An MSNBC host and former White House press secretary for President Biden, Jen Psaki, who publicly stated she never saw evidence of her boss’s mental decline, is facing criticism for her decision to question why President Trump was “hiding” from the public over the holiday weekend.

Left-wing conspiracy theories about Mr. Trump’s health were rampant on social media over the long Labor Day weekend as commentators and social media users suggested that his empty public schedule, combined with pictures of a bruise on one of his hands, were signs of a dire medical situation for the president. The rumors were not put to rest despite Mr. Trump emerging to go to his golf club in Virginia.

Ms. Psaki discussed the bizarre rumors on Tuesday, opening a segment on Mr. Trump’s health by talking about the “wave of online speculation about the president’s health and well-being.”

“Today, when he re-emerged from his absence for an event in the Oval Office, even my buddy from Fox News, Peter Doocy, couldn’t resist asking about it,” she said. 

When Mr. Doocy asked about the rumors, Mr. Trump said that he did not see the rumors online and that he was “very active over the weekend.” The president also pointed out his predecessor would frequently not make public appearances for several days and “nobody ever said there was ever anything wrong with him … and we know he wasn’t in the greatest shape.”

Ms. Psaki seemed to be careful not to explicitly question Mr. Trump’s health, but suggested the lack of public appearances over the holiday weekend and the president’s response to being asked about the rumors seemed odd.

“As I mentioned, Trump’s prolonged absence from the public eye sparked pretty widespread rumors, you probably saw them,” she said. “But somehow the guy who is famously online, at very odd hours and totally obsessed with his self-image, says he didn’t see any of it.”

She noted that Mr. Trump later said he heard “reports” about speculation that there is “something wrong with him,” but denied that he had heard about the speculation of his death.

“We went from Trump saying he hadn’t heard about the rumors of his death, to Trump saying he did hear about them from reports, to then back to Trump saying he hadn’t heard anything about any of it,” Ms. Psaki said. “You really can’t make this stuff up sometimes. And look, 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 then suggested Mr. Trump was “hiding” because of concerns about his poll numbers.

Ms. Psaki was roundly criticized on social media.

A conservative activist, Greg Price, wrote on X, “Jen Psaki does an entire segment claiming that Donald Trump is hiding something about his health because he took a few days off on a holiday weekend. This is the same woman who was Joe Biden’s Press Secretary.”

A Republican Rhode Island state representative, Brian Newberry, wrote, “The unmitigated gall is amazing.  This is a ‘journalist.’”

Another user wrote, “If anyone would know about hiding the health of the POTUS.”

A conservative journalist, Charlie Harper, noted the business aspect of MSNBC as it is being spun off from NBC News and wrote, “With @comcast @NBCNews  spinning off cable networks into Versant, the new company is going to have to decide if this ‘entertainment’ fits with the new mission.  @CNBC’s reputation as part of the same spinoff/ownership/management hangs in the balance.”

The post refers to questions about what editorial direction MSNBC, soon to be renamed MS NOW, will take as it is jettisoned from the NBCUniversal umbrella and loses the financial buffer it had from its connection to its broadcast parent company. The network will have to hire its own reporters, after it spent decades largely relying on NBC News’s reporters to cover Congress and the White House and other breaking news events.

There are also questions about whether the management of MS NOW will keep its current lineup of hosts as it struggles to bring in viewers. Ms. Psaki’s show is drastically underperforming top-rated host Rachel Maddow’s ratings. From May to June, Ms. Psaki averaged 1.1 million viewers. That represents a 44 percent decrease from Ms. Maddow’s 1.8 million average viewers between January and May. A panel show featuring Symone Sanders, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez that replaced fired host Joy Reid’s 7 p.m. show has also been underperforming in the ratings. 

Ms. Maddow now reportedly earns $25 million a year for just one day of work a week. There is speculation that MS NOW executives will try to either force Ms. Maddow to work five days a week, which would likely bump Ms. Psaki from her Tuesday to Friday 9 p.m. time slot, or come to an agreement to pay out her contract and have her leave the network. 

Ms. Psaki faced heavy criticism when her primetime show premiered in May. Inconveniently for her, the launch of her show coincided with the publication of “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson. The book says that Mr. Biden’s advisers developed deep concerns about his condition in 2022, when Ms. Psaki was still serving in her press secretary role.

However, Ms. Psaki publicly denied witnessing any issues with Mr. Biden’s mental acuity and cognition.

During an episode of Semafor’s “Mixed Signals” podcast, Ms. Psaki was asked if she believes there was a “cover-up” to hide Mr. Biden’s declining mental state.

“I think ‘cover-up’ is such a loaded phrase. … People use that term as related to Watergate or the covering up of not sharing public information about a war,” she responded.

She also said she “never saw” the version of Mr. Biden that unsettled viewers during his disastrous June 27 debate with Mr. Trump during her time in the White House, even though she said she was in the Oval Office “every day” between 2021 and 2022.

Ms. Psaki suggested that the 46th president’s decline only happened after she left the White House and started working at MSNBC, telling Semafor, “I’m not a doctor. Aging happens quite quickly.”

Ms. Psaki has been accused of lying about not seeing any sign of decline, especially in light of questions about the timing of how long Mr. Biden and his inner circle were aware of his prostate cancer. In May, the former president disclosed he was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer, which led to questions from Republicans and even Democrats about whether he was diagnosed with the cancer while he was in office.

MSNBC did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.