The FRONTLINE Interviews

Dan Balz

Journalist, The Washington Post

Dan Balz is chief correspondent covering national politics at The Washington Post and is the author of several books, including Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore on Oct. 28, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Pelosi’s Power

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Jan. 6 and the Aftermath

First of all, Jan. 6, Pelosi goes in.Of course, the Georgia results have just come out the day before, so she knows that they have the majority.So to some extent, she starts out on a very high note going into that day's events.But by the time of, of course, the rioters invading, the day turns very different.Talk about where she was at that point a little bit, and the irony of the developments of that day, and how they must have all—and the speaker herself—felt with what happened.

Well, I mean, that whole period was so traumatic and celebratory at the same moment.The two Georgia Senate races, which drew literally worldwide attention because of the significance of them and the fact that the Senate was hanging in the balance, those victories, narrow as they were, gave the Democrats and an incoming president something that they were desperate for, because in the absence of having even the barest of majorities, President Biden was not going to be able to really do what he had talked about doing in the campaign.

In the House, frankly, Speaker Pelosi ended up with a smaller majority than she had anticipated.There were expectations in the election that the Democrats were going to pick up some seats.It ended up that the Republicans gained seats even though Biden won the presidency.

So they recognized going in that they had the power to do what they wanted to do, but not unlimited power.And I think that as they got through Jan. 5, there was this kind of sigh of relief: OK, we will have majorities, slim as they are.

But everybody knew that Jan. 6 was going to be somewhat fraught.Nobody anticipated quite what it turned out to be, you know, with the attack on the Capitol.But everybody knew that this was a very, very important day in the history of the country because of all of what former President Trump had been doing in the time after the election up until that moment.

So it was a day of, I would say, competing emotions about where things might be, what might be about to happen, what the possibilities were for a new president as he was getting ready to be sworn in.

… Let's cut to the end of the day, where she and McConnell were both intent on coming back and showing that the Congress would continue the important work that they were involved in under their constitutional mandate.She shows a certain kind of resolve and a certain attitude towards what had happened during that day.And in the days that follow, she does a couple of things that are fascinating, and I want to get your opinion about what it represents and what she was doing and what it shows about her.

… Talk about the role she took on at that point, what it showed about her and what it said about the feelings of the Democrats at that point.

Well, you know, if you think back to her relationship with Donald Trump, obviously it was never good, but it deteriorated rapidly over the course of his presidency.And I think what Jan. 6 did was it just, in a sense, put her over the top in her determination to do everything she could to prevent Trump from doing further damage to the country.You know, I think she was outraged; she was angry.She was probably scared for the country, which is why the call with [Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley, to make sure that there were protections in place, that if Trump went totally off the rails, that he would be prevented from doing the worst.

You know, in that phone call, she talked about him being crazy: "He's crazy.He's crazy."And I think that that, you know, that was her mindset.It wasn't just because of Jan. 6.It was because of everything she had seen and the observations she had had, her interactions with him, and Jan. 6 was kind of like, everything snapped at that point, and it was, "I have to do everything possible to take this person out of action while he is still in office."

But how will history look at it?… She basically seemed to be trying to run the government.I mean, certainly I'm assuming some Republicans think that she was attempting a coup with the 25th Amendment.How is history going to look at that move and whether she had the right to do it; and number two, whether it was an absolute necessity?

Well, I'm not sure I would say that she was trying to run the government.I think what she was trying to do was to protect the country and that she felt, given what had happened on Jan. 6, that who knows what might be coming after that?I mean, you're in a kind of an unpredictable period.That attack on the Capitol was cathartic for everybody.I mean, anybody who watched that, you know, watched it with a sense of horror: How could this be happening in the United States of America?How could the Capitol of the United States be overrun by a group of marauders who were waving Trump flags and attacking Capitol Police and law enforcement?I mean, what was going on in this country?

And I think she saw in that moment that, as the highest-ranking Democrat in the country, as the speaker of the House, as the leader of the Democratic Party in Congress, that she needed to act and that she had the authority to try to do things.

Now, trying to get then-Vice President Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment was certainly a reach, because despite the fact that, you know, that Pence and Trump had had a serious coming apart over Pence's role on Jan. 6, there was no way that Mike Pence was going to do what she wanted to do.But nonetheless, she was kind of pushing every button possible, in part to sound the alarm, in part to say to as many people as possible, "We need to be together in protecting ourselves, our institutions, our democracy and the security of the country."

… There's been a lot of reporting about—discussions about impeachment were happening while they were in the protected spaces that they were in.What's the mood of the Democratic Caucus and the role that Pelosi plays in either controlling that or pursuing it?

I mean, the mood of the caucus in a sense reflected the mood of a lot of part of the country, which was great anger and a sense that the president needed to be held accountable for this; that he had whipped up this crowd in the speech that he gave as the insurrection was taking place; that he had fostered the Big Lie about the election being stolen and rigged; and that having seen what had happened on Jan. 6, there was a sense, "OK, we have to hold him accountable."

And I think that she felt that very strongly, and I think her troops felt the same thing.I think there was—they were all in sync on that at that point and that they needed to move quickly; that this was not something that you could wait and try to do a long preparatory series of sessions and hearings; that the evidence in a sense was right there.The evidence was all in the video of what had happened on Jan. 6. You didn't need much more than that to do.And she was determined to try to make that happen as quickly as possible.And there was no serious pushback from people in her own delegation on that.

For those 13 days until inauguration, she was in that mode of protecting the democracy, fear of what Trump might do.But after Biden's inauguration, is this existential threat that the Democrats were worried about during those 13 days, did it dissipate?

Well, it dissipated to some extent.I mean, once Donald Trump is out of office, he's no longer got his finger on the nuclear button, so to speak.And so, in many ways, a former President Trump is less dangerous because he doesn't have the levers of power that a president does.So there's some easing of that, but not of the idea that he needed to be held accountable.I mean, that still was part of the DNA of the Democratic Caucus in the House and the Senate as well, that this was a president who had committed acts that were impeachable and that they needed to do something about that, so that there was this combination of, yes, there's a little bit of relief Joe Biden is now the president; Joe Biden is in the White House; things will calm down, or begin to calm down.But the ongoing threat, if you will, of even a former President Trump is something that had to be dealt with.

