The FRONTLINE Interviews
Molly Ball
Author, Pelosi
Molly Ball is the author of the 2020 biography Pelosi. She is also the national political correspondent for Time magazine and previously reported for The Atlantic and Politico.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk on Oct. 25, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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January 6 and the Aftermath
Tell me, what do people not know about [Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives] Nancy Pelosi that you know?
Oh, gosh.I always say that she's a person who everyone has an opinion about, but very few people really know.I think it's a hard question to answer because she's been perceived so differently at different points in her career.
I think one thing people don't realize about her is that she got started in politics pretty late in life, that she was essentially a housewife and political volunteer until most of her children had left home and went to college.People probably also don't know that she is independently wealthy, that her husband is a financier who is responsible for her comfortable position in the world; it's not related to her political career.
In the larger sense, I think something people don't appreciate about her is her boldness.You know, I think she's seen, as a politician, a relatively cautious figure.But this is someone who, you know, stood up to the Chinese government and caused an international incident to protest Tiananmen Square.This is someone who was against the Iraq War when virtually all the top leadership in her party thought that that was politically disadvantageous, and she whipped against her own leadership to make a statement against it, and I think in retrospect a lot of people would say that she was right.
So she's someone who has repeatedly taken political risks, taken courageous stands.And I think you see that with the way that she interacted with the Trump administration as well.
… Go to the morning of Jan. 6.What do you think Nancy Pelosi was probably thinking as she went into the Capitol that day with all that was before her? …
I think there was a lot of trepidation on the part of a lot of members as they went to the Capitol that day because they knew that these protesters were amassing outside.They knew that [President Donald] Trump had never properly conceded the election and was, indeed, actively whipping up his followers, and they knew that several Republican members of Congress in both the House and Senate were planning to object to the electoral count.
So there, you know, there were some warnings about the security situation.There was a lot of nervousness as people went in.I don't think anybody expected that there would be violence, but I expect she was probably exasperated with the behavior of the Republicans that she expected to play out, but probably looking forward to another sort of regular day of business at the Capitol.
… When she's pulled from the podium—they say quietly, but I can't imagine that—what are the circumstances?What happens to her then, from what you know?
Well, she gets whisked away to an undisclosed location, and the House chamber is cleared.We know now that that happened very, very shortly before the chamber was breached.And so, you know, she was hustled away.But she was obviously very concerned about the situation and was immediately making calls, trying to figure out what the president was doing.I believe most of her actions during this time were just frantically trying to reach the president and get him to try to call off the violence and to reach people around the president who she thought might be able to reason with him or who she thought might be able to, themselves, help stop the violence.
… We're all familiar with the man sitting on her desk, the picture of the man sitting on her desk and leaving her a note.We have footage of people walking down the hall hunting for her, saying, "Nancy!Nancy!," in the most chilling, horror movie kind of way.What must that be like for her?
You know, I think many of the protesters that day were targeting her specifically because she is such a vilified figure, because she's so recognizable, you know.People made a beeline for her office, and many of the rioters took objects, took computers, were particularly intent on seemingly hunting her down.
But if you're Nancy Pelosi, you have been under threat for years, if not decades.The volume of vitriol that pours into her office on a daily basis, the amount of security that she requires—I think she doesn't like to talk about it, and she has an incredible ability to put it out of her mind and to focus on her job.But the idea that there are nasty people out there who want her dead in the most graphic and violent ways and are willing to express that openly, that can't be new for her, unfortunately.That's something that she's lived with for a long time.
She has very strong feelings, not surprisingly, as you know, about Donald Trump.And especially at this moment, I gather there were lots of phone calls coming from her.She was calling him crazy or unhinged or whatever it is.Help us understand her feelings probably about Donald Trump at this moment.
Well, at the time the insurrection happened, I believe she had not spoken to Trump for over a year.The relationship was beyond chilly.I think she viewed him as beneath contempt.Whenever I spoke to her about Trump, that was her attitude.It was sort of, "Don't even ask me about him; it's not worth my consideration."She really saw him as so completely not serious, so lacking in knowledge, and so reckless and dangerous.You can hardly get, you know, a better contrast in temperaments, right?She's someone who, long before the insurrection, really did view the Capitol as a sort of temple of democracy.This was a sacred place to her; this was the place she'd spent her career.Every time she took up that gavel, every time she was sworn in, she paid tribute to the hallowed halls and to what that meant.
And so, you know, Trump was very much a sort of self-styled wrecking ball against the establishment.And he really did, in her view, pose a threat to all of those institutions that she held so dear.And I really see, you know, her as the sort of figure of order and him as the figure of chaos.And this was one of many points when they collided.
So I think when the insurrection happened, it validated all of her fears and concerns about him, and her contempt for him, frankly, and she proceeded on that basis.I don't think there was any trust left between them that he could further violate.
He's had poor [relations] with a lot of other people from both parties.She's insisting on everybody going back to the Capitol and finishing the business there.Does that surprise you?
No, and I know that, you know, for Speaker Pelosi and Leader [Chuck] Schumer both, it was extremely important.They were actually being advised, I believe by some of the security forces, to evacuate.But they refused to do that, to evacuate the area completely because they believed it was really important to make that statement—that if this, that so many believed at the time, and in retrospect, if this was a coup in progress, the way to defeat it was to not cede the territory, to make sure that once the Capitol was taken back physically, it was also taken back for democracy, and this process of certifying the vote was completed.It was a statement to make.It was symbolic.But I think also it was a process that had to be completed to ensure that this transfer of power would go on, even if not peacefully.
She, in effect, is president of the United States for the next 10 days or two weeks.She takes charge of the government.She's calling [Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley.She's on the case.Describe what you know about that person you know so well now taking charge, feeling a responsibility, I guess, to take charge of America at that moment.
Yeah, I mean, I think everyone was just so concerned with what else the president might do.You had members of both parties talking about the 25th Amendment at this point, believing that he was out of his mind, that he was incapacitated, that he could not be trusted even to run the government for 10 more days remaining in the administration.
And so, you know, there have been questions raised since then about whether it was appropriate for Gen. Milley to do some of the things that he did, for the speaker to have some of the conversations with him that she did.But I think it was such a white-knuckle moment that everybody felt that whatever the rules said, you just had to hold down the fort and make sure this thing didn't get further out of hand.
Pelosi’s Historic Rise
… [We start out] with that meeting of the Gang of Eight at the White House that you and I both think is a very important moment for her where she recognizes she's the first woman that's ever been sitting in on any of these meetings.Could you tell me that story?
… Yeah.So Nancy Pelosi goes to the White House for the first time as part of the leadership of Congress, the only woman ever to lead a party in the Congress.And she looks around her, and she realizes not only is she the only woman in this room, which is, of course, a familiar dynamic to her at this point in her career, but she's the only woman that's ever been in this room; that for hundreds of years of American history, the leaders of the House and Senate have met with the president and the top members of his administration—always his administration—and she's the only woman who's ever been in that room, where those decisions are being made about the future of the country.
And it's a tremendously powerful feeling.She describes it as almost feeling her predecessors, the great feminists of history, the suffragists and so on, as ghosts, presences in the room around her.And she carries that consciousness forward.She believes that in those moments, she is representing all women in some ways.
Are there tangible issues attached to that?Is there a list in her mind that suggests itself or that was in operation at that time?
No.I mean, this is maybe a little bit of a hobbyhorse of mine, but I don't think that this is about, you know, quote/unquote, "women's issues"; that getting women in the room, you're more likely to pass, you know, a child care policy or a—it's true that she always says that her sort of lodestar is "the children, the children, the children," and that is what she is always making policy with a mind to.But at the same time, she's devoted her career for the most part to the issue set that's traditionally sort of male-coded, I think, right?She was on the Appropriations Committee; she was an appropriator doing the, you know, hard budgeting decisions, the dollars and cents.
