When I pressed Pelosi to talk in greater detail about her language on “Morning Joe,” she looked at me silently, unblinking. Finally, as the silence expanded past the boundary of awkward, I said, “You’re looking at me and waiting for this moment to pass.”
“Yeah, but I’m trying to think of why you’re even asking it, because, you know, I’m not going to answer it the way that you want,” Pelosi said. “I didn’t plan to do that on [‘Morning Joe.’] In fact, if I did, I probably would’ve worn a different suit or something, because I didn’t look too professional.”
“It was like you felt his pain,” I said.
Then Pelosi dropped her calculated reserve. “I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she admitted. “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The President has to make the decision for that to happen. People were calling. I never called one person. I kept true to my word. Any conversation I had, it was just going to be with him. I never made one call. They said I was burning up the lines, I was talking to Chuck [Schumer]. I didn’t talk to Chuck at all.
“I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next.” Her goal, she added, was simple: “That Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”
To those around her who were saying her appearance on “Morning Joe” gave them the “space” to call on Biden to leave the campaign—the “permission structure,” as D.C. lingo now has it—she counselled, Wait for the NATO summit to end; no need to embarrass the President with so many foreign leaders in the country. But then, “We need the President to make the decision.”
Which is precisely what happened. On July 21st, ten days after the NATO summit ended, Biden issued a statement via social media announcing his withdrawal.
Pelosi said she has not been in contact with the President since that dramatic Sunday, and I asked her if she thought her long relationship with him would survive.
“I hope so,” she said. “I pray so. I cry so.”
Do you worry about it?
“I lose sleep on it, yeah.”
Do you think he’s angry at you?
“I don’t know. We haven’t had a conversation. But...”
What kind of state do you think he’s in now?
“I think he’s in a good state,” Pelosi said. “I mean, I think he did a remarkable thing, bringing home all these prisoners. Oh, my God, that was so masterful.... But my understanding is that he’s good. And the thing is that his legacy will go right down the drain if what’s-his-name ever [returns to] the White House. Whether it’s the planet, whether it’s fairness in our economy, whether it’s the safety of our children...”
Since stepping down from her leadership position in the House, Pelosi has had time to write “The Art of Power,” a memoir about her role in various pieces of major legislation. She is also a degree less disciplined in her criticism of other political figures. In the wake of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s recent admission to Clare Malone, of The New Yorker, that, yes, at the age of sixty, he pulled a prank by stashing a dead bear cub in Central Park, I asked her if that would be her own response to such generously proportioned roadkill. “If worms have infiltrated your brain,” she said.
What did you make of that story? I asked.
“So strange,” she said. “It’s really so sad. But he has a name and he’s got the anti-vaxxers. So he commands some attention—but it’s so sad. It’s really a tragedy.”
Pelosi has 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 forty-two-year-old assailant named David DePape broke into the family’s house, in San Francisco, saying, “Where’s Nancy?” It was the same question heard among the insurrectionists on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, when they went hunting for the Speaker and other politicians who they thought were blocking Trump from the Presidency. DePape’s intent was to kidnap Pelosi, but, after he discovered that her husband was home alone, had to content himself with attacking him with a hammer. Pelosi said that her husband is “about eighty per cent” recovered, but that the shattering blow to his skull still has “ramifications” and requires continued therapy and time to heal.
“It’s a horrible thing,” Pelosi told me. “The physical damage is one thing. There’s also the trauma of it all for our children, our grandchildren. It’s really sad. It happened in our home. In our home.” She said it was still “creepy” to be in the bedroom or the garden room “where he banged his way in.” “We wouldn’t go there for a long, long time,” she said. “To tell you the truth, David, we’ve never ever had this conversation about what happened that night. What I know about it is what was testified to in court and what’s in the public domain.... The doctor said he doesn’t want him to revisit it. But, apart from that, I think he knows it would be very painful to me to hear what he went through. The guy was after me—and he gets my husband? Really?”