And the fact that that existential threat was about the loss of democracy and the influence that even a president out of office might have by revving up his supporters with his claims of a stolen election is something that we're still dealing with.I was watching that clip the other day of the guy in the audience saying, "When do we get to use our guns?"I mean, things like that are ever-present these days.

Well, I mean, yes.I mean, in a sense, that piece of the story has never stopped.Donald Trump has continued to say and do everything possible to keep alive the idea that he was denied the presidency out of fraud, irregularity, stealing of votes, changing of votes and that sort of thing.And I don't know that people on Jan. 7 or 10 or 22 or once Biden was in office sensed how much Trump would continue to do that, or sensed how much that would begin to take root within the Republican Party, particularly in different states as they began to look at audits of votes and change the voting laws.

All of that was slowly building as Biden was taking over the presidency.And what we've seen in the time since then is that it has continued to build and build.And therefore, I think the alarm about the threats to democracy are probably as great or greater today than they were in the month right after Biden took office.

… Give us a description of where Nancy Pelosi is at this moment.What parts of her long history, the lessons she's learned from all her life, how they have come to fruition to define the Nancy Pelosi that we've just discussed?

… Well, Nancy Pelosi by this moment had earned respect as perhaps the most powerful speaker in modern times.I mean, I don't think there's any question that she has wielded power over a long period of time, whenever she has held the gavel, in ways that few if any speakers have been able to do.She had shown a kind of an unerring instinct about how to get her caucus to do the things that she felt needed to be done, a superb vote counter, a good sense of timing, a leader who knew how to lead, a prodigious fundraiser, somebody who was always working to assure that they got as many seats as they possibly could.In all ways, she was an incredibly powerful speaker.

I think at this moment, people also recognized that she's in the final chapter of that long political career; she had given indications of that.And so this was a question of, all right, what will this last act produce?What will Nancy Pelosi, in collaboration with President Biden and Chuck Schumer, the leader in the Senate, what will she be able to produce on behalf of her party and the country?What kind of legislation will she be able to do?And ultimately, what will that legacy look like?But in many ways, that legacy had been written by the time we had gotten to this moment.

So we start off with Bush.At that point, she's just become—in 2001 she's just become whip, so she's starting on her leadership role.And the first meeting of the Gang of Eight is in the White House, and she's in that meeting, and she's thinking about the fact that she's the first woman in the history of America to ever be involved in these discussions within the White House.

… Talk about the significance of her rising to that role, the significance of a woman making it to that point and that woman being her.

Well, I mean, I think there's two ways to think about this.One is simply being the first woman in that situation, in that environment.It's, again, a reminder of how long it has taken this country to have women in those positions.In many ways, we take this for granted today perhaps, and yet even today there are moments when you think there's been no woman who's done this or no woman who's done that.So for Nancy Pelosi to be in that moment is another symbolic indication of the advancement of women in our democracy, in our government, in corporations, etc.

I think there's another piece of that, and that is that it is Nancy Pelosi who is there, not just any woman, and part of that is her long history—I mean, coming from the political family in Baltimore, growing up around politicians and having in a sense in her DNA an understanding of what local politics is like and what general politics is like. …

Talk a little bit more about where she does come from.… Is there something about that upbringing that helps define the way she has operated?

Well, she's a politician who's never essentially had to count on Republicans for her advancement.And so she's not the kind of politician who comes from a swing district, who has had to maneuver through the conflicting winds of left and right in order to appeal to that center.She is a very, very strong Democrat and a very strong progressive Democrat.

I think it would be surprising if, given her background, she would be anything other than that.Baltimore is, you know, is a one-party town.San Francisco is as Democratic a place as there is in the country, a place that Republicans have over the years pilloried as being symbolic of a kind and a style of politics that is way out of the mainstream.

And so in some ways, it's perhaps surprising that somebody like that ends up being the leader of a Democratic Party that has factions and that has a centrist wing.But I think that she has always seen her politics and seen her role as attempting to push forward those kinds of progressive ideas, and to push as hard as she could and to get as much as she could, but again, within the knowledge that there were people in her caucus who couldn't go that far and that she had to be the manager of that and, in a sense, persuade progressives sometimes that they couldn't take as much they wanted while pulling the more moderates to do as much as they were prepared to do, while saying, "I will protect you in every way possible." …

Pelosi and Bush

With Bush, very early on she was a vocal critic of Iraq, and she took Bush over the hot coals often on how he went about it, sometimes in a very vicious away.… How much of that was emotion?How much of that was partisan politics, the idea that this is something that they can use in coming elections?Your overview of the way she handled the debate over Iraq.

I think first and foremost, it flowed out of what was, in a sense, the kind of politics that she grew up in, and particularly in San Francisco, an antiwar sentiment in general.And I think that on a policy basis, she was simply opposed to that war.And there were many Democrats who had gone along with it, who had given Bush the vote to go ahead and authorize whatever he needed to do, basically to give him a blank check to do.Many in retrospect said that's not quite what they were doing, but everybody knew at the time what that vote was about, and she was on the oppositional side.

I think that was not simply partisan politics.I think that was her view that this was the wrong thing for the country to do; this was not a war that was justified.But she is a strong partisan, and any way that she can create an opportunity for the Democratic Party to gain, she will try to do that.

So I think in a sense those two things came together.But I think her opposition to the war was genuine, that this was a bad step for the country to take.

But she understood, would you say—as you said, a lot of the Democrats and Democratic leadership supported Bush and felt they needed to for multiple reasons, including politics.And she understood that there was a progressive base that was very angry with the Democrats that had made that decision, and she felt she needed to keep them within the fold.And to some extent, part of the way she presented the issue was also to help keep that part of the Democratic Party in the fold?