She's the longest-serving member of the House Intelligence Committee.She's been involved with, you know, foreign policy, national security issues.So she has not spent her career focused on the sort of soft-perceived issues—education, health care, child care—that I think are traditionally associated with women's representation.
… But then in that case, in what way does it matter that she's a woman, if at all, in those rooms?
Yeah, well, I mean, I think representation always matters just because it's another perspective.There are things that don't occur to men to bring up in a congressional meeting, you know, going back to the beginning of her career when the men would sit around talking about childbirth and how hard it was for all of them, and never asked the women in the room, "What was that like for you?"She had plenty of experience with that dynamic.
So whether you're talking about the specific experiences that she brought to that meeting, having been a mom, having taken care of five young children all at once, having dealt with the dynamic of managing a brood like that and getting them all off to school, we're a product of our unique experiences, and to have a woman in that room I think is significant in its own right.
… What is it about her, do you think, especially in those early days as she's rising so rapidly, I mean, relatively speaking, especially given her gender and that no one else has risen this fast before?What is it about her that lights Rush [Limbaugh] and the GOP right wing up in those days?
Well, from the very beginning she was caricatured as, you know, the ultimate sort of San Francisco liberal.She was caricatured as an airhead, as a sort of entitled, rich housewife who was just sort of dabbling in politics as a party girl, a dilettante.All of these sort of terms were used for her.
And so there was always this sense of resentment that she seemed to feel that she was entitled to power. And I don't think you can escape the sort of gendered aspect of that, that, you know, when men embraced the perks of their positions, whether it was having, you know, a military plane to fly back to your district when you're the speaker of the House or simply having opinions and things to say about the issues of the day, it seemed to trigger this rage in people consistently that she felt she had a right to speak on these things.
And so, you know, in all of the—all of the sort of gendered tropes—she was called shrill; she was compared to, you know, your nasty mother-in-law or your ex-wife—all of these sort of relational tropes from the male perspective, seeing her as this sort of unpleasant, unreasonable harridan in a world where women are supposed to be soft and pleasant and not tough and steely.
She doesn't seem to flinch in some way.Is she flinching inside in some way?She seems to have pretty thick skin.
It really seems to be an innate quality of Nancy Pelosi's to ignore the nasty things that people say about her.And it may be her superpower.You can certainly imagine that anyone who didn't have that capability would not have been able to rise in the way that she has.
Even in her very first campaign for office, people would come to her and say, "Oh, my goodness, they're saying these awful things about you," and she'd cut them off, she'd interrupt them, she’d say, "I don't want to know that.If you don't like what they're saying about me, go out and walk another precinct.Go out and raise more money.Go out and do something."She's always more interested in results than she is in gossip.
And so that ability to simply shut all of that nastiness out of her head, she's just an incredibly confident person, and I think that that is a part of her makeup that simply comes naturally to her.So, you know, she's had decades of experience ignoring the insults, ignoring the sexism, ignoring the nastiness and vulgarity, and focusing on the results that she wants to achieve.
And, you know, very early on in her congressional career, she made a decision to that effect, that, you know, she could stand around fighting all of the sexism in the political system, yelling at the men who were rude to her and fighting to get the House gym open to women and the bathroom next to the House floor.And she participated in all of that, but she, I think, made a conscious decision that if she spent all her time doing that, she wouldn't get to do the things politicians get to do: use her power to make change, to achieve results through the legislative process.
So I think to a certain degree she does let it all roll off her back because she's more focused on the things she wants to do.
She doesn't seem to give a damn about image either. …What does she think about all of that, that side of being a modern American, TV-age, multimedia speaker of the House?
You know, Nancy Pelosi describes herself as a shy person.She is not a person who enjoys public speaking.That's part of the reason that she didn't intend to run for elective office until she sort of dragged into it.And she's never been comfortable speaking in public or doing interviews, and she is somewhat awkward in that format.And it's such a big part of a politician's job to be that sort of a public figure, to be perceived.
But she is just not interested in her image.And I and many others have tried to ask her about it because it is such a huge part of her public persona, this negativity surrounding her, her being polarizing, her being disliked.And she's not interested in it at all.And when you try to get her to talk about the subject, she'll just say, "If I weren't effective, I wouldn't be a target."And then she wants to talk about something else. …
Pelosi and Bush
… In our story, she comes in, and there is a Republican president, George W. Bush.What are her feelings about Bush from the get-go?
Well, she became speaker because of her antagonism to Bush, you might say.The Iraq War had become tremendously unpopular, and she worked with Rahm Emanuel and the Democratic [Congressional] Campaign Committee to make him more unpopular.She had some very harsh words for Bush's conduct at that time, and she believed that he had no business being president, frankly.She thought that he was sort of shallow and feckless, and she said as much at the time.
She's always been someone who believes that you say whatever you say for political rhetoric, and then you get in the room, and you still have a civil relationship; you're still able to deal with each other.So at the same time as she's out there saying these nasty things, she's still able to work with Bush and his administration in many instances on financial bailouts and that sort of thing.But she did have a fair amount of contempt for him, I believe.And so, you know, there was an amount of collegiality.He was very gracious to her and paid tribute to her becoming the first woman speaker, but politically they were quite bitter rivals.
And I think, you know, her first years as speaker were consumed with trying to find a way to wind down the Iraq War that the public had so turned on, and she wasn't able to do it.She was surprised that Bush dug in so much and doubled down on the war, despite the political consequences.And she was frustrated that the many, many gambits that the House took up to try to force the war to wind down, that none of those were successful.
She's, I think, among the first, maybe the first, certainly major political figure to go against the war in quite the way she went after him; she really went after him.Is this political partisanship?And is it part of her strategy to win in the 2006 midterms?How much of it is heartfelt?How much of it is hardball?
Well, Nancy Pelosi was against the Iraq War from the beginning.She was in favor of the war in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but she was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and so she had seen a lot of the intelligence on which the administration was making its case for war.This was at a time when, you know, the country famously came together after 9/11 and the mood in America was very pro-war.So a number of top Democrats, including the Democratic leader in the House, Dick Gephardt, as well as, you know, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton and many other prominent Democrats, thought that it was important politically to stand with the commander in chief and to not reinforce the Democrats' image as a party that lacked the strength to confront the threat of terrorism.
So I think she got some flak in those days from her own party for being against the war.At the same time, she was walking a tightrope, and she wasn't out there on the barricades with the protesters.In fact, every time that she expressed opposition to the war, she was careful at the same time to express support for the troops and to not reinforce the anti-war enthusiasm of some of the Democratic base.
So she was perpetually under attack from the Democratic base for not being anti-war enough, even as, at the same time, she got a lot of criticism from the Democratic establishment for being too anti-war.So she really did sort of carve her own path.
By the time of the 2006 midterms, the war was going very badly.The public was turning against the war.And she had worked with her close ally in Congress, Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), to harness that public sentiment and to position the Democrats as the party that was committed to ending the war, that had a plan, a responsible plan to withdraw from Iraq, to bring the troops home, to wind down the conflict.
So I think they certainly did use that to their political advantage.But I don't think you can look at her positioning on the war throughout and say that it was primarily partisan.It may have been partisanship that led her to distrust the president more than a Republican member of Congress would have, but she was pretty clear-eyed from the start about whether this was a good idea.And not only did she not waver from that; I think she was vindicated.
