Jen Psaki went on her MS NOW show and compared Donald Trump to a foreign strongman.
She dressed it up as a warning for anybody casting a ballot this fall.
And Psaki never told her viewers who actually built the deathtrap that brought her villain down.
Psaki Grabbed Barack Obama’s Shiny New Metaphor and Ran
Barack Obama handed her the script.
In a clip Psaki played on The Briefing, the former President accused Trump of cashing in on the office and pitched the coming election as the cure. “We need to flip that circuit breaker,” Obama said.
Psaki liked the line so much she built a whole segment around it. Then she went shopping for proof that voters can trip the switch on a corrupt ruler, and she landed in the Balkans.
Serbian voters threw Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party out of power in snap parliamentary elections on October 25, 2026. By Vucic’s own count, a student-led movement pulled in roughly 2.2 million votes to about 1.7 million for his side, and he conceded that night.
Psaki called him “the country’s tyrant” and traced his downfall to a November 2024 disaster in the city of Novi Sad, where a concrete canopy at a freshly renovated train station came crashing down and killed 16 people.
Then she looked into the camera. “Does this sound familiar, everybody?” Psaki asked.
She didn’t leave much to the imagination. “Authoritarian government is corrupt government, and corrupt government, like the one we’re living through now, is bad government,” she said.
So there it is. The President of the United States, lumped in with a Balkan strongman, on a cable channel that still wants people to call it a news network.
The Builder Psaki Forgot to Mention
Here’s the part MS NOW viewers never heard.
That train station came out of a Communist China project. Two Chinese construction giants, China Railway International and China Communications Construction Company, ran the renovation as part of a Beijing-backed rail upgrade stretching north from Belgrade.
And they ran it in the dark. When a local Novi Sad broadcaster asked to see the renovation contract, Serbia’s construction ministry answered that the Chinese partner didn’t agree to release the details.
Both companies swore the canopy that fell wasn’t part of their job. Serbian prosecutors saw it differently. The country’s special prosecutor for organized crime brought charges alleging that defendants embezzled at least $18.7 million to benefit the Chinese consortium, according to the Serbian news agency Beta, which also reported that prosecutors asked police eight separate times to question key people from the Chinese companies. Anyone charged is presumed innocent until a court says otherwise.
But that’s the case Psaki held up as her shining example of corrupt government. A Belt and Road job, wrapped in secrecy, with Beijing’s contractors at the center of the investigation.
Funny how that detail slipped through the cracks of a segment that ran this long.
Psaki has never been shy about warning viewers when a foreign power wants to meddle in somebody’s affairs. Communist China’s fingerprints on her favorite tragedy apparently didn’t make the cut.
Her Old Boss Called the Tyrant a Good Partner
And the Biden years make the comparison stranger still.
Joe Biden pulled veteran diplomat Christopher Hill out of retirement and shipped him to Belgrade as ambassador. Rather than freeze out the man Psaki now calls a tyrant, Hill praised him. In 2023, Hill told Voice of America that Vucic and his government “are good partners in this process,” as Politico reported.
Critics on all sides noticed. Foreign Policy ran a piece titled “How Biden Lost the Balkans,” accusing Washington of doubling down on its ties to a Serbian president the magazine described as nearly autocratic.
CBS News, for its part, called Vucic a Putin-endorsed strongman.
So the administration that sent an ambassador to pat the Kremlin’s favorite Balkan leader on the back belonged to Psaki’s old boss. She spent the first 16 months of that administration at the White House podium.
Maybe that’s asking a lot of a cable host who has an hour of airtime to fill every night. Then again, she picked the country.
A Grifting Lecture From the Hunter Biden Art Spokeswoman
Obama’s clip accused Trump’s family of cashing in on the presidency. Psaki nodded right along.
But Psaki carries some baggage on this exact subject.
In the summer of 2021, Hunter Biden rolled out a career as a painter, with asking prices reportedly as high as $500,000 for work by a man with no formal art training. Psaki told reporters that an arrangement keeping buyers’ names secret from Hunter and from the White House “provides quite a level of protection and transparency.” She also promised that “any offer out of the normal course would be rejected out of hand.”
Walter Shaub, who ran the Office of Government Ethics under Obama, wasn’t buying it. “They have outsourced government ethics to an art dealer,” Shaub said.
The wall didn’t hold. Business Insider later reported that Hunter knew who bought at least two of his pieces, and his attorney confirmed one buyer: Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, whom Joe Biden appointed in July 2022 to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad.
Then, in December 2024, Joe Biden pardoned his son.
Nobody at MS NOW called that a breaking point.
The Breaking Point Psaki Keeps Missing
Psaki did say one thing worth chewing on. “You don’t always know what the breaking point is going to be,” she told her audience.
True enough. American voters found theirs in November 2024, after four years of grocery bills that looked like car payments, a southern border that looked like a turnstile, and a President whose own staff spent years insisting he was sharp as ever. They didn’t need a train station collapse to make up their minds.
But Psaki can’t see that, because the “circuit breaker” in her version of the story only ever trips in one direction.
When voters reject Democrats, the press calls it a crisis for democracy. When voters reject a leader Democrats don’t like, the press calls it democracy working. Psaki wants the credit for the Serbian students without ever asking who signed the contracts they were protesting.
And the comparison itself insults the people she claims to be warning. Serbian protesters spent two years in the streets against a government they accused of rigging the deck. American voters, by contrast, just finished a presidential race where they heard every argument Psaki and Obama had to offer and chose the other guy anyway.
That’s not the profile of a captured country. That’s the profile of a country that didn’t take her advice.
Psaki wanted a story about who gets to flip the circuit breaker. She just never mentioned who wired the building.
Sources: NewsBusters; Euronews; CBS News; NPR; Al Jazeera; Vreme; N1; Beta Briefing; China Digital Times; Politico via N1; Foreign Policy; Associated Press; The Daily Signal; Columbia Journalism Review; The Dispatch