NewsNight host Abby Phillip clashed with a MAGA panelist who was told to “be quiet!” by a fellow guest during an on-air shouting match over Trump’s tariffs.
On Tuesday night’s CNN panel, things quickly descended into chaos when veteran anchor Richard Quest went toe-to-toe with conservative commentator Scott Jennings in a blistering exchange over tariffs, recessions, and who predicted what, and when.
“Be quiet!” Quest demanded, after accusing Jennings of “playing with numbers.”
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Jennings smugly reminded Quest that he, and others on the panel, had forecast a recession after Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April. However, Quest and Phillip were at pains to point out that the super-inflated rate of levies has since come way down.
The fireworks began when Jennings, clearly relishing the opportunity to needle his co-panelists, tried to score points by mocking their gloomy economic predictions.
“I would like to build a DeLorean and go back to April,” he said, reciting panelists’ past warnings of a recession, with the sarcasm dialed up.
That’s when Quest had had enough.
“You called the recession,” Jennings jabbed. “You took your shoe off. You brought cookies.”
“Would you like to see that again?” Quest snapped, apparently ready to recreate his original theatrical flourish in April, when he literally removed a shoe on-air to signify impending economic doom.
“15 percent shoe!” he exclaimed mid-crossfire, waving his shoe.
Jennings wasn’t backing down. “GDP is 3 percent. Trade deals. Record high in the stock market. Cooling inflation.” To which Quest shouted back: “These trade deals are garbage!”
“Garbage?” Jennings retorted. “Oh, brother.”
Phillip stepped in, trying to reclaim the segment from the brink of shoe-flinging collapse. She attempted to walk the panel back to April 2025 and pressed Jennings on the specifics.
“What were those tariff levels?” she asked repeatedly as Jennings ducked and weaved like a prizefighter. “They were different for different countries,” he deflected.
“Scott, you can’t skip steps here,” Phillip insisted, as Jennings accused everyone else on the panel of forecasting “calamity” that never came.
“You guys are so mad. Why are you rooting for failure? Why does this table root for failure?” he goaded.
That’s when Quest, who had been trying to reason with a laughing Jennings, told him to “be quiet!”
“You are taking a number of 40, 50, 60 percent back in April and you‘re comparing it to a number of 10, 15 percent now,” he said.
Jennings argued that the drop in rate was a negotiation “strategy.”
Phillip then accused Jennings of being “completely disingenuous” due to his reluctance to go into specifics.
As she tried to speak, Jennings kept chiming in. She had to plead with him to let her speak, saying: “Give me one second, please. Let me finish. It is completely disingenuous to suggest that what economists said would happen if Trump imposed 50 and 60 percent...’Oh, let‘s jump all the way up to 135% level tariffs on this economy,’ would have been a recession. Those levels never happened, which is why there has been no recession,” she explained.
Jennings said she “sounds disappointed” that a recession didn’t occur.
Reacting after the show, Quest also labeled Jennings “disingenuous.”
“Tonight @ScottJenningsKY sank to disingenuously playing with facts when he threw my April recession comments at me,“ he wrote on X.
“When I made them @realDonaldTrump had imposed 130% tariffs on China. Today’s 15-20% tariff rates are bad but manageable. Sad Scott Sad you sank to that."
Again deferring to challenge the fact that rates have changed, Jennings responded with a list of comments Quest made when the levies were higher.