… What's driving her, do you think? Other than obviously the moral issueshe thinks the war is, and Bush is not doing it right.But what do you think is behind all of that?Why that decision?Why that issue?
Well, the war was the biggest issue in the country in that moment.But I think in addition, her opposition to the war was so sincere … and she had so much conviction about it that she really believed that it would go badly and the Democratic Party should be able to say that they predicted that.
… So her opposition had an effect, and I think it gave her credibility once the war did take a turn for the worse, to say, "This is what we said would happen.We told you the intelligence wasn't there.We told you this was a conflict of choice that was not the main theater of the war on terror, an unnecessary war to be taking up."And as the public came to that position, she could say she'd been consistent.
This is also an example of her partisanship as part of her approach.If Gephardt and others want to sit down and negotiate things with Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney and others, my sense from reading and thinking about her at the time, she's less interested in negotiating things.Partisanship, as we'll discuss in a minute, is part of who she is in lots of ways.Yes?No?
Yes.But it's also the whip's job to enforce party unity.The job of the whip is literally to get the votes for the party on every particular position that's being voted on in the House.Yeah, she's literally spent her life as a partisan.She's born into the Democratic Party.She has a healthy dislike for Republicans from the time she's a little girl.
…So, I mean, she's such a partisan that when she moved to San Francisco and she's staying with four young kids with her mother-in-law, frantically trying to find a place for them to live, and it's very difficult to find a house for a family this large.They finally find a suitable rental, and she's about to sign the lease when she sort of idly asks the owner why it's being rented.And the owner says, "Well, my husband is—we're moving to Washington so my husband can join the Nixon administration."And she drops the pen and says, "I'm not going to live in a house that's been made available by the election of Richard Nixon."
So she was willing to spend weeks or months living with her mother-in-law.Again, she was not a fan of this situation.But that's what it was worth to her, to not live in a house that was made available by the election of Richard Nixon.
So it's always been a part of her makeup, that she is a hardcore Democratic partisan.
That being said, she is also always willing to negotiate.I don't think she ever walked away from the table when there was common purpose to be made with the Bush administration or anybody else.So I don't think it's fair to call her an obstructionist.She's a tough negotiator, and she's always going to get the most she can for her party in any given situation.
And she does not—I think particularly also having been through the 1994 Gingrich revolution, when the Democrats lost their longtime majority in the House and saw the Republicans engaged in very harsh partisanship over the decade that followed, I think that also was educational for her and taught her not to romanticize the good intentions of the other side, dealing with Newt Gingrich, dealing with Tom DeLay, dealing with the Republican characters in the House at that time.
So by the time she became speaker, and by the time [Barack] Obama became president in particular, she was always going to be a voice for "Let's get as much from these people as possible," not, "Let's trust them and hold hands."
Pelosi’s Early Life
… Take me inside the D'Alesandro [family].What's it like?Let's pick 7 years old or whenever her dad won the mayor's job.Pick a time for Nancy—what she sees, what she experiences, maybe what she learns, if it's only by osmosis.Let's start with "Tommy the Elder."What is she picking up from her dad, both good and bad, during this time?
Well, at the time Nancy Pelosi is born, her father is already a member of Congress.So politics, besides being in her blood, is a part of her life from the day she's born.She's on the front page of the newspaper the day after she's born, announcing that a girl child has been born to the famous D'Alesandro family of Baltimore."It's a girl for the D'Alesandros" is the headline after, you know, they'd had five boys.So there's never a time when she's not in the spotlight.
And those political machinations are all around her.Her father, when he was in Congress, won a Democratic primary because he supported the New Deal and his opponent didn't.He skipped a House vote to be there for the day that she was born.And then when she was 7 years old, he got elected mayor of Baltimore, the first Italian American mayor of Baltimore.And she's there with, you know, her little hair bow, to hold the Bible on which her father is sworn in for his first term.
So this is all around her.There's even a moment when her father's being sworn in where she refuses to talk to a stranger, and it turns out that that stranger is the outgoing Republican mayor of Baltimore.And her big brother says, "I'm going to tell Daddy that you were rude to the mayor," and she says, "Well, I was told not to talk to strangers."And they actually made a deal where he wouldn't squeal on her.So she was already wheeling and dealing at this point.
But I often say, you can't get a better a sort of metaphor for the trajectory of the Democratic Party in the 20th century than where Nancy Pelosi came from and where she got to.She comes from the very stereotypical urban, white ethnic, machine politics of the early 20th-century Democratic Party.The way Baltimore is run by her father is very much about these sort of tribes and factions and ethnic fiefdoms and the boss system and so on.It's a very transactional style of politics, and it's one that's very close to the ground.You know all of your voters.You know every precinct, every block.And you know exactly what favors you need to trade to get what you want.
And she was also, from an early age, involved in the "favor file" that was kept in the parlor of their row house on Albemarle Street, where everyone—any constituent who needed something from city government could go to the mayor's house, and then she or her brothers or her mother would help them get a place on the welfare rolls, get into the city hospital, find housing, get anything that they needed, and then their name would be kept on file for when the next election came around and the mayor needed a favor in return.
So she was in charge of that from the time she was about 11.She had help, of course, but she was intimately familiar with the sort of politics that her father practiced, and I think it became sort of second nature to her.
…But so, you know, she comes from these sort of white ethnic, transactional, urban machine politics of her father, and she ends up epitomizing the San Francisco liberal of the sort of 21st century, you know, concentrated on the coast, sort of concentrated among the college-educated and the economic elites, the new Democratic Party that's emerged that's more focused on social issues and identity issues and the environment and so on.Nancy Pelosi embodies that.
Still embodies it and keeps in some way—it's like she's a hybrid, because smoke-filled rooms and all the things that she's vulnerable to in terms of criticism, too, brass knuckles, behind closed doors, whatever Nancy is doing to make it happen, hard votes by people.You know what I mean?She's retail.She's, as somebody said, LBJ in heels, right?She knows how to do it.
She is sort of a bridge between her father's more traditional, transactional style of politics to something that might feel more modern, although I have to say, she has been called an anachronism because of her skill at deal making.But isn't that the way government's always been run?Isn't that always what the job consists of, is being able to get in a room with your opposition and work out a deal that’s somehow mutually beneficial or at least where people can meet in the middle?So yes, she had the ability to get people in a room and to do a negotiation and to feel out people's mutual interests and exchange those favors when needed.But I think that's just the eternal way of the political process.But you do see—
Unless your name is Donald Trump or Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz or a lot of other people, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez].It's all about public pronouncements.A lot if it is influence; a lot of it is the power of Instagram or Facebook and not so much behind—I mean, you may not get anything done, but you are certainly moving the dial here and there, you know, in the new modern American politics.
Yeah, I guess I'm talking about the legislative process specifically.But, you know, it's not as if she doesn't recognize the importance of public opinion.She certainly—and one of her many catchphrases, right, there's a Lincoln quote that she loves: "Public opinion is everything.With it, you can do everything; without it, you can do nothing."And I think people hear that and think that she's the sort of the typical finger-in-the-wind politician, right, sort of testing the polls, seeing what's popular, trying to do what it is that the people want.That's actually not what she means by that.I think she believes it's the responsibility of leaders to educate their constituents and to bring them along if there's something that they believe is right for the government to do.
So when she's having a conversation with one of her members who says, "Well, I can't do that; my district doesn't support it," she'll say, "Go back and talk to your district.Educate your constituents.Get them on board with this."You can't come to the Capitol and expect to do something that everybody's against, but you also can't be so afraid of what people think that you never get anything done.So she really does believe in moving public opinion, using the public pulpit to get people to your position.And that's the sort of precondition for legislative action.
