Psaki, who once said Biden was so fit he was ‘hard to keep up with,’ claims Trump was ‘hiding’ from the public
Former White House press secretary and MSNBC host Jen Psaki promoted conspiracy theories about President Donald Trump’s health after Trump went roughly a week without an official event, telling her viewers that “we may never know” why the president was “hiding.”
“He had been basically absent from the public eye since last Tuesday. And that absence, and you may have seen this over the weekend if you looked at any social media platform, prompted quite a wave of online speculation about the president’s health and well-being,” Psaki told viewers of The Briefing with Jen Psaki on Tuesday.
Psaki was referring to left-wing conspiracy theories that Trump was secretly dying, or even had died, after his lack of public appearances following a more than three-hour cabinet meeting on Aug. 26. Trump shrugged off the rumors at a Tuesday press conference, saying he was “very active over the weekend.” Still, Psaki insisted the president had been actively “hiding” from the public.
“You really can’t make this stuff up sometimes,” she said. “We may never know why Donald Trump suddenly spent a week hiding entirely from the American public, but you don’t actually need baseless online conspiracies to explain why he might not want to show his face in public right now,” she added, going on to suggest that Trump could be trying to hide from public displeasure with his agenda.
Psaki’s remarks represented a stark departure from her posture during the Biden years, when she repeatedly dismissed concerns about former president Joe Biden’s mental decline.
“I never saw that person, not a single time—and I was in the Oval Office every day—that was on that debate stage,” Psaki said in May, describing Biden’s disastrous June 2024 debate against Trump. As White House press secretary, Psaki told reporters Biden was so fit that “he’s hard to keep up with.”
Trump has easily lapped Biden’s pace when it comes to press availability.
By the end of June 2024, Biden had only held 168 press conferences. Meanwhile, Trump spoke to journalists 129 times during the first 100 days of his second term alone. Trump’s interactions were more frequent than any other president, according to presidential scholar Martha Joynt Kumar. Biden did not hold a formal press conference until late March 2021, months after he was inaugurated.
Read the full article here