The one thing about Speaker Pelosi is that she's thinking constantly about that entire group that, you know, that she's leading.And it is a divided party.It has been as long as I've covered the Democratic Party.And her sense was, if these splits become irreconcilable, then the ability of the Democrats to come together around an election in order to gain seats and to gain political power would be compromised.And so she's looking: "How do I balance this?How do I keep everybody, if not happy, how do I keep them from being at each others' throats?We need to keep the focus on the real opposition," which is the Republican Party, or a Republican president that they're going to be going against in the 2004 election, and then seeking to take over the House in 2006.

All of that's in her mind.And so that's part of the skill that she has demonstrated over the years.I mean, that's, in a sense, her abiding strength, is that ability to manage a disparate caucus through whatever it is at the moment that is potentially pulling them apart.

And by 2006, those midterms, the issue of Iraq was very important, and she raised millions and millions dollars partially due to her stance and being able to hold the coalition together.And that success, in some ways her decision early on to be against Iraq, did that help her rise in the Democratic leadership?

Yeah, I think it did.If you think about that 2006 election, I mean, this was an election in which the party had gone out and recruited a lot of people who were not Pelosi-like in their views.I mean, they were more moderates.They were people who were suited to the districts that they were trying to win.And she was, you know, she was fully in accord with that because, again, the key is winning, not simply ideological purity or the need to have everybody agree with her.

And at that point, Bush was clearly a weakened president.I mean, not only was there opposition because of Iraq, but this was post-the Katrina hurricane and floods in New Orleans, which he got very, very low marks on.So he was a damaged president at that point, and he was the focal point of those elections.

And so in a sense, the Democrats were—never quite this simple—but they were pushing against a somewhat open door in trying to take back the House.This was clearly going to be a real opportunity, and it turned out to be a big opportunity, and she was a beneficiary of that.

At this time, and we'll talk about this again in 2010, but at this point in time, 2006, how is the right, how is talk radio, how is [Rush] Limbaugh looking at her?How is that hatred towards her, that attitude towards what the role she plays, growing in the Republican Party and talk radio, with what Limbaugh is saying every day, and by 2010 certainly becomes a tsunami of using her as the way to attack the Democratic Party?But start in the beginning, early days.Why does she attract such animosity?

Well, I think there are a couple of reasons.I mean, there's no easier kind of attack on a Democrat than to call them a San Francisco liberal, because that seems to symbolize something that, you know, that suggests they're not really American; that in one way or another they're, you know, they're the wild-eyed liberals, the worst of the liberals, the impractical liberals who are going to spend you to the poorhouse and tax you beyond your capacity.And we've heard that for years.It predates Nancy Pelosi, obviously.But so that's one thing.

And I think obviously the second is that she's a female.And females are—have been historically far easier to attack, and people have been more willing to do that.I think it's just—it's a recognition of kind of the sexism that has been pervasive throughout our history and certainly in our politics, in which this has long been—there long was a male-only domain, as were many professions, but certainly politics was.

And so for a woman to reach that kind of level made her an obvious target, and then the ideological part of it made it even more attractive for the Limbaughs and others to go after her.

Let's talk about the financial crisis in 2008.… She decides that she will go along and hold hands with the Republicans as they both jump off the bridge together, which is basically the decision that they will go to pass the bill to get the money to the banks.How hard a decision do you think that was for her? …

I don't know how hard a decision that was for her, because frankly [Secretary of the Treasury Henry] Paulson had handled that quite well in terms of dealing with everybody on Capitol—all the leadership on Capitol Hill, as I recall.And there was another aspect of that, which was this was right on the cusp of the presidential election, and there was this famous meeting at the White House that included John McCain and Barack Obama, and Obama recognized this as a moment in which there was an opportunity to be—I don't want to exaggerate—to be a statesman, to think about what's good for the country as a whole, not simply what's good politically.

Now, clearly it was to his benefit that McCain mishandled that moment and—to the benefit of Obama.But I think the Democrats as a group at that moment felt that it was in the interest of the country and perhaps in their own interest to be cooperative with Bush to try to prevent this thing from being even worse than it looked like it was going to be.

Pelosi and Obama

… So let's bring Obama into office.And again, following up on what you've just been saying … they have different political philosophies, certainly Obama, with his entire election, talking about bipartisanship.So talk a little bit about how different their philosophies were and how that might affect the way they would work together.

… We all remember Obama's arrival on the national stage at the 2004 Democratic convention with that speech that electrified the hall in which he said, "We're not red America or blue America; we're one America.We're the United States of America."And that was the campaign he ran.It was a campaign to try to say, "Let's turn the page on this ugly chapter of purely partisan politics.Let's try to bring the country together and unify the country."

That was part of that campaign.The other part of that campaign was a fairly progressive series of ideas.And I think that what got lost in that campaign and kind of the moment of his election in which there was kind of a euphoria in the country of breaking that racial barrier in electing an African American president was that this was a president who, yes, wanted to find a way to bring competing sides together, but also had some very big ambitions, legislatively, including on health care, that he was going to try to put through.

I remember doing an interview with him in the transition, and I said, "You've talked about Lincoln as a kind of a model or somebody you admire in terms of his leadership.Talk to me a little bit about what that means."And he said, "In no way am I comparing myself to Lincoln.But," he said, "my sense is that his view was, 'I don't have the truth, you don't have the whole truth, but if we can start to talk, maybe the truth is somewhere here and we can get to that point.'" And he said, "That's a style of leadership that I admire."

And that was what he was thinking as he came into the presidency.I think it was a belief, or certainly a hope, that he could, with persuasion and conversation, he could draw Republicans closer to what he wanted to do, and that he was obviously prepared to move in their direction and that that could work.

I think Pelosi had clearly a different view of it and a different view of what was going to be possible with the Republican Party.

Talk about that a little bit more, specifically, and certainly when it came to ACA.… Was there a difference of opinion between how Pelosi saw it when it came to health care and ACA with how Obama and the people around Obama, including Rahm [Emanuel], saw it?

Sure, there was.I mean, there was a big difference.But again, I think it reflects the places from which each exercised their power.She understood that they had a big majority in the House; that a president, even a popular new president, has limited time to get things done, and you need to move, and you need to move rapidly.But I think she was not dealing with the Senate.And Obama clearly wanted to have some Republicans on board, and he spent weeks and months trying to do that.