Let's go back inside your metaphor for a minute.Let's take ourselves all the way back to the 1950s.They live in the same house they've always lived in.It's not a mansion; it's not the Mayor's Mansion or anything.It's in the neighborhood.People come in and go out all the time."Big Nancy" is a force inside that house, and inside the head of her daughter, I have a feeling, a little sexism going on in the family.She can't run a business; she can't do this and that."Big Tommy" or Tommy the Elder isn't 100% behind very much that she does.It isn't helping him, it feels like in some ways.Give me Big Nancy.Bring her on the stage.Animate her and then talk about the effect she has on her daughter.
Sure.Well, Nancy Pelosi's mother had a very big personality.She was tough.She didn't take any crap.And, you know, she was a woman of her time.She—but she had ambitions.And Nancy Pelosi grew up acutely conscious of the limitations that were placed on her mother.So Big Nancy wanted to go to law school.She wanted to be an auctioneer.She actually patented a beauty device and wanted to market it nationally.She had investments she wanted to make.And she couldn't do any of those things because you need a man's permission in those days; you needed a man's signature on the checks.So she had to settle for sort of being the behind-the-scenes operator.
But Nancy Pelosi's older brother, Tommy, who himself served as mayor of Baltimore, he always said that their mother was the real politician in the family.She was the one with the sort of strategic mind for politics.She ran the Baltimore Women's Democratic Club out of the basement of their little row house in Little Italy.So she was responsible for getting out the vote when election time came around.She ran that favor file out of the parlor, so she was sort of keeping track of the political interests behind the scenes.
And she didn't take crap from anything.She told off presidents to their face.At one point, when she felt that LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson] had insulted her husband, she told him so to his face.And similarly, when she got a call from Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, she said, "After all that he's done to poor people, he should not come to our city."She did not exactly welcome him to Baltimore.And there's even a story that she once supposedly punched a precinct worker in the face who had displeased her.
So I think you can certainly see the toughness, the ambition, a lot of the qualities of Nancy Pelosi in her mother.But also I think she drew inspiration from her mother's limitations and refused to be limited in the same way, refused to have her horizons limited by being a woman.
Nancy Pelosi hits college age in about 1960, maybe '61.Leaves home, goes to Trinity, 40 miles from Baltimore, and it's quite a move, shocking to the father and the mother. ...What did she decide to do?
Her family did at one point expect her to be a nun, but she never really had any interest in that.And in fact, when she was a little girl, she even said, "Well, maybe I could be a priest," and it had to be explained to her why that wasn't a possibility.I think particularly growing up with five older brothers, it didn't occur to her that there were things that they were allowed to do that she wasn't allowed to do.
But she did want to break free.She wanted to be independent.She always felt that her family was too protective, and she wanted to go out and have her own life.And Washington, D.C., was only an hour down the road.Her father commuted there for years, and yet it did seem like this dramatic break with the family, and her mother was in tears, and her father wasn't going to let her go.He said—he even said, you know, "You'll go to Trinity over my dead body."And her mother said, "Well, that can be arranged."
And so her mother had the final word, and Nancy got to go to Trinity.And by all accounts, she sort of flourished in college.Her college girlfriends are still her closest friends.They have a group that keeps in touch and gets together from time to time.She did aspire to potentially go to law school.She even got so far as she took the LSAT, the law school entrance exam, but I think she would tell you that the reason that didn't happen is that she fell in love.And she met Paul Pelosi, and when he asked her to marry him, she said yes.
And so that was sort of it in those days.You got married, and you followed your husband, and you started having babies.So she and Paul pretty much immediately, they moved to New York City.He pursued a career in finance, and she proceeded to give birth to five children in six years.
Pelosi and Motherhood
Five children, six years, New York to San Francisco.How is it relevant, the five children in six years?… What about that contributed to her life method?
You know, Nancy Pelosi talks about those years, those days of having babies, having young children at home, as—and I think any new parent can relate to this, the feeling of your capacities expanding, the feeling of being sleep-deprived and stressed out and absolutely at your wit's end and realizing that you're capable of so much more than you thought, that you have these reserves of energy, these reserves of capacity; and indeed, that humans have been doing this since time immemorial.And so she described—she's described to me that sort of revelation of, you know, "I might have thought that I was tired before or busy before or not able to do something; I had no idea."
And so she brings that experience with her.And I think you see in the way she manages the household a lot of foreshadowing of the way she eventually runs the House.She's got five children all nearly the same age, and it's sort of a fractious team of rivals, right?It's sort of a coalition situation.She's got to convince them all that it's in their interest to collaborate, or nothing is going to get done.
And she develops a lot of methods for this.She sometimes would dress them all in the same outfit.A friend of hers once said she knew that Nancy Pelosi would be successful in politics when she saw these five little kids all folding their own laundry.They made their own lunches before—the night before school.It was an assembly line, you know—lunch meats and snacks and so on.And they all made their lunches.As soon as dinner was finished, they cleared the table and set the table for breakfast the next morning.
So it was a highly regimented household.She was by all accounts an extremely effective disciplinarian to the point that she rarely had to yell at her children because they were just so afraid of disappointing her.And her children describe this sort of look on her face when she knew and they knew that they'd done something wrong.And she'd just say something like, "Well, you children wouldn't have done that, would you?"And—and, you know, their stomachs would just drop.
So I think it's important for a couple of reasons.I think you see the inherent capabilities that she had in running a large enterprise, in keeping a number of people—you know, politicians are very much like children, particularly members of Congress.Even when there's a lot of them, they all think they're the center of the universe.They're, you know, unreasonable.They have big egos.They all think they're entitled to all of your attention at all times.
… The slogan that she always uses in caucus meetings, she says, when she's trying to get all of the Democrats together on a vote or something like that, she says, "Our diversity is our strength, but our unity is our power."I have honestly, when I am trying to get my three children to put their shoes on and get in the minivan, I've literally said those words to them, because it's the same sentiment, right?Yes, we all have things that we all want to do, but we're not going anywhere unless we can all row in the same direction. …
Pelosi’s Early Political Career
She runs for Congress.Fourteen other people are running at the same time.She's in her mid-40s.The kids are grown.… What makes Nancy run?
Well, by the time Nancy Pelosi runs for Congress, she's already quite active in politics.She's a mover and shaker in San Francisco politics.She's one of the biggest fundraisers on the national Democratic circuit, her home in San Francisco a sort of well-known stop for candidates from all over the country looking to raise money.She's been the chair of the California Democratic Party.Almost became chair of the Democratic National Committee.Hosted a Democratic convention in San Francisco.Was also active on the boards of many volunteer organizations.Finance chair of the Democratic Senatorial Committee.
And so for years she'd had people saying to her, people as important as, you know, the Democratic Senate Leader George Mitchell, saying, "Well, you're clearly good at this.You know a lot about politics.Why don't you run for something?You could be the next mayor of San Francisco like your friend Dianne Feinstein.You could be the governor of California.Why don't you do something like that?"
And she would always say, "I'm on this side of the process.I'm behind the scenes.I'm not the person out front."She saw herself in that strategist role, that sort of the brains of the operation, the person behind the person.So it wasn't until her good friend Sala Burton was dying of cancer—Congresswoman Sala Burton, who had taken her husband's seat in Congress, which is how so many women got to Congress in those days—and when she was dying of cancer called her friend Nancy and a few others to her bedside and implored her to run for the seat in Congress.It's the sort of, you know, cinematic scene that I wouldn't have believed if I hadn't spoken to several witnesses.
But it really did happen, that on her deathbed she implored Nancy Pelosi to run.And she said to her relatives and allies who were also gathered around that bedside, she said, "She's operational.She can do this."
