White House counselor Kellyanne Conway slammed James Clapper on Thursday for his assessment that President Trump may not be fit to serve, calling the former director of national intelligence “an armchair psychiatrist.”
“I question his fitness to be in this office and I also wonder if he is looking for a way out,” Clapper told CNN host Don Lemon on Tuesday night.
Conway slammed both Clapper and other pundits for “pontificating and conjecturing.”
{mosads}”A couple nights ago on television he said he wondered whether or not the president was fit to be president. Fit to serve. If James Clapper is watching right now, what’s your message to him?” asked “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy.
“It’s such an absurd analysis playing armchair psychiatrist,” she responded. “It’s not just him. It’s a lot of people on TV.”
“I’m old enough to remember when news stations reported the news,” Conway continued. “And didn’t just have a parade of pundits going out there and opinionating and pontificating and conjecturing. It leads to analysis like this because people end up with very little to say.”
Trump’s mental state has been broached in multiple segments on CNN and MSNBC in recent days, with various pundits weighing in on the topic.
One particular exchange stood out on CNN after pundit Ana Navarro was accused by conservative radio host Ben Ferguson of saying Trump has dementia.
“I think people that criticize the president and they constantly say, well, he’s unpresidential or he’s unhinged or he is outside the realm,” said Ferguson. “The same people that are saying that are the ones that are tweeting things like ‘I think the president has dementia’ or ‘I think it’s time to unseat the president’ or ‘I think it’s time to impeach him.’ If you don’t like the president, it doesn’t mean that you have to go to personal attacks or to somehow say that his mind is not sane.”
“Let me say this. I did not say he had dementia,” interjected Navarro.
“You implied it,” Ferguson shot back.
“No, no, no. Go read my tweet. It’s right there,” said Navarro.
The tweet in question went out to Navarro’s 572,000 followers during Trump’s rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, where he repeatedly attacked the media for not reporting on his Charlottesville, Va., comments accurately.
“Only possible defensible explanation for Trump’s disgusting, unpresidential, narcissistic behavior, would be early-on-set dementia. Maybe,” Navarro wrote in a tweet that was retweeted more than 7,500 times and favorited nearly 30,000 times.