But to be fair to Obama, that was also the message he was getting from Max Baucus, Sen. Baucus, about how they needed to operate in the Senate in order to get success on a bill.Baucus kept saying, "Give me more time to bring along a couple of Republicans."And the White House was impatient, frankly, and I think the president was impatient, but he kind of said, "OK, I'll let Max—I'll follow Max's lead on this."

And there were endless meetings with individual Republicans that Obama had to try to get them to come aboard.I think at a certain point they realized that either they were definitely being played, that this was just a delaying tactic, or that they were never going to get the Republicans to go as far as they needed them to go to get a bipartisan bill out of the Senate committee and to the floor.

And Pelosi at that point is obviously impatient: "It's time to get this done; it's time to move."And Rahm Emanuel similarly was basically saying, "Take half a loaf if we need to do it.Get something."And Obama was determined to try to go as big as he could, but he was still hopeful that that would include some Republicans.And finally it was clear that that wasn't going to be the case.

… Is that a frustration for Nancy Pelosi?

Sure it's a frustration for Nancy Pelosi.I mean, she sees the possibilities of what they're going to be able to do.But she's—she's the speaker of the House, but the president is the president of the United States, and he's the one who got elected in a historic campaign.And so to some extent, it shows even a powerful speaker has some limits on the power that they're able to exercise or their ability to persuade a president to do it exactly the way they want to do it.There's a difference of opinion there, and obviously to the frustration of Nancy Pelosi and probably in some ways to the exasperation of Barack Obama.

But I don't think there was ever a moment in which Obama didn't understand and appreciate what Nancy Pelosi was able to do on behalf of his presidency and on behalf of the ACA.So there was at a time of frustration, there was also, I think, clear respect from the White House toward Nancy Pelosi, and probably in the other direction as well, despite her frustrations.

… And then there's sort of debate that goes on after Scott Brown about what do we do now and how do we go?

… Talk about the post-Brown, the idea of whether they would take whatever they could get and the role that she played, which was basically, "No, we continue on; we go big."

I don't have good inside reporting on her side of it, but my recollection from that moment is, yeah, she was pushing as hard as she could to go as big as possible, no question about that.Inside the White House, I don't know the degree to which Obama was being persuaded by the Rahm Emanuels of the world to be prepared to take something smaller.People I talked to at that time and somewhat after that gave me the indication that Obama still had very big ambitions, that his sense was, "We've got to get as much as we can at this moment.We weren't put here to go small."And if you're thinking of yourself as a historic president, you want to go as big as you can.

So obviously there was pressure from Pelosi.I think Obama's instinct was, if at all possible, I want to do it.Now, it may be that they saw the practicalities of that somewhat differently, that Pelosi had greater confidence that they could go big and be successful, and that Obama, obviously newer to all of this than she was—I mean, because he had served a very short time in the Senate, and half of that time in the Senate he was out campaigning for president—he was in the early stages of his presidency; he did not have a feel for that institution.Joe Biden, his vice president, had more of a feel for it than he did.

And so he had to, on the one hand, trust his own instincts and his ambitions, but he didn't have the grounding or the knowledge of the institutional necessities that she did.

So the 2010 election.

The Republicans spend over $70 million on negative ads towards Nancy Pelosi.They've got that bus with "Dump Nancy Pelosi" on the side of it that's traveling the entire country.They're using her.They're not attacking as much Obama.They're attacking her.… What was going on?Why?

Well, I put it in two different buckets.If you look at the fundraising, fundraising is done, particularly smaller-dollar fundraising, through emotional appeals, the most emotional appeals possible.And the way to do that, if you're the Republicans in that moment, is to go after somebody like Nancy Pelosi, who is symbolic of, again, the farthest left portion of the Democratic Party.So—and again, as we've talked about before, and a female.So she is a prime target when they're sending out fundraising emails and advertising to try to stir up their base.

I think the other piece of it, though, is that this was ultimately not an election about Nancy Pelosi.This was an election about Barack Obama's policies and particularly the Affordable Care Act.And the Tea Party had arisen in that moment, and we can debate whether it was purely organic or a combination of bottom-up and top-down.But nonetheless, there was a Tea Party movement that had sprung up.That didn't spring up in opposition simply over primarily to Nancy Pelosi.It sprang up against the Obama agenda, first of all the spending and then particularly the health care.

And so those things came together in 2010.She was certainly a focal point, but this was an election about Barack Obama and what he was doing as president.

Pelosi and Trump

… So let's talk about Trump.The first White House meeting is where we start the Trump section, and it's a fascinating meeting.… Trump starts talking about the fact that he had won the popular vote and it was shown by the historic size of the people that came to the inauguration.So he started spinning the lies that he tends to say about his popularity and stuff, and Pelosi says, "No, Mr. President, that's not true.That's not what the facts are."

So on her first meeting she's setting a precedent, I guess, for what this relationship is going to be all about.How significant was that first meeting and what it said about what that relationship was to become?

Well, I mean, if you look at it in hindsight, it said everything about what that relationship was going to be like and how it would unfold.I don't know that we all saw that at that moment; we saw a strong Nancy Pelosi standing up to a blustery president, and that that showed backbone.But we knew that Nancy Pelosi had backbone by that time; that wasn't a surprise.

But I think what it said was she was going to take nothing from the president.She was going to take no guff from the president.She was not going to—she was not going to humor him in any way when he was telling lies, throwing out falsehoods or in other ways attacking people in her party.And it clearly set a tone and probably said to him and to her, this is going to be a very contentious relationship from here forward.This is not going to be a relationship in which there's going to be any real cooperation.

… President Trump's point of view towards her?There seemed to be some respect—he had called her, "She actually is a killer"—in ways that were important to him.

Right, in the ways he means, in a good way.

How did that evolve?

One thing we know about Donald Trump is that he respects strength, or what he perceives to be strength.He admires people who he thinks are strong, because he likes to think of himself that way, and so he kind of projects to other people.He's famous for saying never show weakness, never apologize, and that's the way he operated as president.Never any indication of second-guessing himself or remorse or anything.