And so she embarked on that campaign.She wasn't exactly an unknown quantity, but she'd never been out front of the process before.She wasn't a particularly graceful candidate.She was sort of stiff.She, you know, wasn't the best public speaker.But she had an ability to be at home in absolutely any room she was in, whether it was a room of, you know, homeless transgender advocates or a gala of the richest people in San Francisco.She could simply seem at ease in absolutely any situation and focus on the humanity of the person in front of her in any sort of interaction.
So she worked very, very hard.I think she made up for her maybe lack of oratorical skills by just showing up absolutely everywhere.She campaigned very hard.She also had a lot more money than anyone else in the race, so she was able to use her family's money to pay for television commercials, which none of the other candidates could afford.So she did have some advantages. …
Let's just do the whirlwind of Nancy Pelosi comes to Washington. ...She's obviously breaking into the boys' club, that's for sure, and learning to operate effectively in it. ...How did she do it?How would you characterize her style, her effectiveness through there?
Well, you know, when she arrived in Congress in 1987, there were 23 women in the 435-member House of Representatives, and most of them were the widows of male members of Congress.So the most important thing for her was simply to be taken seriously, to break into that boys' club and to show that she wasn't a dilettante, that she wasn't an airhead.
And so rather than trying to climb the ladder when she arrived in Washington, she focused on being serious about policy.She focused on getting on the serious committees, doing the serious work.She focused on proving herself to her constituents, having just won this very tough campaign against, you know, her principal opponent being a liberal gay man who argued that she was too conservative and would not do enough for the city's gay population in particular.
So establishing herself on the AIDS issue was very important.Her very first day when she was sworn in, she didn't expect that she would get to give a speech of any sort, but then she was unexpectedly sort of called up to speak, and one of the first things she said was, "We're going to fight AIDS," to the sort of embarrassment and shock of the other members on the floor at the time who thought, "Well, you don't say that out loud.We don't want to be associated with those people."This was still a disease that was extremely stigmatized.
So I think she showed herself to be fearless and to be serious, but her close friend and ally, particularly in those early years, George Miller, told her something that stuck with her.He said, "There's a free hedge-clipping service around here.If you stick your head up, you'll get clipped."So I think she kept her head down and focused on policy in order to prove herself, in order to show that she was serious, in order to get on those committees and do that real work of Congress. …
In the face of all this criticism, she says that thing about eating nails: "I get up in the morning, and I—"Do you remember this quote?
Mm-hmm, yep.
Tell me that story. …
I think Nancy Pelosi came up in a historical era where you increasingly did see politics as combat, where, you know, starting with the Gingrich years and the Republican Revolution, there was sort of—not that it was ever a friendly process—but a more antagonistic style of politics, a more partisan style of politics, more money coming into politics.So I think she always saw politics as warfare and never really had any illusions about the process.And in her—from the beginning of her tenure as whip, she was making procedural changes to the way that the caucus operated in order to enforce more party unity, in order to get the Democrats more unified and give them more leverage against the Republicans.
And so she always said, you know, "Every morning, I put on a suit of armor, eat nails for breakfast, and go out and do battle."And that is very much the way she sees her task in politics.She's not here to have a good time.She's here to do battle, and she—and that's been the case, I think, from an early time.
The Financial Crisis
Early in her speakership, the financial crisis hits.Talk about needing to pull on everything you have and in some ways back away from something you hold dear.If partisanship is kind of your middle name in lots of ways, now you're confronted with [Chair of the Federal Reserve Ben] Bernanke, [Secretary of the Treasury Henry] Paulson, President Bush, [House Minority Leader] John Boehner, "We've all got to come together on this; we've got to stop; we can't be partisan about this." …What are the stakes as Nancy Pelosi understands them after that meeting, or even going into that meeting, but certainly after that meeting with Paulson, Bernanke and all the white men?
I think it's important to remember that this all took place in the fall of 2008, at the height of the presidential campaign, so it's a very intense time politically.
… The crisis really seemed to Democrats to be the result of Bush's policies.They believed that the administration had brought on this crash because of the deregulatory and other economic policies that had been pursued.So there was a lot of desire for punishment and to use this as a way to win the election for Barack Obama. …So when she makes that call to Paulson, it's because things are starting to move very quickly, and it's—and this crash seems like it's accelerating.And so when he says, "Well, this can't wait; we've got to meet now," she says, "Well, then if it's that's urgent, why aren't you calling me?" …
But, you know, the politics of this were very fraught because by—but she did become convinced in that first meeting that the situation was so dangerous that if nothing was done, the entire economy could collapse.So the stakes were higher than any election, than any politics.And she believed that, and everyone in that room who had gotten that talking-to believed that.
But it meant that she would have to take a significant political risk.It meant that she would have to do something that—because when they came up with this strategy, that they were going to essentially bail out the banks, they knew people weren't going to like it, right?The conservatives hated it: You're spending all this money; you're meddling with the free market.The liberals hated it: You're bailing out George W. Bush, who's done all these irresponsible things and caused this to happen; why not make him pay for his mistakes?And furthermore, what about all these people on Main Street?Where's their bailout?Why are we giving all this money to the big fat cats and bankers on Wall Street?So there's criticism from all sides.
… It was a mistake they jumped off the ledge together, something she won't forget?
… I think when she saw that vote go down, she realized in that moment that she had to count all of her own votes, even on a bipartisan measure, that she couldn't trust her partners across the aisle to come up with the votes for a bipartisan deal, and that made an impression on her going forward when Obama was president and the Republicans were still in the minority, that even if they were willing to make a deal, which they pretty much weren't during the Obama presidency, but even if they were willing to work with her, they couldn't necessarily bring the votes to the table to get a deal done.
Pelosi, Obama, and the Affordable Care Act
And Obama gets elected. …He's hopeful that he can do things, amend what he's doing to appeal to the Republicans.Speaker Pelosi, happy to have the power now of the Senate, the House and a supermajority with Obama, knows better because of this most recent experience.Is it the beginning—or is it the definition of a real difference between the speaker and the new Democratic president from the get-go?
Obama comes in with a big head of steam.He's popular.He's new and fresh, and he's campaigned on this idea that he's going to bring everyone together and fix Washington, fix the nasty partisanship that has prevented it from getting things done.From the very beginning she is the voice in his ear telling him, "They're not going to let you do that; they're not going to give you the votes; they're not going to work with you, no matter what they say."So she's the skeptical one telling him, "Don't trust these people; they don't have your best interests at heart; they're not going to work with you, no matter how many times you invite them to the White House and serve them canapés."
And I think it took—the Obama administration had to learn that lesson a few times before it sunk in.But she was consistent from the beginning.And she would never call him this to his face, but it was clear that she believed that he was naïve.It was clear that she believed that he was too trusting, too confident.He thought it was going to be like the Illinois State House, where you could take the Republicans out for golf and play a game of poker and everybody could get along.And she was telling him, "These Republicans aren't like that, and they're not going to help you."
And again, I think she was vindicated in that view. …
… The Affordable Care Act, which was in those days called Obamacare, help me understand the stakes for both sides in this and what Obama's position was and what her position was in terms of just pure tactics and strategy for how to get this done, this massive piece of social/domestic legislation.
I don't think she ever had to worry about passing a health care bill through the House.She had a big majority.Democrats have been wanting to do some sort of universal access to health care for the better part of a century, and she was really pushing Obama to sort of take this opportunity to get this piece of legislation done.But it was what was going to be in the bill.And the House majority is far more liberal than the Senate majority, although there was also a much larger and more influential moderate caucus in the House than there is now.
