Jen Psaki has a warning about making fun of President Donald Trump too much — after roasting him herself. On the most recent episode of her MSNBC show “The Briefing,” the former White House press secretary pointed out that Trump’s had a pretty humiliating couple of days.
Trump’s Humiliating Week
Psaki cited a few instances, like a judge ordering Trump to finally pay writer E. Jean Carroll $5.8 million for sexual abuse and defamation, and how the president’s peace deal with Iran completely fell through — but Psaki was just warming things up before serving her main course.
“It is safe to say Trump is not having a very good week, and it is only Wednesday, everyone — lots of time to go,” she began. “But perhaps the most humiliating thing that happened to Donald Trump this week — the thing, you know, that gets under his skin more than anything else — was his doddering performance on the world stage.”
NATO Summit Gaffes
Psaki was referring to all the on-camera blunders Trump made in front of world leaders at the NATO summit this week. “It started as soon as he got off the plane from the annual NATO summit in Turkey,” she said while rolling a clip of Trump walking on the tarmac with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“Trump meandered — you can see him there on the screen — down the tarmac, until Turkish President Erdoğan took him by the arm and told him where to stand. That, that happened.”
Psaki then proceeded to air a pretty brutal mashup of every gaffe Trump made during his trip — from calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “President Putin” to seemingly referring to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Japan.” “I seriously hope someone is making sure the president hasn’t accidentally declared war on Japan,” she quipped before moving on to several other embarrassing hiccups.
A Sobering Warning
After the montage ended, Psaki made a more sobering point. “It seems the man is basically getting laughed at every day by judges, by world leaders, by European soccer players,” she said. “Most are responding to him with a collective eye roll.”
“But it doesn’t mean we can entirely dismiss him,” Psaki added. “Because when this president gets embarrassed, when he feels cornered, that is when he’s most likely to try and cling to power.”
Threats to Withhold Funding
Psaki cited the Trump administration’s threat Wednesday to withhold some federal funding from states that don’t make changes to voting practices. “I mean, in just the last 24 hours, we learned that the Trump administration is now threatening to withhold $1 billion in counterterrorism funds from states unless those states completely change the way they run their elections,” she said. “The more desperate he gets, the more desperate those plans get, too.”
She later added: “Trump is at his most desperate and unpredictable moment of his presidency so far, and that means he is also at his most dangerous.”
