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Psaki acknowledges Dem failures: ‘Now is the time to break some sh*t’

February 15, 2025 | | Print Article

An admission on Democratic disconnect from MSNBC’s Jen Psaki had her suggesting the means for the party to find recourse was to “break some sh*t.”

After making the lateral move from the White House press briefing room to corporate media, Psaki had been on the frontline for the 2024 election, pushing the narratives that ultimately saw now-former Vice President Kamala Harris lose to President Donald Trump. This week, while claiming her network was “not a mouthpiece” for Democrats, she joined Jon Stewart to lament the party’s failure to address what “people actually care about.”

At one point, the host of “The Weekly Show” told his guest, “I’ve been shocked by how un-democratic the Democratic Party can be,” including “putting their foot on the scales” to advance former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the 2016 presidential nominee over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

In response, Psaki acknowledged failures from the party, particularly losing control of every branch of the federal government, leading her to conclude, “now is the time to break some sh*t, right? And break some china.”

Warning: Language

Elsewhere during the discussion, the MSNBC host peddled to Stewart, “I feel like when Democrats, and including people who are on television in a variety of ways, were saying things like, ‘Authoritarianism is under threat and democracy is on the ballot,’ I think we were speaking in a manner that was so academic and Ivory Tower, it wasn’t talking about a lot of the things people actually care about.”

“So, I don’t know that people voted against democracy, I think they voted in some ways against protection of status quo and kind of the disconnected academic Ivory Tower elite language that is too often used by Democrats, sometimes on cable television,” she went on, noting her takeaway for the future to “cross authoritarianism and oligarch out of every script. Nobody talks this way.”

Frustrated that Democrats haven’t been pushing back more on the administration’s sweeping effort at shrinking the federal government, Stewart had said, “But that seems obvious, Jen! So why are they not doing it?”

“I wish I knew the answer to that question,” she replied as he contended, “That is the most painful sigh I’ve ever heard.”

“I’ve retired from the world of Democratic messaging in some ways,” argued Psaki who added, “I don’t see that yet, either,” when the host spoke to the lack of “understanding” from the left on “how they ended up in this position.”

Of course, this included his guest’s own apparent delusions as Stewart had questioned, “MSNBC: Do they come to you every day and go, ‘Here’s what we think is important to preserve and fight for,’ whatever?”

“You’re not waiting to be told what to say about anything,” she claimed. “You’re gonna say what you think, so people can trust that.”

“I disagree with that,” replied the host. “I think it’s not that you’re able to be independent, it’s that you’re then a prisoner purely to the minute by minutes…ratings, incentives and all those other things. If you don’t have the ideological component, right, then you don’t have a governing authority of editorial authority, right?”

To that, Psaki claimed, “Nobody is, to the frustration at times of many elected Democrats, it is not a mouthpiece of the Democratic Party,” prompting considerable disagreement on social media.

Kevin Haggerty
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