Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s new book on the most important events of her two decades as House speaker and Democratic leader is titled “The Art of Power” — an unintentional echo, she insisted to me, of Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” important agreements that she helped to finalizesuch as the Affordable Care Act and the rescue packages after the global financial crisis, and the deals Trump failed to complete on infrastructure and much more.
And Pelosi also speaks of her amazement at the fact that of the four presidents she served under as House speaker, people only want to know about Trump, or “what’s his name,” as she calls him.
Opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
That should come as no surprise, though, given Trump's enormous impact and constant threat, and her famous virtue: standing up to him like no one else. Pelosi offers some behind-the-scenes insights, including into Trump's attitude. called “complainer” to her in 2019 begging him not to remove him for his “perfect” call to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, and how she corrected him when he opened his first White House meeting with congressional leaders by lying: “You know I won the popular vote.”
“I have had many conversations with this man,” he writes, “and at the end of almost every one I think: either you are stupid or you think the rest of us are.”
But this week, as Pelosi began promoting her book, there was a shift: She is now being asked primarily about another president: Joe Biden. And specifically, about his latest power play, one too recent to include in the book: his role in pushing Biden, her (former?) friend of four decades, to abandon his reelection bid.
Pelosi, always cautious, won't go into that topic, although she leaves much to be read between her carefully chosen lines.
The launch of her book, with television appearances and interviews and confidentiality agreements to keep tabs on it all, is competing for attention with the new Democratic presidential ticket Harris-Walz, which she herself helped create in no small part.
“Look at the response you’re getting!” he exclaimed to me and other journalists at a roundtable on Wednesday. But he is reluctant to take credit for his enthusiasm: “At some point I will come to accept my own role in this.”
Though “hundreds” of panicked Democrats called her after Biden’s calamitous debate with Trump, she said she spoke to few and told them to direct their concerns to the president’s circle. “I didn’t make one call” to generate outside pressure on Biden, she said, repeating for emphasis. Yet she was the obvious emissary of the president himself, given their relationship, similar age: at 82 in 2022, she’s 83. resigned as a Democratic leader—and, yes, his skillful exercise of power.
While Biden stood firm, some of Pelosi's closest allies, including California Reps. Adam B. Schiff and Zoe Löfgrenurged him to step down. “I had nothing to do with it,” he insisted. on CNN. And she flatly denies it. information that on a call with Biden she demanded that he put a top adviser on the phone when the president said his staff had more encouraging polling data.
Pelosi admits she spoke to Biden: “I was actually asking for a better campaign. We didn’t have a campaign that was on track to win.”
She told us she would not accept Biden's public no to his final decision.
Referring to Trump, and pounding the table with every word, he added: “My goal in life was that that man Biden would never set foot in the White House again.” Yet Democrats seemed to be throwing “rose petals” in his path and endangering their other candidates for lower offices as well. What will happen then to Biden’s legacy and hers?
Since Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, Pelosi says she has not spoken to him. Perhaps to encourage rapprochement, she praises him in every interview. He is “a Mount Rushmore-type president,” she says. saying on “CBS Sunday Morning.”
Trump, who in 2020 actually tweeted A photo of himself on Mount Rushmore, of course, doesn't get as much prominence in Pelosi's book.
Despite Biden’s debate performance, Pelosi says she has seen no mental decline in him. Trump is another case, literally. Pelosi writes of attending a memorial service for a prominent psychiatrist and being a magnet for the many doctors there, expressing concern about Trump’s mental health. His family and staff “should have staged an intervention,” she writes.
“I knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. I had seen it up close. His denial and delays when the Covid pandemic broke out, his tendency to stomp out of meetings again and again, his foul mouth, his slamming of tables, his tantrums, his lack of respect for our nation’s patriots, and his complete detachment from reality and actual facts. His repeated and ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time.”
Take it from a TRUE GOATTrump is not one.
Trump did manage to keep Pelosi in Congress. She had planned to retire after 2016, once Hillary Clinton was elected. When that didn't happen, Pelosi stayed on primarily to prevent Trump from repealing Obamacare. Arizona Sen. John McCain confided to her that he would oppose repeal, so she wasn't surprised, as Mitch McConnell and so many Republicans were, when Trump's Obamacare repeal came to an end. McCain's thumbs down She condemned the effort to failure. “Every day I wish he were still here,” Pelosi writes.
Pelosi makes clear that her book is not an autobiography. It focuses at length on four tortuous debates: Iraq and Afghanistan; trade and human abuses by China; the financial crisis and recovery efforts; and Obamacare. Among those chapters are accounts of the near-fatal beating of her husband, Paul, in 2022 and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. In both, pro-Trump attackers chanted “Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?”
She's still here, running for her 20th term representing San Francisco. And she might write another book, she suggested. Maybe even about what might have been one of the most ingenious and consequential uses of her power in recent weeks.
@jackiekcalmes
