MSNBC host Jen Psaki, a former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden, made her big MSNBC debut on Sunday… and it was worse than usual.
Psaki was commenting on the possible indictment looming over former President Donald Trump and took issue with one Trump advisor’s remark about “woke, radical D.A.’s in New York and Atlanta.”
Psaki hit back. “Blaming woke politics for problems big and small has become a one-size-fits all response for Republicans lately,” she said Sunday, during the premiere of MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki.
Psaki made the remarks after one conservative author’s viral failure to define the term “woke.”
The author, Bethany Mandel, appeared on a podcast to promote her book on wokeness, and she appeared unprepared for the gotcha questions.
“It’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite,” Mandel said. “This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral. ‘Woke’ is very hard to define, and we spent an entire chapter defining it.”
Naturally, Mandel went viral, and she saw some liberals dig up her bad tweets from 14 years ago.
Psaki jumped on Mandel’s remark.
“If you can’t explain it and people don’t understand it in 15 seconds, it may not be the winning message you think it is,” Psaki said.
But then Psaki pushed farther.
She urged her viewers to embrace “wokeness,” even after characterizing it as a vague term.
“Everyone out there, it sounds like you can let your woke flag fly,” she said.
Psaki cited the USA Today poll with most respondents reporting positive associations with the term.
Psaki, a former Biden official, even treated Mandel as a representative example of the GOP’s campaign strategy.
“Many Republicans have co-opted ‘woke’ and increasingly used it to rally their base against their political opponents. In a decidedly unscientific analysis, we found that mentions of the term ‘woke’ in Fox News articles skyrocketed after Joe Biden became president. Imagine that!”
A decidedly unscientific analysis!
Townhall.com ran a headline called, “Jen Psaki Attacks Republicans During MSNBC Debut.”
Psaki doubled down on Twitter later… but will she go as viral as Mandel?
Let your woke flag fly https://t.co/aX6AwMEHuA
— Jen Psaki (@jrpsaki) March 19, 2023
Psaki, who was spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department from 2013-2015 and was Barack Obama’s last White House communications director before serving Biden, said she considers herself retired from the world of political and government communications.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams was the first Inside guest on Weekend Routine, what Psaki plans as a regular feature to get to know a newsmaker in a less formal setting. In a preplanned segment, she rides the subway with him and he makes them a smoothie in Gracie Mansion, along with answering questions about politics, immigration and crime.
In a future episode, she goes hunting for vinyl records with 26-year-old U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida.
Another segment, Don’t Freak Out, has Psaki using her policy experience to explain why some stories aren’t as big as they seem. “There’s often a view that everything is a five-alarm fire, and it’s not,” she said.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were also guests on her first show — all Democrats.
The network is banking on Psaki and her popularity with MSNBC’s liberal audience. She’s already taken a seat at the anchor desk on big events like midterm election night and her former boss’ State of the Union address, and makes frequent appearances on day-to-day shows.
But despite standing at a White House lectern defending President Joe Biden, Psaki claims to understand how that’s no longer her role.
“I have made it clear when I think some things could have been handled better,” she claimed, according to the Associated Press. “I’m not going to shy away from that. I’m also not going to shy away from the fact that I was proud to work for President Biden, proud to work for President Obama and Secretary (John) Kerry.”
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.