‘Not at All OK!’ MSNBC’s Jen Psaki Savages Trump Over Blizzard of New Blunders
MSNBC host and former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki savaged President Donald Trump over a new series of blunders and gaffes, intimating a deeper decline by saying Trump is “not at all okay.”
President Trump has baffled observers recently with a string of false and at times impossible claims, blaming President Joe Biden for an appointment that Trump himself made, mistaking the timeline of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and spinning a yarn about Ted Kaczynski — the Unabomber — that didn’t add up.
On Wednesday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki, Psaki opened her show by slamming Trump over the errors and insinuating there’s some mental deterioration at play:
PSAKI: I want to start tonight with some of the very strange behavior we are seeing from the president.
Look, we all know that Donald Trump has always been far, far from a normal guy. That`s one way of describing it. I mean, his behavior is often erratic. His public statements can be completely bizarre. And at times he doesn`t seem to know what is going on inside his own government. But recently, it seems like he is — well, not at all okay, I guess is one way to describe it.
Let me show you what I mean. Yesterday, Trump attended an A.I. summit in Pittsburgh, and within ten minutes of taking the microphone, he launched into an utterly strange digression about his uncle and the notorious domestic terrorists of all people, Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: My uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors, 51 years, whatever. He was the longest serving professor in the history of MIT.
Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There`s very little difference between a madman and a genius.
But Kaczynski, I said — what kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Doctor John Trump, he said, what kind of a student? Then he said, seriously good. He said he`d correct. He`d go around correcting everybody. But it didn`t work out too well for him.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PSAKI: I love the look on the face of the guy next to me and sort of seeing that video. But again, to sum that up, Trump says his uncle taught the Unabomber at MIT, and apparently the question of all the possible questions Trump asked him was what kind of a student Kaczynski was.
And then he felt the need to share the detail that the Unabomber was a good student to some perplexed people. And yes, that`s a pretty weird, pretty creepy thing for the president of the United States, or really anyone to say at an event that was supposed to be about artificial intelligence.
But it gets weirder because the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, never attended MIT. And while Trump did have an uncle who worked at MIT, his uncle died in 1985, which is a full 11 years before the Unabomber was publicly identified and apprehended.
So I guess either Donald Trump is confessing to having known the identity of the Unabomber more than a decade before he was caught. There could be that, I suppose. Or something is seriously off with Donald Trump.
And that is hardly — that`s not a one off. That is hardly the only incident. I mean, today, reporters in the Oval Office asked Donald Trump about new reporting that he has floated the idea of firing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. And this is how he responded.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: He`s a terrible fed chair. I was surprised he was appointed.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PSAKI: He`s a terrible fed chair. I was surprised he was appointed. Were you — were you really surprised he was appointed?
The person who nominated him for that job was you, Donald Trump. It was you. Trump picked Jerome Powell to run the Fed during his first term. There they are right being announced.
He does not seem to remember basic facts about his own life. He does not seem to remember things that happened as recently as his first term.
This is a guy who once boasted he had the best memory of all time. His words, certainly not mine.
But now those apparent memory lapses are bleeding into the self-inflicted scandal that has rocked his administration and ignited a full on MAGA revolt. I`m, of course, talking about what has come to be known as the Epstein files. Just a few hours ago, Trump won on a friendly right-wing network in an attempt to quell the outcry again, to try to quell it again and deflect the blame. And here`s what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: In the case of Epstein, they`ve already looked at it, and they are looking at it. And I think all they have to do is put out anything credible. But, you know, that was run by the Biden administration for four years. I can imagine what they put into files.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PSAKI: That was run by the Biden administration for four years. Once again, for whatever reason, because the guy`s a little off right now, it seems Trump`s memory seems to have failed him. Maybe he needs to Google who was president six years ago because Trump was president when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges.
Trump was also president when Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell. And Trump was president when Epstein`s criminal case was officially closed. All that took place in 2019, more than a year before Joe Biden even became president.
Trump seems completely lost on all of this.
Watch above via MSNBC’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki.
