wiles, who helped manage Trump's election campaign and is now White House chief of staff. 'She's like, 'Alex, we've got to get him to do more of these.'' After that, they went all in. 'We lined them up, one major podcast a week, up until we did Rogan, which was like a week before the election,' Bruesewitz says. The appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the US, garnered more than 44 million views on YouTube by election day, allowing Trump to reach young, predominantly male voters, opining on topics such as martial arts, the possibility of life on Mars, and his admiration for William McKinley, the president who was assassinated in 1901. When I ask how Bruesewitz decided which podcasts Trump should do, he shrugs. 'I mean, I just went through something called Spotify and Spotify rankings. And I think we did eight of the ten podcasts on Spotify that were popular.' There was one conspicuous exception, however. Trump avoided Alex Cooper's Call Her Daddy, one of the most popular podcasts among young American women. Cooper, the 30-year-old host of the show, is beloved by her 'Daddy Gang' — some 70 per cent of whom are female, with 76 per cent under 35. In October Kamala Harris appeared on the podcast, discussing women's rights and abortion. Cooper later said her team had a Zoom call with Trump's team about the possibility of him appearing. Bruesewitz says that's not true. 'I was President Trump's team,' Bruesewitz says. 'I never had a conversation with Alex Cooper about going on the podcast. Her team reached out to me. We never responded. I would never put the president on Call Her Daddy.' Why not? 'Because one, she's terrible, she's terrible at what she does. I think personally. I think she's been a detriment to society with the content that she talks about.' And she's 'regressive', he says, 'when it comes to starting families and having happy, healthy relationships'. A source close to the Call Her Daddy team confirmed that a call about the president coming on the show occurred before the election in November 2024 with members of his campaign team, including discussing a suggestion by his staff that they film the episode at Mar-a-Lago. Unexpected love story Instead, looking for a female-friendly podcast to counter Harris's appearance on Call Her Daddy, he landed on a show called Girls Gone Bible. 'It's the No 2 religious podcast on Spotify,' he says. 'Massive following. They do these in-person shows where they get 1,000 young girls at each tour stop. They talk about Jesus and they pray over them. And it's actually really beautiful.' Bruesewitz organised a meeting between Trump and the hosts of Girls Gone Bible in Las Vegas. The night before, one of the hosts brought a glamorous friend to dinner. It was Carolina Urrea, the former Miss Nevada. 'Carolina walked in. I'm like, wow, who's that girl?' The following day, Carolina took a picture with Trump, who gave Bruesewitz a 'thumbs up'. The pair got engaged eight months later. Bruesewitz says his fiancée has 'strengthened my relationship with the Lord'. ALEX BRUESEWITZ/INSTAGRAM He sees his experience as part of a larger shift toward Christianity in America in recent years. 'Another trend is moving away from the girl boss attitude to the trad wife,' he says. 'I don't know if it was Covid that kind of made that switch where people were spending more time at home and they were, you know, learning to cook more and doing more things. But that trad culture started taking off big time.' • My day with the trad wife queen and what it taught me While podcasts helped Trump to reclaim the White House, the president has rarely appeared on them in his second term. Though he showed up last month on the New York Post's Pod Force One, Trump is spending most of his time these days on Truth Social and his old favourite: TV news. Bruesewitz, who describes Trump as 'a good friend of mine' thinks this could change. 'I think he'll eventually do some. You know, he's been very busy running the free world.' As for his own future, he says that Trump would have endorsed him to run for office if he had wanted to, but he didn't. 'I think Congress would be a little too boring for me.'
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Kremlin says Putin is ready to discuss peace in Ukraine but wants to achieve goals
MOSCOW, July 20 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to move toward a peace settlement for Ukraine but Moscow's main objective is to achieve its goals, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state television in a clip published on Sunday. Peskov said that the world was now accustomed to U.S. President Donald Trump's sometimes "harsh" rhetoric but pointed out that Trump had also underscored in comments on Russia that he would continue to search for a peace deal. "President Putin has repeatedly spoken of his desire to bring the Ukrainian settlement to a peaceful conclusion as soon as possible. This is a long process, it requires effort, and it is not easy," Peskov said told state television reporter Pavel Zarubin. "The main thing for us is to achieve our goals. Our goals are clear," Peskov said. On Monday, Trump announced a tougher stance on Russia, pledging a new wave of military aid to Ukraine, including Patriot missile defence systems. He also gave Russia a 50-day deadline to agree to a ceasefire or face additional sanctions.
