CNN senior political commentator Scott Jennings, whose profile has skyrocketed this past year by becoming one of Donald Trump’s most loyal media defenders, has been tapped by the conservative Salem Radio Network to take over the midday time slot once filled by slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Axios first reported on Wednesday that Jennings, along with Breitbart News editor Alex Marlow, will take over the noon-3 pm ET block that Kirk’s show had occupied. Since the Turning Point USA leader’s assassination in September, The Charlie Kirk Show has been hosted by TPUSA staffers Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff.
Jennings, who launched a midafternoon show with Salem this past June, will expand his program to two hours and host the 1-3 pm slot starting January 5. Marlow, the Breitbart editor-in-chief who already hosts a podcast with Salem, will anchor the noontime hour.
The three-hour midday slot has long been seen as the top prize in the right-wing talk radio universe, largely due to conservative icon Rush Limbaugh commanding it for decades. Now that Marlow and Jennings are stepping in for Kirk, they are likely to see their prominence within the MAGA media sphere grow.
The Charlie Kirk Show, which has been kept alive by Kolvet and Neff since Kirk’s death, will continue to air as a podcast on Salem’s podcasting service.
“While some of the details around how we want to distribute the show will change, our friendship and trust in Salem does not,” Kolvet said about the changes. He also stated that, while Kirk’s show will move to another venue, the show’s team “agreed that Alex and Scott were the perfect hosts to take over on the radio portion.”
In discussing their new roles, both Marlow and Jennings praise Kirk and the TPUSA staff that kept the show running over the past few months.
“To my friend Andrew Kolvet and the Turning Point USA team, thank you for your stewardship of Charlie’s radio legacy,” Jennings said. “These are some of the most important hours in talk radio.”
Marlow, for his part, added that “it was a rare pleasure to be a weekly guest on my friend Charlie Kirk’s show during the last year of his life,” adding that he “can’t wait to get started” with his new program.
A representative at Salem told Axios that the network expects that Marlow’s and Jennings’ shows will be picked up by roughly 300 radio stations and reach roughly 1.2 million listeners.
Jennings, a former adviser to Mitch McConnell and George W. Bush administration official, has seen his fame grow within the right-wing media ecosystem since Trump’s return to office due to his vehement defense of the president on CNN’s airwaves.
His combative on-air exchanges with liberal pundits and trollish social media behavior has led to not only his own radio show, but a spot on the Los Angeles Times editorial board as the paper’s billionaire owner looks to shift its coverage to the right.
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On top of that, Jennings has also publicly weighed a Senate run in Kentucky, but only if Trump urges him to fill the seat that will soon be vacated by a retiring McConnell.
Meanwhile, Jennings and Marlow are now going to take a more prominent role in a MAGA media universe that has been splintered by interpersonal feuds and drama over the direction of the conservative movement.
Much of that turmoil, in fact, centers on conservative influencers – namely one-time Kirk colleague Candace Owens – peddling increasingly wild conspiracy theories about the deceased TPUSA founder’s killing.
Owens has spent the last few weeks spinning outlandish claims that Israel, Egypt, France and the US military all may have played a part in assassinating Kirk on a Utah college campus in September, going so far as to suggest a number of TPUSA employees were in on the plot.
This culminated in Erika Kirk, Kirk’s widow and the new CEO of TPUSA, to privately meet with Owens in a summit that former Fox News star Megyn Kelly has claimed she organized. While both Kirk and Owens said their discussion was “very productive,” Owens doubled down on her conspiracies during a Tuesday night podcast.
“I did not recant,” Owens said, claiming that TPUSA did not provide any information to dissuade her from her “investigation” into Kirk’s death. Additionally, she said that the key text-message evidence against Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old charged with Kirk’s murder, was “fake and gay.”
