‘You Were Absolutely Schooled!’ CNN’s Navarro Taunts Pro-Trump Host in Brawl Over Slavery and Elections

CNN contributor Ana Navarro taunted pro-Trump host Jason Rantz during a brawl over the Electoral College and slavery, telling him “You absolutely got schooled” by her and fellow panelist Charles Blow. Rantz disagreed.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is getting attention this week for a new comment on the Electoral College.

“Well, I personally think the Electoral College is an abomination — for obvious reasons,” Clinton said in a preview clip for the Netflix docuseries The American Experiment.

On Monday’s edition of CNN NewsNight, anchor Abby Phillip hosted a panel that included Blow, Navarro, Rantz, Jemele Hill, and Caroline Downey to discuss the issue.

When Navarro said that the EC was “rooted in slavery,” Rantz declared that “it had nothing to do with slavery.”

That drew objections from Navaro and Blow, and disagreement over the degree of “schooling” that occurred:

NAVARRO: The bottom line is changing the Electoral College is something that we talk about all the time. It’s archaic, it may make no sense, it’s rooted in slavery. All those things are true. But in practicality, getting rid of it, it’s in the Constitution.

HILL: It would require a constitutional amendment.

NAVARRO: And that is an incredibly high bar. And in this political environment–

RANTZ: It’s not going to happen. Just to be clear, it wasn’t founded because of slavery. That’s just factually inaccurate.

The reasons behind it had a lot to do with the size of the country and the lack of technology to actually reach everyone at the time. That’s why the Electoral College came out. To your point, I agree with you.

BLOW: We’re not going to let that lie stand.

RANTZ: It’s not a lie. It’s not rooted.

BLOW: Let’s take the word rooted out. You’re not going to sit here and say it has nothing to do with slavery, which you just insinuated.

RANTZ: I’m going to say that it had nothing to do with slavery. That’s just not true.

BLOW: That’s not true. So the large states, the small states were already up in arms because if you had a straight vote, a popular vote, then they would always be drowned out.

Some of the smaller states were in the South. Roughly a third of their populations were enslaved people. One of the compromises was to take one person or every representative you had that incorporates the three-fifths rule on slaves automatically because the representatives were determined with the three-fifths rule incorporated.

The moment that the Electoral College adopted one person or every representative, it incorporated by default the slave clause. For this man to sit here and say it has nothing to do with slavery, what did you learn in school?

RANTZ: Well, I learned that it wasn’t rooted in slavery because, again, that is factually inaccurate. That is the context in which I was responding.

You’re wrong. I’m not arguing that slavery doesn’t play any role in slavery.

BLOW: You just said that!

NAVARRO: You just got schooled on national T.V. That’s what you were saying.

RANTZ: Nobody was schooled. You act like–

NAVARRO: You were absolutely schooled! Your ignorance was revealed.

Watch above via CNN NewsNight.

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