But so from the House's perspective, they're going to want a much more liberal bill than the Senate is going to want, in particular that they want this public option.They want there to be a government-run health insurance plan that people can purchase as an option alongside the options in the private market.
And there are other very arcane sort of issues with regards to Medicare reimbursements and different rates for different states on such-and-such.And then there's the abortion issue, which ends up being the real sticking point, particularly to pass that initial House bill.And that was—that was a very painful issue for Pelosi.You know, her support for abortion rights, despite being such a faithful Catholic, was something she had taken a lot of abuse over, and even been threatened with being denied Communion, although that never happened.
So for her to have to—you know, she'd been shuttling back and forth with these groups of bishops who were lobbying at the Capitol, and the position of the church was that they supported expanding health care but not if there was any possibility that government funds could be used for abortion.And so even beyond the Hyde Amendment that already exists, that says government funds can't be used for abortion, they were pushing for an even tougher measure in this bill that would make it absolutely clear, absolutely impossible for abortion to be covered.
And she tried very, very hard to get them to budge, and they just wouldn't.So she had to go to the liberal women, the staunchest and most sincere supporters of abortion rights in the entire Congress, really her sisters in a lot of ways, women for whom this was a really central issue of conscience, and she had to implore them to give up this thing that was incredibly important to them. …
[Scott Brown gets elected. Now the numbers are different.]
Well, the day the Democrats lost that 60th vote in the Senate, a lot of people assumed that the Affordable Care Act was dead and buried, and that was it, because it had not passed the Senate before that happened, and because they no longer had 60 votes, and because it was clear that there would be no Republican support and because Scott Brown had been elected on a platform of stopping this from happening.
And the process had dragged on.The bill had become unpopular.It was particularly the political advisers within the White House—Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod—who thought it's time to cut our losses, get something small done so we can kind of save face, but we've got to give up the dream of a universal health care bill; it just isn't possible at this point.
And there was some public evidence that the president was starting to go wobbly as well.He denies it to this day that he ever lost heart, but there was an interview he gave at the time where he seemed to be listening to those voices in his ear that were saying, "Maybe we have to go small."
And so she was talking to Obama, and she was trying to shore up his confidence in the process behind the scenes, but it was really in this climactic meeting in the Oval Office where she said publicly in front of everyone, she said, "Mr. President, I know there are people telling you to take the namby-pamby approach.I'm here to tell you, we can still get this done."And it was, I believe that even if the president was already fully in that position, it was her confidence in that moment; it was her saying, you know, with her experience and with her abilities in the House, her saying "We can still get this done" that gave the process what it needed to move forward.
And I believe that's the reason that the bill ended up being done, was because she committed herself to this Herculean task that people thought was impossible to find a way to get this bill over the line, even without the 60th Senate vote. ...
The bill passes.There's a signing moment at the East Room at the White House with Obama.She comes."Nancy, Nancy"—welcomes her in—"if it wasn't for you," right?Blah, blah, blah. …How much of it was her, and how much of it was Obama and the White House?
Well, when you read histories of the Affordable Care Act and the process that led to its being passed, they're mostly about the Senate, whether it's Obama's own memoir or a lot of other books that have been written about the passage of this bill.It was not easy to get that bill through the House.But I think because of Nancy Pelosi's skills, because she was able to make it look easy in some ways—I don't think anybody else could have pulled that off—but because she's able to sort of make it look easy, she gets taken for granted to a certain extent.
So there was this very public wrangling over each individual senator and, you know, did Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) want the Cornhusker Kickback, or what was going to go to some other senator for billions of dollars in the bill?The House process was much less of a fight, seemingly, and so, despite the tremendous difficulty that she encountered getting it done, I think it's been a sort of neglected chapter historically in this bill being passed.
… But so the bill passes, and the Democrats are jubilant.The Republicans are also jubilant because they believe that this is—and correctly—that this is their ticket to winning the midterms.But because there was so much focus on the Senate, it was really only in the Democratic Caucus that this was celebrated as Pelosi's achievement.And her colleague Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) made buttons that said "Pelosicare: I was there" to celebrate—to celebrate her achievement for what was already then being called Obamacare.
Republicans Campaign Against Pelosi
… The credit may not have landed on her, but a lot of blame finds its way to Nancy Pelosi.Tell me a little bit about what happens in the midterms and what happens to her.
Scholars will surely debate for centuries exactly why the Democrats lost the House in 2010.You still had an economy that was recovering very slowly.Many people didn't feel like the recovery was happening.Meanwhile, the Obama administration is busy passing this massive health care bill that's been so messy and difficult and unattractive.
And so the Republicans were able to campaign against the Democrats' perceived ineffectiveness, their perceived big spending, their perceived mismanagement of the economy.But it is also the moment when Nancy Pelosi really becomes central to the Republicans' political strategy.And while they had, you know, run ads against her before, it was really in 2010 that she became the centerpiece, that they—and it really was just an intuition on their part.They sort of saw how every time they'd mention her in, you know, a fundraising appeal, the Republican supporters, the sort of fundraising base, just went crazy.They hated her so much.
So they doubled down on that.They had a bus tour that went to 130 cities, the chairman of the Republican National Committee [Michael Steele] with the "Fire Pelosi" bus.And so, you know, every city they go to, they get there, and the local newspaper, campaigning for the local member of Congress, and this was just a tremendously powerful message for them.
So she ends up being in tens of thousands of attack ads in districts all over the country.And there wasn't necessarily anything unfair about this, right?It was literally true that a vote for your local Democratic member of Congress is a vote to make Nancy Pelosi the speaker of the House, to keep her speaker of the House.And this is a time when those campaigns are becoming increasingly nationalized.
But to see her demonization really accelerate to that point—the Democrats had campaigned against Newt Gingrich, but no congressional leader had ever been the focus of such a sustained and expansive political effort, to say, "Nancy Pelosi is the face of the Democratic Party, the reason that you should not vote for Democrats in this election."And you know, there was an ad where she was a 50-foot giantess, you know, crushing people!
So they began that strategy in 2010, and they've never let it go.And they believed that it was very effective for them.
Why her and not Obama?
Obama was still popular, particularly personally.He also was literally not on the ballot in 2010, right?His interests might have been on the ballot, his agenda might have been on the ballot, but it wasn't a presidential election; it was a midterm.But it was clear that people didn't respond to him the way they responded to her.
Now, he was in plenty of ads.And I think a lot of Democrats would tell you that particularly in the South, there was a sort of race-baiting strategy where they'd sort of take the first African American president and put him next to, say, a moderate white Democrat to great effect.It was really, you know, everybody talks about LBJ and the Southern strategy, but there are many, many Southern states that did not flip until 2010, 2012, 2014, particularly at the state level, to the Republicans.And Obama had a lot to do with that.
So it's not that they didn't attack Obama, but they attacked Pelosi even more than Obama, and it was simply because it worked.It was simply because when they ran ads with her face in them, you know, and turning her into this sort of, you know, shrill, extreme, far-left San Francisco liberal, voters responded.
Pelosi and Trump
… Let's bring Trump in.She's in an early meeting with him. …She's in a room with Trump, [Steve] Bannon, others, watching Trump in action.She's not in any power.She's not speaker or anything, but there she is.What is her take on him? …
Well, immediately after the election, they have a phone call that seems quite encouraging.Trump says nice things to her, says, "We're going to do great deals together."I think there is a part of her that thinks, well, you know, he's campaigned as this dealmaker; maybe we can make some things happen.He's campaigned on a lot of Democratic issues, things like spending money on infrastructure.He even campaigned on universal health care in some ways.He said a lot of contradictory things during the campaign.But I think she certainly hoped that she could find a way to work with him at the beginning.
