When I pressed Pelosi to elaborate on her language on “Morning Joe,” she looked at me silently and unblinkingly. Finally, when the silence crossed the line into awkwardness, I said, “You’re looking at me, waiting for this moment to pass.”
“Yeah, but I’m trying to think about why you’re even asking that, because you know, I’m not going to answer it the way you want me to,” Pelosi said. “I wasn’t planning on doing that on ‘Morning Joe.’ If I had, I probably would have worn a different suit or something because I didn’t look very professional.”
“It was as if you felt his pain,” I said.
Then Pelosi dropped her calculated reserve. “I have never been so impressed with his political actions,” she admitted. “You won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: The is not going to happen, and we have to make a decision to make that happen. The President has to make the decision to make that happen. People have been calling. I never called a person. I kept my word. Every conversation I had was only with him. I never made a call. They said I was overloading the lines, I spoke to Chuck (Schumer). I didn’t speak to Chuck at all.
“I never called a single person, but people called me and said there was a challenge. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, otherwise it would happen.” Her goal, she added, was simple: “That Donald Trump never sets foot in the White House again.”
To those around her who said her appearance on “Morning Joe” gave them the “space” to call on Biden to drop out of the campaign – the “permission structure,” as it is now called in Washington jargon – she advised: “Wait for the NATO Summit over; there is no reason to embarrass the president when so many foreign heads of state are in the country. But then: “We need the president to make the decision.”
And that is exactly what happened. On July 21, ten days after the NATO After the summit ended, Biden issued a statement on social media announcing his withdrawal.
Pelosi said she had not had any contact with the president since that dramatic Sunday, and I asked her if she thought her long relationship with him would endure.
“I hope so,” she said. “I pray so. I cry so.”
Are you worried about this?
“That can give me sleepless nights, yes.”
Do you think he is angry with you?
“I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it. But…”
What condition do you think he is in now?
“I think he’s in good shape,” Pelosi said. “I mean, I think he did something remarkable by bringing all those prisoners home. Oh, my God, that was so masterful… But I understand him as good. And the thing is, his legacy is going to go completely down the drain if what’s-his-name-ever returns (to the) White House. Whether it’s about the planet, whether it’s about justice in our economy, whether it’s about the safety of our children…”
Since resigning from her leadership post in the House, Pelosi has had time to write “The Art of Power,” a treatise on her role in several major pieces of legislation. She has also been somewhat less disciplined in her criticism of other political figures. Following Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent admission to Clare Malone that The New Yorkerthat he had actually pulled a prank at the age of sixty and hidden a dead bear cub in Central Park, I asked her if she would react in the same way to such a lush, roadkill animal. “When worms have invaded your brain,” she said.
“What do you think of this story?” I asked.
“So strange,” she said. “It’s really so sad. But he has a name and he has the anti-vaxxers on his side. So he’s getting some attention – but it’s so sad. It’s really a tragedy.”
Pelosi also had more time to spend with her children and her husband, Paul, who is still recovering from a near-fatal attack. In October 2022, a 42-year-old assailant named David DePape broke into the family’s San Francisco home and asked, “Where’s Nancy?” It was the same question heard by insurrectionists on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, as they went on the hunt for the speaker and other politicians they thought would keep Trump from the presidency. DePape planned to kidnap Pelosi, but when he discovered her husband was home alone, he had to settle for attacking him with a hammer. Pelosi said her husband is “about 80 percent” recovered, but the concussive blow to his skull still has “effects” and requires continued therapy and time to heal.
“It’s a terrible thing,” Pelosi told me. “The physical damage is one thing. There’s also the trauma to our children, our grandchildren. It’s really sad. It happened in our house. In our home.” She said it was still “creepy” to be in the bedroom or the garden room “where he had forced his way in.” “We wouldn’t go there for a long, long time,” she said. “To tell you the truth, David, we never had that conversation about what happened that night. What I know about it is what was testified in court and what is public knowledge. . . . The doctor said he didn’t want him to go back into it. But having said that, I think he knows it would be very painful for me to hear what he went through. The guy was after me – and he’s coming for my husband? Really?”