And so when he runs up against a strong person, even a person in opposition, there's a grudging respect there.He doesn't like it.He doesn't want to hear it.He doesn't want to take it.But in the back of his mind he obviously says, "This is a tough person."I mean, one of Donald Trump's favorite words is, "This is a tough person; this person's tough."And Nancy Pelosi politically is a tough person and has demonstrated that, had demonstrated that time and again before Donald Trump ever got to be president of the United States.

And so I think he saw that in her and therefore had that respect, even though it was not going to be an easy relationship, by any means.

So by the 2018 elections, the Democratic philosophy for that election and what Nancy Pelosi was telling her caucus was, we don't focus on Trump.

… How significant was that election and the way that it was handled?

It was a historic election, there's no question about it, for a variety of reasons.The decision by the Democrats and by Pelosi not to focus on Trump was a simple decision in many ways, because the anger at Donald Trump within the Democratic community was just powerful.You could see that from the day after his inauguration, when millions of people, almost all of them women, came out into the streets all over the country and in other places in the world to say, "We're against this president."That resistance continued apace throughout his presidency, and that was the underlying force heading into the 2018 midterm elections.

And so Democrats didn't need to stoke that any further.I mean, that was just there, and frankly, in my mind, the single most important factor in that election.That gave them the luxury, particularly in some of these swing districts, to focus on issues that put their opponents and the incumbents on the defensive, and health care was obviously the primary one because the Republicans had tried to repeal the Obamacare bill numerous times, had tried to come up with their own alternative, had failed, had really made a hash of this most important promise, which is, if you elect Republicans we'll get rid of Obamacare.They were not able to do that, and it left them vulnerable on those issues.

And so that kind of two-pronged strategy was a very shrewd strategy.But the most important element was that the anger at Trump was already baked into the electorate at that point.

Let me say one other thing about that election.That election symbolized the power and the importance of women as part of the Democratic coalition, and particularly college-educated women.Those were the people who were in the streets the day after Trump's inauguration.So many women decided as a result of that to run for office.And you can find individual stories that are just—they're very powerful about the emotions people felt and the anger people felt and this kind of call to public service that women felt as a result of Trump being elected.

And Pelosi was, again, symbolic of that as the leader of the Democratic opposition.And so you had a historic number of women running and winning for office in 2018, and that—it was not only that the Democrats had huge numbers in terms of their victories, but it was the composition of that new freshman class that was so important.

As much success as they had and as much of that success that was due to Pelosi's efforts, which were considerable, and you alluded to some of what had happened during that time, there was this moderate faction of mostly men.There were five major men that were involved in it that were against her gaining the speaker role again and were fighting that.How much of a chance did they have?Why did that exist?What did it say about the caucus at that point and the view of Nancy Pelosi?

That opposition reflected a frustration with her leadership.It reflected a fear that the Democratic Party was moving too far to the left and that she was quite happy to continue to push that.This was at a moment when the Democratic Party, having lost the 2016 election, was going through its regular internal debate about who are we as a party and what's going on.Bernie Sanders in 2016 did not win the Democratic nomination, but he had run a much stronger campaign than anybody thought.It was symbolic of the power of the progressive liberal grassroots activist wing of the Democratic Party.And there were obvious fears among more moderates in the party that they could be taken over the cliff as a party and that they would lose the opportunity to be able to win a presidential election or to be able to command majorities in the House and Senate over a longer period of time.

That's kind of the backdrop of that.I think the reality was that ultimately they had very little chance of unseating Nancy Pelosi.Everything we know about Nancy Pelosi is that she is the consummate inside player.She understands all the levers of power.She understands what she needs to do to keep people behind her.And everybody, we all wrote about the threats to Nancy Pelosi's becoming speaker and this opposition and all of that.I think as we look back on it, we probably should have said there was no way she was going to lose that election.I mean, she was—she was not going to let herself lose that election, and she was going to do whatever she needed to do to get the necessary votes.

… And the other thing that comes up next in our film in the chronology is her coming up against the Squad.… Pelosi's hard-power stance is very different than how AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], for instance, sees power.She sort of sees her influence; she's got 5 million Twitter fans, and she sees that influence as power, and Nancy Pelosi sees power in a very different way, in counting the votes and blah, blah, blah.Is that a break or a change in the way that politicians are seeing things?What's the relevance of that dichotomy there?

Certainly there's some generational difference there.Obviously AOC comes out of the new world of politics and social media and the ability to command a big following and to have your voice elevated in the public square.Nancy Pelosi has always been more about realpolitik.And her kind of criticism of the Squad was, how many votes do they pull with them?Are they speaking only for themselves, or do their voices and does their ability to have a big social media following mean that people in the caucus are going to follow them?Not necessarily.

And her view was, that's the key thing.What are you able to do to get things done legislatively?What are you able to do to exercise the power that you have other than simply to try to affect public opinion, and how far does affecting public opinion really count in these tough inside battles?

And so I think there's—I say there's partly a generational difference in the way they look at things, but there's also a difference in the way they think about what is power and how you exercise it.And Nancy Pelosi is, in that sense, less purely ideological and more practical in how she thinks power has to be exercised.

And the thing that was happening at that exact moment which also leads to some more anxiety and some more of the division within the party was the fact that she was playing the role of holding back the caucus from moving forward with impeachment.Why?… Talk a little bit about her position and what it meant and how it did cause some division within the caucus.

Yeah, she was under a lot of pressure to push forward on impeachment for any number of months, and she resisted it.She resisted it because she recognized, one, that you don't enter into an impeachment proceeding lightly.This is, you know, this is not like taking any other vote.I mean, this is trying to bring down a president, and that her respect for the office of the presidency, I think, enters into that.

But there's also the reality that the House could do whatever it ultimately wants to do to impeach him, but there's no way that the Senate of the United States is going to convict him.And so why go through that unless there is an absolutely good reason to do it, to show some sign of holding him accountable?Why go through that if the ultimate end of it is he stays in office and Democrats, particularly moderate Democrats, suffer some of the fallout from it?

So she—all along she was trying to hold that back as best she could.