But then this first meeting at the White House where he starts saying, you know, "I really won the election, and there was all this fraud, etc., etc."And I think it was the beginning of a dynamic where most of the people in the room would just sort of sit on their hands and look at their laps and just kind of put up with it.But she wouldn't let him get away with it.So she's the one who jumps in and says, "You know that's not true."And I think that really started the dynamic of her being the one willing to stand up to him, to correct him; indeed, feeling obligated to do so even if it was impolite.
And if there's one thing that we know about Donald Trump, it's that he respects strength.He respects dominance.He respects toughness.And for all that they would, you know, not have such a great working relationship, he always respected that about her; that she was, you know, in his mind, a killer.She was someone who wouldn't back down.
… Let's go to the 2018 midterms.What are the stakes for Pelosi in those midterms, and what's her plan?What does she decide she's going to do?
Look, her first priority with Trump is just not letting him do too much damage to the things that she holds dear in terms of policy.And so despite being in the minority, you know, she's able to really take a pound of flesh in a lot of these early negotiations with him and his administration.But the thing she was most concerned about was protecting the Affordable Care Act.Literally the day after the 2016 election, she's making phone calls, strategizing, figuring out, trying to figure out how they can, you know, shore up public support for Obamacare to make it difficult for the Republicans to repeal it.
… Her marching orders to the Democrats are, don't talk about Trump.When you go out there to campaign, talk about health care, talk about jobs, and talk about ethics.And so it's this very simple, you know, three-part agenda: Keep it simple; keep it something people can understand, but absolutely hammering this positive, substantive message that says, they're trying to take away your health care; we're going to expand it.You know, we're about cleaner government, better health care, bigger paychecks.
And they hammer that job, and you see these Democratic candidates almost refusing to talk about Trump, particularly in swing districts, because she has settled on this strategy that they have to offer a positive alternative if they're going to get over the line.
And she brings a ton of money to the situation.We haven't talked much about that, but she is prodigious in terms of her ability to reach in and pull wallets out of people's purses and pockets and get them to write checks for the Democrats.She can spend that money, especially in districts that Trump won, so they can turn the tide in that way.And bringing women to the game, I suppose, that's all part of her overall strategy.
And it works.
Yeah.Yeah, I mean, she is—she is once again the face of the campaign in the sense that she's in thousands of negative ads, but she's also working behind the scenes.She's by far the most prodigious fundraiser in the history of the Democratic Party.I don't think there's any dispute about that.Of course, she coincides with an era of big money in politics that some would even say she's been complicit in.But she's doing the strategy; she's doing the fundraising.I've been on some of these campaign trips with her.She's flying around the country just constantly campaigning for candidates.
Some of them don't want to appear in public with her; that's fine with her.If they say that they're not going to vote for her for speaker, that's fine with her.The most important thing is just to win. …
Division in the Democratic Party
The moderates, especially five white men, really go for her after the victory.Tell me a little bit about what's going on there and how she responds.
Well, it was the candidates in the swing districts who suffered the most from her negative image.They're the ones who are getting hammered with these ads about how, you know, Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco liberal, is going to be speaker if you elect this person.And so they're the ones who have the most angst about her position in the party.They're the ones who have the most acute, sort of deeply felt sense of how much easier their lives might be if she weren't on the ballot with them.
And so what you hear from a lot of them around this time is, you know, they might think that she's perfectly capable as the leader of the party, but her image is just too toxic.And the party needs a fresh face.The party needs to be freed of this sort of dead weight, this liability that she represents.And so that's the argument against keeping her.But she's got her finger on every lever in the Democratic coalition, right?She's got—her response to this is just to sort of swing into action.She puts on a campaign.
And the unintentional, or intentional, effect of this ends up being that she ends up demonstrating her leadership qualities, demonstrating the abilities she brings to the speakership in this campaign to actually become speaker again because she has to negotiate with each of these holdouts.She has to negotiate with the progressives who are unhappy with her, with the moderates who are unhappy with her, with individual members who may have a beef with her for some reason, and find something to give them.And it has to be calibrated just right because if she gives them too much, that just incentivizes more people to complain.So she has to give something that's small enough that they can save face—or sorry, big enough that they can save face and say they got something, but small enough that she doesn't then have a line of 100 other people at her door saying, "Well, what do I get for voting for you?"
And so it's a balancing act that really shows off exactly how well calibrated her sense of the caucus is when she's finally able to bring that home.
The favor file.
… Let's talk about the red coat confrontation moment and its importance.When she goes over to the White House with Schumer, she's teetering.I take it that the end of this is going to be a happy ending for her and she's going to demonstrate something.But tell us the story.What were the stakes for her, and what were the results, and what actually happened?
Sure.Well, at the same time as Nancy Pelosi is trying to get her gavel back, Trump is trying to get his border wall.He finally realized that for the two years that they held the House, the Republicans were sort of stiff-arming him on this and delaying him because none of them wanted to do it; they all thought it was kind of stupid.And so now, as they're about to give up the House in the lame-duck session, he's decided to play hardball on the budget negotiations.
And so Trump summons Chuck Schumer to the White House, and Schumer sees that this is a divide-and-conquer strategy, so he insists on bringing Pelosi.And they both go to the White House, and they're pretty sure they're going to have a normal negotiation to the extent you have one with Trump.They're going to try to confront him over the border wall, and—but it's going to be behind closed doors, right?
But Trump had this tactic where he liked to set people off balance.He'd sometimes keep the cameras in the room.So when the press comes in to take a picture and then leave, he says, "Why don't you guys stay here and we'll have this discussion in public?"So it's all on camera, this whole discussion; we're all watching it live.And they're going back and forth about the border wall and about the government funding and whose shutdown it would be.
And she starts needling him, saying, "It would be a Trump shutdown," and he doesn't like that very much.And so he sort of insults her back and she says—and he says, "Well, you know, I know Nancy can't really talk right now; she's got this whole situation in her caucus."
And she stops him.I believe she interrupts him and puts a finger in his face, as she likes to do, and says, "Mr. President, please don't characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who have just won a big victory."And you could immediately see the response to that play out on Twitter because people are watching this in real time.And, you know, the Democrats won the midterms in large part because of the way American women reacted to Donald Trump.
And so for all those liberal women who wanted so badly to see someone stand up to him, who wanted so badly to not have him be able to steamroll them and speak for them, to see this woman be so strong and tough in that moment, to see her stand up [to] him—for herself and refuse to let him put her in her place, refuse to let him tell her where she stood.
I think it was even bigger than that.I think it was every woman who's ever had her male boss talk over her in a meeting, put her down in a professional situation.I think it was—it resonated with a lot of people in that moment, for her to stand up to him and say, "I will tell you where I stand, thank you very much.You don't get to tell me that."
So that was the context for her walking out of the meeting, you know.They got Trump to take ownership of the shutdown.Tremendous political mistake on his part because usually we in the press spend half of the shutdown arguing about whose fault it was, and here he is on camera saying, "It's my shutdown; I will take it."They sort of can't believe he's done this.
And so they walk out, Pelosi and Schumer.They walk out in a daze, like, "Can you believe how well that just went?"And so she puts on this red coat, and she puts on the sunglasses.She does have great style, but she—she keeps a big closet, and she's kind of frugal; she wears things over and over.So the coat wasn't some kind of big statement that day.It's actually the same coat that she wore to Obama's inauguration, second inauguration in 2013.So it was just a coat she had handy.
And in fact, afterwards she sort of muttered, "Well, now I can't wear that coat anymore because it's so famous.People will think I'm wearing a—making a statement."She just really liked that coat.
