CNN Anchor Fires Back at Scott Jennings Over Trump Trade Cave: ‘Backing Down Isn’t Leverage’

CNN anchor Abby Phillip fired back at GOP analyst Scott Jennings over President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, quipping that “backing down isn’t leverage — backing down is just backing down.”

Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Monday that the U.S. and China have agreed to a 90-day truce, dropping tariffs Chinese tariffs against the U.S. to 10 percent and U.S. tariffs against China to 30 percent. The agreement comes after weeks of chaos that have roiled the economy and stock markets. Analysts have pointed out that Trump secured no concessions in the truce.

On Thursday night’s edition of CNN NewsNight, Phillip and a panel comprised of Jennings, Natasha Sarin, Van Jones, Erin Maguire, and Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL).

In a lengthy discussion of Trump’s trade policies, Jennings cut in to defend the president and praise him for “creating leverage” that brought China “to the table”:

SARIN: What is the argument?

JENNINGS: Leverage! Leverage!

SARIN: I’m just actually — I actually genuinely curious what the argument is for having trade policy that’s going to result in higher prices for the American consumer that’s going to result in a smaller economy, and that’s going to result in job losses on the order of 400,000 to 500,000 people?

JENNINGS: This is your apocalyptic night wheezes (ph), but the reality is he is setting up leverage to renegotiate trade deals that are imbalanced and bad for American workers. The whole point of this is to put American workers at the center of our economic policy and not just Wall Street and not just people who deal in money. That’s the point.

MOSKOWITZ: Hold on. That’s fine as a concept, but his execution was terrible and I can prove that. Where’s Peter Navarro, APB for Peter Navarro? I haven’t seen him in weeks because —

JENNINGS: He’s on our air like three nights a week.

MOSKOWITZ: Okay. The execution of this was awful. Had he just focused on China, he would’ve had a bipartisan coalition. We have a China caucus in Congress. We had a China select committee. It was passed by 400 members of Congress. Had he just focused on China and talked about on-shoring jobs, we learned that in COVID, right, that our supply chain is broken, had he done that, I think he would’ve — we would’ve been way more successful. But, no, we tariffed friend and foe alike, the penguins, Antarctica, everybody. And ever since we’ve done that, all we’ve been doing is moving backwards and backwards. There’s no factories, there’s no robots. We’re not building iPhones here. None of this stuff that, you know, we see the commerce secretary on T.V. every day big — he talked about big, beautiful coal. I mean, are we building coal plants here again?

JENNINGS: I hope so. We need them.

MOSKOWITZ: Okay.

JENNINGS: And let me tell you something else. The energy needs in this country over the next four years are going to spike. We need coal, we need solar, we need wind, we need nuclear, and we need it now. I hope I’m not (INAUDIBLE).

PHILLIP: I think one of the key, one of the key data points here in whether Trump’s own leverage strategy is working is that they went into a negotiation with China and basically, unilaterally lowered their own 145 percent tariff down to something that is still very high, but he negotiated himself down off of a hill that he climbed on his own. I’m not sure how that’s creating leverage.

JENNINGS: Well, the leverage is getting them to the table.

PHILLIP: Yes. But China didn’t get them anything, Scott. So, I think that’s part of the problem is that you backing —

JENNINGS: That’s not true. That’s not true. They’re already negotiating non-tariff trade barriers.

PHILLIP: Scott, backing down is not leverage. Backing down is just backing down.

JENNINGS: Getting to them to the table is leverage. I mean, this is — if you hate Donald Trump, this is how you would describe it. There’s a better way to describe it. I mean, the better way to describe it is bring these people to the table, get the trade situation with the tariff rates correct, but also the non-tariff issues that we have going on with China, which are legion, must be —

PHILLIP: Okay. None of which have been dealt with. That is a fact.

Watch above via CNN NewsNight.