Scottish Sun
2 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Four Moscow airports shut as Ukraine blasts capital with massive drone blitz for fourth night as explosions rock city
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) UKRAINE unleashed chaos at Moscow's four airports with a fourth successive drone blitz rocking the city. Hundreds of passenger planes had to be diverted as waves of flying bombs converged on the Russian capital. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 8 The moment of a Ukrainian strike on the Russian-occupied Donetsk region on Saturday Credit: East2West 8 Ukrainian drone attack disrupted four Moscow airports Credit: East2West 8 Stranded passengers at Sheremetyevo airport, Moscow Credit: East2West 8 Footage captured the moment a Ukrainian drone was downed in Zelenograd, Moscow region Credit: East2West Footage showed explosions as Russian air defences attacked incoming unmanned planes in Zelenograd, a district 23 miles northwest of the Kremlin. Ukraine has stepped up assaults since Donald Trump reportedly told Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky it was time to make Russians feel 'the pain' of war. Russia's defence ministry claimed to have downed 93 Ukrainian drones overnight across nine regions - 19 of them over the Moscow area alone. Authorities were forced to twice close airspace over Moscow, hitting airports Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, Vnukovo and Zhukovsky. A total of 134 planes were diverted, as confusion and frustration gripped passengers caught up in the escalating fallout of the war. State airline Aeroflot was forced to adjust its schedule, while regional airports in Kaluga, Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod were also thrown into disarray. Frustrated passengers - including tourists on summer vacations - were hit by delays, diverted flights and numerous cancellations in an apparent new tactic by Ukraine to paralyse air travel in Vladimir Putin's capital. Passengers — many travelling for summer vacations — were left bedding down on the airport floor. 'The restrictions are necessary for ensuring the safety of civil aircraft flights,' announced Russia's Federal Air Transport Agency. In Zelenograd, a district on the northwestern edge of Moscow, explosions were heard as air defences intercepted drones. 'Really p****d' Trump gives Putin 50-day ultimatum as he unveils major plan Debris sparked fires that damaged buildings and set vehicles alight, according to local reports. In nearby Golube, residents described powerful blasts that shattered windows and shook homes, The Kyiv Post reported. While Russian officials claimed success in intercepting the majority of drones, the repeated closures of Moscow's airspace suggest Ukraine is successfully placing pressure on the capital - targeting not just military assets but the daily functioning of civilian infrastructure. In a separate blow, anti-Kremlin partisan group Atesh claimed responsibility for sabotage on a key rail line in Tula region. They set fire to a relay cabinet, causing what the group described as 'serious disruptions in railway communication'. Atesh said the attack had critically crippled the movement of weapons and military gear from key defence factories. It was a hammer blow to Putin's logistics — and a taste of the chaos Ukraine and its allies are now willing to unleash. Elsewhere, drone strikes were reported on Russian-occupied Donetsk, with footage showing what appeared to be an attack near a regional trauma hospital. In Ukrainian-held Sloviansk, one person was killed in a Russian drone strike. The Kremlin continued its own strikes in response, targeting the Sumy region in Ukraine's northeast after scoffing at Trump's 50-day peace ultimatum. A 78-year-old woman was killed in Shostka, close to the Russian border, while in the Zaporizhzhia region a 69-year-old woman was wounded in another attack. Putin's war machine, ever indiscriminate, continues its campaign of terror against civilians. 8 The aftermath of a Ukrainian strike on the Russian-occupied Donetsk region on July 19 Credit: East2West 8 Explosion of a Geran-2 drone next to a Yak-52 aircraft that was acting as an interceptor Credit: East2West 8 Shostka in Sumy region, Ukraine, was attacked with drones and aerial bombs on Saturday Credit: East2West The Russian Defence Ministry, desperate to project strength, released footage of a MiG-31K jet launching a hypersonic Kinzhal missile, a menacing display as the Kremlin signals no intent to back down. And in a chilling twist, a Russian Shahed drone exploded dangerously close to a Yak-52 aircraft used as an interceptor. Despite Moscow's bluster, president Zelensky continues to push for peace - on Ukraine's terms. 'The pace of negotiations must be increased. Everything must be done to achieve a ceasefire,' he said. 'And the Russian side must stop hiding from decisions. 'Prisoner exchanges. Return of children. End to the killings. 'And a meeting at the level of leaders is needed to truly ensure peace – a really lasting one. Ukraine is ready for such a meeting.' But Kremlin is showing no signs of backing down. According to German General Christian Fröding, Russia is now preparing to swarm 2,000 drones at Ukraine, launching them simultaneously to try to overwhelm its defences. He warned of growing Chinese support behind the scenes. 'The current situation is such that China is effectively exporting exclusively to Russia, while Ukraine is excluded from this market,' Fröding said. And while Kyiv has not officially commented on its role in the latest strikes, officials have repeatedly insisted that 'Ukraine consistently adheres to international humanitarian law and targets only legitimate military objectives.' According to Ukraine's military: 'All actions by the Armed Forces of Ukraine are conducted in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, with a clear distinction made between civilian and military targets.'