And that doesn't help the relationship that she has with AOC either.As the summer goes on, she has more problems with the Squad.… What's happening between the two sides, and how is it resolved?

Well, there's kind of an irreconcilable situation that you have in the way they are practicing their politics.The interesting thing is, the members of the Squad basically come from pretty safe districts, as does Nancy Pelosi.So in a sense, they both understand that they've got a lot of leeway to be able to do and say what they want to do because it's not going to cost them politically back home.And in fact, it's probably going to help them politically back home.

And so the members of the Squad, among the most liberal members of the House, were there to push, were there to push the party as far and as fast as they could.And Nancy Pelosi, recognizing that they had any number of first-term, newly elected House members who came from districts that were totally unlike those of AOC and the others in the Squad, that she was not going to do anything unnecessarily to put them at risk in the 2020 elections.

And so that's the issue.It's on the one hand people feeling very passionate about what the Democratic Party ought to stand for and what it ought to be pushing and a speaker who is mindful of the fact that the power in the House has been swinging back and forth—2006, it goes in their direction; 2010, it goes in the other direction; 2018, it goes in their direction.These are not stable times, and that unless you play that very carefully, you could be out of power fairly quickly.And so that's the real tension that goes on.

And then, lo and behold, the president … gives Nancy Pelosi a gift.… He goes after the Squad.Why does that make a difference, and the significance of the president once more unifies the Democrats?

Well, it's like we always say about families.Families squabble and families have fights and families get at one another's throats, but anytime somebody comes in from the outside and starts criticizing that family, then the family comes together: Stay out of this.And that was kind of what happened there.

And particularly on the issue of race, I mean, there's nothing that's going to bind the Democratic Party together more rapidly or more cohesively than an outside attack on the issue of race.And so it made it very easy for Pelosi to defend the Squad, for the party as a whole to come together and to push back against the president.

And then of course the information becomes public about the president's conversation with Ukraine's president, and that pushes Nancy Pelosi to move towards impeachment, which again, I guess unifies the caucus and gives the base the kind of thing that they wanted, which was to at least attempt something against the president, and it sort of protects to some extent the moderates because of the egregious action of the telephone call.What happens there?

Well, I think if you go back to the early pressure for impeachment, the Mueller report, which I think all the Democrats were counting on to provide them the basis for which to move forward on impeachment, or believing that that was likely, the Mueller report and Mueller himself didn't do that.They essentially threw it into their court, but without a clear recommendation of "Here's what you need to do; there's how you need to go forward; these are impeachable offenses."It basically said evidence of obstruction of justice, but it didn't quite make the case.

And so I think in the mind of Pelosi, it wasn't enough to move forward; it wasn't an open-and-shut case.The call on Ukraine and everything that began to come out as a result of that seemed a more open-and-shut case, that this was a clear example of an abuse of presidential power, trying to damage a potential opponent using a foreign government to try to do it.All of the elements that went into that call with Zelenskyy, it was as if something snapped among the Democrats.It was like, we've been holding back, but we can't hold back anymore.I mean, at what point are we negligent in our obligations to the Constitution by not trying to hold him accountable for these things?

And I think that the Ukraine moment pushed them very rapidly, and Pelosi obviously herself—"We have to do this.We can't escape this anymore."She had been quoted in The Washington Post at one point of, prior to all that, of, "He's just not worth it."In other words, he's not worth going through this exercise of impeachment.With the Ukraine thing, that all went out the window.It wasn't whether he was worth it or not; it was, what do we owe to the Constitution?

So then we have in our chronology the … State of the Union speech in February of 2020.

… Talk a little bit about you watching that speech that night and what—your take on it, what that represented, what happened there.

You know, I wouldn't call it the kickoff to the 2020 election because he had kicked it off much earlier.But a State of the Union in a presidential election year is a moment in which the incumbent president, if they were running again, has an opportunity to speak to the country.And Trump was feeling very good at that moment.He was not going to be convicted in the Senate.He was defeating the rabid Democrats on this impeachment issue.The economy was in good shape.

And as he looked forward to reelection possibilities, he felt pretty good about where things stood.Obviously things were potentially difficult because of him himself.A lot of the country still wanted him out of office.But as he looked forward in that year, he could see, yeah, the possibility Is pretty decent that I could get reelected, even in a tough environment.

So all of that is kind of coming out in the House chamber, and it's Nancy Pelosi's chamber, right?She's the speaker of the House.He may be the president of the United States, but he's been invited to come give that speech to a joint session.And so that dynamic, I mean, the Pelosi-Trump dynamic for four years had been kind of one of the major issues or subplots of Washington politics, and there it was playing out again against a national audience in a very high-profile moment.

And you could just sense Pelosi feeling tighter and angrier and just watching him perform.And he's a performance politician.He likes nothing better than to perform in public.And so this was an opportunity for him.And on and on it went, and he gave the Medal [of Freedom] to Rush Limbaugh in a dramatic, again, overly choreographed moment.Nobody had ever done anything like that at a State of the Union.

And finally it finishes, and he's accepting accolades from his friends, and she takes that speech and just tears it up and drops it on the dais, and it's just—it was like all the steam had come out of her ears, everything had come undone, and she was like, "I have had it."

Do you think it was prepared?Do you think it was just emotion?

I don't know.It's a great question.I don't know the answer to that.I mean, it had an air of spontaneity to it, but it may have been part of the plan all along.Others would know better than I on that.

And the thing with Limbaugh.He has been attacking her for years, daily sometimes.And the salt on the wound?How would she have taken that, do you think?

Well, I'm sure she was—I'm sure she was appalled by it.Now, let it be said he was suffering from cancer, and he was clearly in the last stages of his life.He was an iconic figure to Republicans and to the conservative movement.I mean, there are very few people who can take as much credit as Rush Limbaugh in helping to build the Republican Party that came into power during the Gingrich years and later, and obviously in seeding some of the anger that Trump was able to capitalize on in 2016.

So you have a figure in Limbaugh, and a dying figure in Limbaugh, who's very important to the Republicans, but who is anathema to every Democrat in that chamber, and particularly to Nancy Pelosi, who has, if she didn't feel the sting because she has a pretty tough exterior, knew that he was taking her on constantly, and in the most belligerent and belittling ways that he could imagine.And Limbaugh was a master at that kind of rhetoric.

