CNN’s Scott Jennings Laughs at Warnings of ‘Fascist Coup’ and Trump ‘Dictatorship’ at Newsnight Table

CNN GOP analyst Scott Jennings laughed as fellow panelists Toure and Jeff Jarvis warned of an impending “fascist coup” and a “dictatorship” under President Donald Trump.

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced Wednesday that the newspaper’s opinion will now focus on supporting “free markets and personal liberties” and exclude other opinions, which prompted resignations and angst at the paper.

On Wednesday night’s edition of CNN NewsNight, a discussion of the move led Jarvis and Toure to provocatively lay out the stakes involved in the Trump era.

Anchor Abby Phillip noted Jennings’s scoffing laughter, and pointed out that it’s unclear anyone “would have the right to say that in the pages of The Washington Post“:

JENNINGS: Well, I’m interested in a couple of the comments you made. You said it was destroying the newspaper because they failed. I mean, what does that say about a newspaper that you have to endorse a certain political party and for it?

JARVIS: That’s not the way it happened. What happened was that the editorial board had an editorial done and ready, and that was the process.

JENNINGS: Right.

JARVIS: And then suddenly to say, well, now we’re not going to endorse. Well, they’ve endorsed other things since. It was the process by which it went under there. And there’s other things going on constantly in the paper. I now use the hashtags broken Times and broken Post. The headlines in both papers, I think, are constantly off, constantly trying to soft pedal what’s going on. You’re not going to like what I’m saying next, but we are in the middle of a totalitarian fascist coup in this country.

JENNINGS: (LAUGHS)

TOURE: Yes!

JARVIS: And when we don’t call it that when we soft pedal it, we don’t have a real discussion about it.

At least here, I can say those words, we can have that discussion, but you will not see those words in The New York Times or The Washington Post.

TOURE: But if we were being honest, there should be a breaking news banner on CNN and MSNBC all day long. We are in dictatorship right now.

JENNINGS: (LAUGHS)

PHILLIP: Let me just say, from the perspective of free speech, right? You disagree with what he just said.

JENNINGS: Yes.

PHILLIP: But he has the right to say it.

JENNINGS: Of course.

PHILLIP: I’m not sure that he would have the right to say that in the pages of The Washington Post. Does that seem problematic?

JENNINGS: Well, my second point was going to be that I think the categories of personal liberty and free markets are quite broad.

You could fit a number of column topics. I’ve written thousands of newspaper columns in my life. You could fit a number of column topics under those two things. I also read his note and he was saying that, you know, there’s lots of opinions out there and we’re going to focus on these sort of big ticket items. I don’t think they’re narrow. I think they’re very large. I’ll be interested to see what they’re willing to publish.

TOURE: Scott, you’re saying we are only doing one side of those issues, these issues, and not exploring both sides of the free market issue. You said it’s going to be about the monopoly of a Jeff Bezos to control the market.

Watch above via CNN NewsNight.