But so she puts on this distinctive coat.She puts on the distinctive sunglasses.And as she's doing so, she's got this little, self-satisfied smirk on her face.And that—that moment, that picture of her in that moment, I think it just summed up the entire dynamic.She won.
… And so you had these memes being made where, you know, there were mushroom clouds behind her; there was rubble behind her; there was, you know, helicopters and music playing, because she was just the picture of a woman who has, through toughness and steeliness and refusing to back down, who has beat Donald Trump at his own game.
And the effect on the trouble she was having in her caucus?
I mean, Trump wasn't wrong, right?It wasn't the case that she was refusing to fund the wall because, you know, the liberals wouldn't let her.She, I think, on a conscience level, was never going to do that herself.But he was right that she was in a sticky situation, right?She still didn't have those votes.But it was the confrontation with Trump that really pushed her over the edge.It was when the last few Democratic holdouts saw her in that situation, saw how people reacted to her in that situation, saw that she had sort of become an icon to a lot of the Democratic base, I think they gave up at that point.I think that was the moment where they said, "All right, it's time to—it's time to come to the table and get whatever we can out of this situation because she's won."
… What's the difference of opinion between the Squad members, especially AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], and Nancy Pelosi as the speaker of the House?
Well, in the summer of 2019, there's a very acrimonious debate within the Democratic Party over the funding that the administration wants for border detention facilities, because in the views of the far left of the caucus, it was unconscionable to give them any money for these detentions.This is at the time, I believe, that, you know, children are being separated from their parents at the border, and a large portion of the Democratic Party just views this as, you know, a matter of conscience.
For other Democrats, it wasn't that they approved of the policy, but they felt like they had to get the emergency funding in there to make the migrants' conditions better, even if they couldn't stop them from being detained, stop them from being separated.
So that was sort of the substance of the dispute, but I think you also just had a lot of frayed nerves from people being around each other too long.This often happens in the caucus.
But, you know, beyond just the policy dispute in that moment, there's obviously a difference of philosophy between Nancy Pelosi and the so-called Squad, where—you know, she came up at a time when hard power was the only thing she had access to, where no one was necessarily going to listen to her as a woman, a housewife who opened her mouth and thought she had something to say.But it was because she had a vote that she had a voice.
And so for her, it was always about counting votes; it was always about hard power.That was how you got things done.And she even said at one point, you know, "They make these lists of influential people, but influence isn't power."I think she's wrong about that; influence obviously is a form of power, and soft power is tremendously important, especially in this day and age when politicians can have a sort of independent, national social media following and so on.
So I think it was also in some ways a sort of confrontation between her sort of old-school hard-power ethos and the new sort of outside social media influence of some of the Squad members.
So—but I think it's worth mentioning, too.Pelosi makes this comment around that time of, "They're four members, and that's all the votes that they've got."She believes that if you want to get something done in Congress, the way you do it is, you go out and you get the votes.And so the fact that they didn't have the votes for what they were trying to do, she viewed them as almost irrelevant, right?I mean, if there had been 20 or 30 or 40 votes against what she was trying to get through, then she might have had a problem.But the fact that there was only four of them, and all they were doing is yelling on the outside, not finding votes on the inside, meant that they really were not a threat to her agenda in that moment.
…But, you know, she was very dismissive, openly dismissive of these new young members who had a tremendous outside following, but not so much clout on the inside.And I think her message was clear, that she didn't view them as serious, that she was saying, "We're the adults doing legislation over here.And you might have some beautiful ideas, but you're not part of this process."And that was a real shot across the bow.And it was taken that way; it was felt.
And there were some efforts to mend fences behind the scenes, I think, by sort of her progressive allies.She's always used her progressive credentials as a way to keep liberals in the tent, right?She can go to the caucus and say, "They've spent, you know, $100 million calling me a San Francisco liberal; now you want to tell me I'm not liberal enough?"
But, you know, in this case, she was so sort of openly and snidely dismissive of these new, young, female people of color in the caucus.That was quite bruising.And I think it was on some level strategic, also, because when you're the speaker, you can't allow new people to just come in and dominate, right?She's got a lot of freshman members, and the Squad, they're not the ones she has to worry about; they're not the ones who might not get reelected; they're all in safe seats.The ones she's worried about are, you know, the ones in the swing districts, the front liners, the moderate members who might have tough races.
… So she has to, I think, internally also send the message to the members of the Squad that they need to be team players, and she's not going to give them extra attention or favors as a reward for them being noisy.It's very much a sort of child-rearing strategy, I think, where you don't reward bad behavior, right?You need positive reinforcement when people do things right.But you don't want to reward people for talking out of school.So I think that that was also a component of it, was just send that brush-back pitch that says, "You don't just go out there and talk crap about leadership and then get rewarded for it."
In a way, the dispute is settled in a kind of funny way by Donald Trump, who decides to enter the fray and throw all kinds of shade on the Squad, talking about "Why don't they go back home to their places of origin?" or whatever that was all about.Talk about Trump's role in a way providing a Band-Aid over this situation between Pelosi and the Squad.
Well, you know, throughout the Trump presidency, he was a tremendous asset to her, because the Democrats could always agree that they were opposed to him.And he made such a tremendous foil to her, sort of the perfect foil.I mean, she'd kind of been at a low point in her career before the Democrats won back the House and Trump got elected president.And it was because of the tremendous contrast with him that she sort of became empowered, became newly appreciated, and—and so once again, he sort of did her a favor, right, when he said that the—that they should go back to where they came from, these American citizens, who happen to be immigrants or people of color.It was not hard to rally the caucus together around, you know, pushing back on that message and being opposed to Trump and being opposed to the racism of those kinds of comments.
So I think not for the first or last time, Trump sort of saved her skin by giving her something that she could rally the whole party around and bringing them back together.
… If you had anything to add to Jan. 7th, when she reaches out to [Vice President Mike] Pence.It's pretty amazing that what they're doing is they're saying, "We think you need to invoke the 25th Amendment."If you can just talk about the historic level of that request and what that said about that moment and about her and Schumer and the Democratic leadership.How exactly was that moment when they tried to reach Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment?
Yeah.I mean, I think you can clearly see the desperation that she felt in that moment, that she and everyone—they were all so frightened of what might happen.They didn't just fear for their own lives; I think they feared for the life of American democracy, and they really believed that the president had become an active threat to American democracy and to the peaceful transfer of power, and they needed to do absolutely whatever they could, including, you know, this final tool on the table, the 25th Amendment.That was still viewed as too extreme by those who would have had the power to do something about it.But I don't think she would have made that call if she wasn't absolutely terrified of what might happen.
… When she walks into that room with Donald Trump after he's been elected, to what extent has he been running against her?He runs against the establishment and he wants to make America great and runs against some of the change that the country has seen. ...What did the two of them represent?
Yeah, for sure.Look, symbolically, Nancy Pelosi is the institutionalist.She's the continuity.She's the political hack.She's the career politician, all the nasty things you want to call someone who's been in elected office a long time.And she's the one with the experience who knows the system and knows the policies and the procedures, but that also means that she represents everything people hate about Washington.She represents everything people hate about the system, everything people want to smash using the bluntest instrument available to them, even if it's Donald J. Trump.
So, you know, Trump obviously got a lot of mileage out of not being a politician, and that's been a powerful message in American politics for a long time.But he clearly came from way outside the system and could say, you know, "I can't be bought because I'm rich.And because I'm the one who's been bribing these politicians all these years, I know how this whole racket works where you give them money, and then they do what you want."So he derived a lot of his political energy from opposing everything she represented.
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