And so to see that, not just that he's awarded the Medal of Freedom, but that it's being done in the House chamber, in the gallery, in the middle of a constitutional event in essence, a report to Congress, it just—to say it rankled is to understate what it must have meant to Nancy Pelosi to see that.

And so the denouement of her tearing up that speech, again, it may have been just the summation of all her frustrations of that moment.It also may have been "I'm going to show him," and she knew exactly what she was going to do when she came into that chamber.

Does that moment in some way encompass the reality of a broken Washington in some ways?

Well, in some ways it does represent a broken Washington, and in some ways you could say Washington had long been broken and that the Trump-Pelosi relationship wasn't what broke Washington.But you could say that for as long as Trump was in the presidency, a broken Washington was going to be the order of the day, and broken in ways that went beyond what had existed prior to that; that this was—tearing up that speech is the symbolic "This is the end; we've had it."

… It seems that Congress doesn't pass bills anymore.Congress goes after the other side.There's a partisanship which has stopped the actions of what Congress is supposed to constitutionally do.How broken at this point is Congress?Where are we at this point as we're getting close to the end of the Trump years?

Well, Congress is very broken, and Congress is very broken because the country is broken politically.And what we see is, in a closely divided country, the ability to gain or lose power is always there in the moment.And so, so much of what goes into what happens in Congress is influenced by how is this going to affect our ability either to hold power or to regain power.It's not just to gain it; it's to regain it.And people know what it's like to be in power and to be out of power, and particularly in the House of Representatives, where power is everything.If you're in the minority, you have no power.It's different than the Senate.

And so it is broken.And what we have seen is that the opposition party's principal way of operating is to try to stop the other party from doing things.That's in part because whenever there is a change in power, it's not that the agenda moves from sort of center right to center left.It moves from hard right to harder left, right?I mean that the ambitions of each party to move in the conservative or liberal direction are pretty significant.

And so with the smallest of majorities, parties try to do big things.… What President Biden has been trying to do is something that no president has tried to do with the majorities that he has.In other words, Franklin Roosevelt had big majorities to push through the New Deal.Lyndon Johnson had enormous majorities to push through the Great Society.Ronald Reagan had a big coalition.It was partly Democratic, conservative Democrats and the Republicans, to push through the transformations that he had campaigned on that he wanted to do.

What Biden is doing is trying to be transformational with the barest of majorities, and it is far easier in the current environment for the opposition party to make that as difficult as possible, if not impossible.

Pelosi and Biden

And so let's talk about Biden.… Who is this Nancy Pelosi and the relationship with Biden and the fact that they … attempt to do these very monumental bills so early in his administration?

Well, the Nancy Pelosi that we've seen during the Biden administration is the same Nancy Pelosi that we've seen for any number of years: a strong leader; a leader of conviction; and a leader who believes that when you have the power, you need to go as big and as fast as you possibly can, again, mindful of that there is a U.S. Senate, but nonetheless, to do it.

I think with President Biden, what happened was that it was a set of circumstances that pushed him in that same direction.The pandemic had exposed inequities in this country—inequities in health care, obviously, in the way the pandemic was far more lethal to African Americans and Latinos than to white people; inequities in the economy in the way that certain people were able to work from home, they could continue to get their paychecks, but there were huge numbers of people whose lives were significantly disrupted economically, and that because of that, Biden had an opportunity to try to, in a sense, repair that damage, and not just in the immediate term, but in the longer term.

And I think that that was what created in Biden the idea of being more than a transitional president, but to try to be a transformational president.And that clearly fit with where Pelosi wanted to be.So there's a meeting of the minds.And I think all Democrats, including more moderate Democrats, agreed with that.

But as is always the case with these battles, it's how much are you trying to do?What exactly are the details of it?And when you have no margin of error in the Senate and a very slender margin of error in the House, you do have to be mindful that everybody has some exercise of a veto power.

What was at stake in pushing forth this agenda and being successful? …

… Whenever you're a new president, you know that you've got two years before a moment of reckoning, and everything you are trying to do beyond simply the belief of "These are policies that I think are good," are to try to put yourself in the best possible position to be able to maintain that power in what's going to be a potentially very difficult election.

And I think that the thinking of the Biden team was that, if we are able to do three big things—the American Rescue package with a stimulus package to deal with the immediate issues of the economy; an infrastructure package in which we get Republican support to show that Biden is serious about trying to legislate across party lines and that he can be successful in that; and then a very big third piece, which is aimed at shoring up in a sense the social safety net, what they call human infrastructure, and dealing with the existential threat of climate, that all of that together would do a couple of things.

One is that it would assure that the economy is humming in 2022 and that people feel good about the economy.The second is that through that and the other things that they're doing on COVID, that they put the pandemic in the rearview mirror so that people are no longer constantly anxious about that.And the third is that the benefits from these various packages are flowing in a way that people say, "I'm getting something real"; that they haven't just spun their wheels; they haven't just spent a lot of money—"I feel actual—something better as a result of that"—and that that would create an electorate that is more favorable to Democrats than might otherwise be the case.

And they know that if they lose the majority, not only do they lose the opportunity to continue to do the things that they're not going to get done in this first year.There's no future to do anything on voting rights, to protect democracy.There's no future probably to do anything on immigration, which is, to the eternal frustration of not just the Hispanic community but many Democrats, that they've had opportunities to do something on immigration and they haven't been able to do it.

So there is so much wrapped into maintaining power, and I think that's why they've done what they have tried to do in the hope that they can stave off what otherwise could be a bad election.

And if they win, if they pass the bills and they still lose the election, will that prove that the politics of the past that Nancy Pelosi and Biden have been pushing and the ideas that power is maintained when one does what one expects the public to do, will that change things?Are politics changing in a radical way in some ways and making the way that Nancy Pelosi has always used power outmoded in some way?

I don't think it means that the way Nancy Pelosi has tried to exercise power is outmoded.I think it would say more about the state of the country and the state of our politics more broadly.The Democrats know the consequences of failure in this moment, and they fear that those could be catastrophic.

