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Conservative commentator and CNN regular Scott Jennings said President Donald Trump was justified in slashing federal funding to Harvard because of antisemitism at the University during an Institute of Politics event on Thursday night.
Jennings — who is known for sparring with liberal pundits on CNN — has spent considerable time at Harvard as a spring 2018 IOP resident fellow and a guest lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2019. But he openly criticized the institution before a sparse crowd on Thursday, saying that Harvard had allowed “some very bad things on campus as it relates to Jewish students, Jewish faculty, antisemitism and so on.”
“I have been defensive of the president on this because I think the issue was serious enough that it deserved a very serious reaction,” Jennings said in an interview after the forum. “It was a fight worth having.”
Jennings’ comments come months into a bitter feud between Harvard and Trump, who has torn into the University’s budget with drastic federal funding cuts and threatened the status of international students over concerns about antisemitism on campus. The dispute, however, may be approaching a resolution: on Tuesday, Trump claimed his administration had reached a $500 million deal with Harvard. (The University has not confirmed that a deal is near completion.)
Jennings said a settlement would be a step in the right direction, but not enough to “stamp out the scourge of antisemitism” at Harvard. The University would need to implement more substantive policy changes to protect Jewish students and faculty on campus, he said.
“What I think is right is admitting the problem and showing the country that you're serious about doing something about it,” Jennings said. “Not just trying to do something for public relations purposes on a particular day and then let it fester all over again.”
“There’s going to be vigilance required over a long period of time, and we’ll see if they’re dedicated to it,” he added.
The event, moderated by IOP Director Setti D. Warren, concluded a week of events at the IOP dominated by conservative heavy hitters. Among the guest speakers were former Vice President Mike Pence and former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who served in the first Trump administration.
Warren said in an interview after the event that the large number of Republicans at the IOP this week “wasn’t planned,” but he added that their presence was part of a longstanding effort to bring more conservative voices to Harvard.
“We’re always intentional about making sure we have diverse voices in the forum, people on the left and right,” Warren said. “We definitely focus on making sure we have conservative representation.”
Jennings — an alum of the George W. Bush administration and a longtime campaign advisor to former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — was once seen as a middle-of-the-road Republican, with opinions even progressive viewers of CNN would appreciate.
But in recent years, Jennings has emerged as a staunch defender of the Trump administration and has increasingly inserted himself in fiery debates with his liberal colleagues on CNN anchor Abby D. Phillip ’10’s 10 p.m. show, “NewsNight.” He has also lately been floated as a potential candidate to replace McConnell, who will not run for re-election after 41 years in the Senate.
When probed about the rumors, Jennings said he was considering a run, but quipped that Harvard would not be the best place to launch a campaign for deep-red Kentucky.
“You’re not exactly what the people back in Kentucky are looking for,” Jennings joked, saying he would defer to Trump on whether to run.
“Donald Trump’s the head coach right now,” Jennings said. “He hasn’t weighed in on it, but I — like every other Kentucky Republican — am waiting to see what the coach has to say about it.”
In Washington, Trump has been occupied with a federal government shutdown that came into effect on Wednesday, after representatives in Congress failed to reach an agreement to extend funding for the government. Jennings blamed Democrats for the shutdown, saying the party was “desperate to fight about anything.”
Republicans, he predicted, would ultimately prevail in forcing the Democrats to back their continuing resolution proposal that would reopen the government without key Democrat demands.
“It might be the first shutdown fight they win in my lifetime, because they have earnestly tried to keep the government open with a clean CR, and no one can really dispute that,” Jennings said.
But Jennings was less confident about the Republican Party’s ability to win a separate, but more significant political fight: a presidential election without Trump on the ballot. He said Vice President J.D. Vance would be the presumptive nominee in 2028, but that it would be “near impossible” to reproduce Trump’s electoral successes.
Jennings called Trump’s triumphant return to power in 2024 “maybe the greatest comeback since Napoleon” and said he doubted that any candidate could mobilize voters in the way Trump did.
“It’s hard for me to imagine how you could replicate Trump,” Jennings said. “On top of that, I have some questions about who could possibly hold together the coalition that he put together to win.”
“To try to ascribe that sort of talent to someone else is hard for me to envision,” he added.
—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.
