Scott Jennings Roasts Schumer for Inventing Actual ‘Imaginary Friends’: ‘Does He Belong in the Senate or an Asylum?’
CNN’s Scott Jennings roasted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and asked whether he belongs in an asylum over his decades-old references to voters who don’t actually exist.
Jennings took to X on Tuesday to offer some promotion to someone across the political aisle from him: John Oliver.
“If you don’t watch anything else today, take 7 mins & behold that Chuck Schumer has invented fictional New Yorkers named ‘the Baileys,’ developed an entire back story for them over several years, & based his entire worldview on them. Does he belong in the Senate or an asylum?” Jennings wrote, sharing a clip of HBO’s Oliver mocking Schumer over Joe and Eileen Bailey — people who have been referred to as Schumer’s “imaginary friends.”
On Last Week Tonight, Oliver ran through the complicated and dense backstory Schumer has created for fake voters he constantly references.
The Baileys are a fictional couple from Massapequa who began as Reagan Republicans in the ’80s, but Schumer has evolved their politics over the years. He often uses this couple as a representation of voters overall. Schumer introduced the idea of these voters in a 2007 book where, according to Oliver, he referenced them 265 times.
“If you ask my staff, I’ve been talking about them and talking to the Baileys for 15 years. I have conversations with them. One of my staffers once said I have imaginary friends to the press, got me in some trouble, but these people are real and I respect them and I really love them and I care about them,” Schumer said in 2007 at Harvard Kennedy School, just one of numerous clips Oliver aired.
“Okay, sure, but they’re literally not real, Chuck!” Oliver exclaimed.
The comedian further roasted Schumer by noting that the backstory of the Baileys is incredibly detailed. Schumer has revealed everything from their TV viewing habits (Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City) to how they discipline their children.
“That is a J.R.R. Tolkien level of gratuitous backstory,” Oliver said, “and I don’t say that lightly!”