They don't know what the consequences of success are.Their hope is that by being successful, they will be rewarded, but there's no assurance of that, and particularly after this has been such a tortured and long negotiation to get to a finish line, whatever that becomes.

But the other part of the backdrop right now is this question of, what is the future of democracy in America?You have President Biden on the one hand trying to operate as a president would want to do in this time, which is to put forward an agenda, work hard to get that done, do everything possible and to try to show that he's successful at governing.

But you also have right alongside that Donald Trump continuing to, in essence, try to poison the environment by claiming a rigged election, stolen election, and doing things that no former president has done in attacking the person who defeated him.

And so this is a moment in which we don't quite know where this is going.You can see the potential dangers.You can see the potential threats.You can see how 2024 could be a very fraught moment in the history of the country as to, is this election going to be certified?Will every state certify their electors?What would happen if the Republicans have the Congress?Would they go along with that?

There are unanswerable questions right now, but it isn't as though those questions don't exist.And I think that's part of why everything that's going on is so critical in the minds of so many people.We don't know how this is going to turn out.We can see danger signs on the horizon, but we don't know which ways things will ultimately go.And that's why 2022 is important as a prelude to 2024.

… What happens to the Democratic Party if they lose that person and they can't find someone as strong?And there's not easy answers as to who might take her place at this place.What's the possibility? …

Well, I think that whenever Pelosi exits the political stage, the Democrats are in for, particularly in the House, some real turmoil, in part because the entire leadership, almost the entire leadership in the House, is old, in their late 70s, early 80s.We've never had leadership that old that's maintained their power for as long as they have.

So the question is not just who might step forward, but who is capable of doing the kinds of things that Pelosi has been able to do?And it's not as though she arrived as a leader fully formed or knowing all of that.I mean, it takes time.And she's been candid about this, of wanting to, in a sense, teach leadership to newer people who are coming in, and particularly to other women, to teach them what it takes to be a leader.And that's what the Democrats will go through when they—when they face this moment in which somebody becomes the successor to Pelosi, whether it's as speaker or as minority leader.And that's not going to be easy, because as we've seen in this long battle over the Biden agenda, there are clear divisions between the progressive wing and the more moderate wing, and at any given moment, each tries to flex its muscles.

And one of the things that's been interesting in this particular series of battles is the degree to which the progressives in the House forced Pelosi to stand down, forced her to delay a vote that she had scheduled on the infrastructure package.She set a date, said, "We are going to have a vote," and the progressives said, "We're not ready to vote, and if you hold this vote, it's going to get defeated."And Pelosi pulled back.And that was a signal moment that even Pelosi has limits in her ability to hold that caucus together, and she has to be flexible.Whoever replaces her is going to have that in a much more significant way because they're not going to be as strong as Pelosi has been.

And will we ever see anyone else—have we ever seen anyone like her before?And when she leaves, is she basically the last of that type of legislator?Are we moving in directions that will be very, very different?

You never want to say this is the last of anything, right?Politics is dynamic and organic, and people rise up.Who would have foreseen Donald Trump as president of the United States?So you don't want to say that she's the last, but I think that because of the position she has occupied and the length of time that she has occupied a position of power, whether it's as speaker or just the leader of the Democrats in the House, I think it will be a long time before we look at somebody and say, "Ah, that's another Pelosi."We don't look at Pelosi and say, "Well, that—we've seen this many times before."She's been unique in her ability to exercise that power.And I think it will be a while before we see that again.

… Just one other area I wanted to ask about, and that's about how she sells health care to her members, how she brings along the different parts of her caucus.How important do you think is her background in Baltimore, where the biographers talk about her mom administering a "favor file," and she knows all of the members and knows what they want?Is that an old-school style of politics and managing Congress?What is that skill that she has, and how unusual is that in today's politics?

It's a wonderful question because it goes to the notion of, what do people who grow up in political families absorb, and particularly people who later go into politics?I mean, there's a wonderful biography that I'm reading right now about John F. Kennedy, the first of the two-volume biography.And the family he grew up in, with Joe Kennedy being so political and him being able to watch that and be at his father's side and all that, you absorb that.

She obviously absorbed a lot from being in the D'Alesandro family in Baltimore and the way her father and her mother and her brother and everybody played politics.And so part of that comes naturally to her.And there is kind of an old-school notion to that.It's understanding the inside game.It's understanding, again, local politics.It's understanding what that person needs to make him or her happy, and how do I deliver that.

She's mindful of all of that.She's very skilled at that.

But the other quality that she has is this incredibly prodigious ability to raise money for people who are running for office.And money is the coin of the realm, not to kill the pun.But her ability to raise money on behalf of her party has been part of the secret to her success.People look to her to raise the money that they're going to need to win these elections.And so that helps to create some of the glue or the lubricant to keep that caucus together.

What does it say, the ability to raise money like that?Everybody says follow the money, especially in politics.… Well, this woman raises more money than anybody has ever raised.What does that say about her?How is she so capable to do that?

Well, I mean, she came out of that part of the Democratic Party.Money was what she did.And many politicians are uncomfortable asking for money or raising money.Some hate it.Other people just are really good at it.And it takes a certain kind of mindset.It takes a certain kind of persuasiveness.It takes a certain kind of inability to be embarrassed by asking for a lot of money.

I remember … talking to Dick Gephardt one time when he was party leader, and we were on a trip to Texas, and he was doing some fundraising, and I said to him, "What's it like?"And he said, "I used to cringe at asking people for $5,000.I had to kind of steel myself to do it.And then I kind of got used to it."He said, "Now"—this was in the days of soft money, he said, "Now I don't think twice about asking somebody for a million dollars."

And Pelosi obviously is of that school, I mean, that willingness to do it.Obviously money is easier to raise today than it sometimes used to be.Small-dollar money is there; I mean, grassroots money flows into the party.But she has a drive, she has a discipline, and she has a willingness to do that, and probably I would say a somewhat sheer enjoyment of being able to raise those dollars and reminding her party that she's the one who's raising it.

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