Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer froze under pressure while addressing questions about President Joe Biden’s mental fitness during his Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
And the video has just gone viral.
NBC’s Kristen Welker presented Schumer with his February 2024 statement — and it caused Schumer to freeze on camera, critics said.
“His mental acuity is great. It’s fine,” Schumer said last February. “It’s as good as it’s been over the years. All this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong.”
Take a look —
NBC's Kristen Welker tries to ask Chick Schumer whether he and top Dems misled Americans about Biden's cognitive decline, as though the media didn't have a role in that conspiracy to defraud. pic.twitter.com/0Gfi4l6zp0
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) January 5, 2025
Asked if Democrats misled Americans on Biden’s mental health, Schumer froze before again dismissing concerns about Biden’s mental health as a right-wing conspiracy theory.
“Uh… I… No… Look, we didn’t!” Schumer stammered before he recovered.
“Let’s look at President Biden. He’s had an amazing record. The legislation we passed, one of the most significant groups of legislation since the New Deal – since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, putting in 235 judges, a record,” he said.
“He’s a patriot. He’s a great guy. And when he stepped down, he did it on his own because he thought it was better not only for the Democratic Party, for America,” Schumer continued. “We should all salute him.”
Welker asked if Biden would actually be capable of serving another four years in office if he’d remained in the race and won, and Schumer dodged the question.
“I’m not going to speculate,” he said.
Reports from multiple Democratic Party sources said Schumer and other Democratic Party leaders pushed the cognitively declining Biden, 81, to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race following the disastrous televised debate with President-elect Donald Trump.
Schumer said he spoke with Biden “several times in a week” throughout 2024 and didn’t notice a declining mental state before the debate.
Biden cited “the good of the nation” in his withdrawal speech from the White House Rose Garden. His handpicked successor to the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Vice President Kamala Harris, took over his failing campaign without winning a single primary vote.
Trump defeated Harris in a landslide in the 2024 election in November.