The FRONTLINE Interviews

Susan Glasser

Columnist, The New Yorker

Susan Glasser is a columnist and staff writer for The New Yorker. She previously served as editor of Politico and editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine. She is the co-author, with Peter Baker, of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution and The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk on Oct. 26, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Pelosi’s Power

TOP

Susan Glasser

Chapters

Text Interview:

Highlight text to share it

Jan. 6 and the Aftermath

So our film starts, Susan, on Jan. 6, which won't surprise you, and we follow closely what happens with Pelosi's office itself, people in there, the attack, the insurrectionists, where she goes.… It's like she thinks she's standing in the breach, defending democracy itself from the existential threat that continues for 13 days and does not dissipate after Trump leaves office.So what do Pelosi's actions tell us about that moment and about our politics?

You know, Jan. 6, as it recedes from memory a little bit, I think it's hard to put yourself back in this period of time, where the Capitol itself, the symbol of democracy, has been attacked by this pro-Trump mob.And not only has Pelosi's office really been directly under assault, and her own young staffers, you know, literally hiding for their lives under a conference table, but I think that for Pelosi, if you look at her as a politician, she's always had almost a sort of a gauzy rhetoric around the symbols of democracy, the Capitol itself.And I think that kind of desecration was a shock, even in a moment when you thought you couldn't be shocked anymore by Donald Trump, right?And she had this incredible clarity for four years in some ways about Donald Trump, far more so than others.That was how she navigated the disruptions in the Trump presidency, by being clear.And yet this still comes as this kind of final, devastating blow.

And I think that, you know, there was a sense of incredible uncertainty, American democracy sort of teetering in the balance.Were we going to make it to Jan. 20?And I think Pelosi saw in that moment that she was the only kind of responsible constitutional actor and was trying to reach out to Mike Pence, the other constitutional actor, in terms of people who are specified by the Constitution as being in positions of authority, in addition to the president.

And so that was really, I think, a defining period for Pelosi.

… Could you describe the Democrats at that moment and what she was holding together, aside from, if she was, America, the union, democracy and her own party in lots of ways?

You know, that image of Jan. 6, where the call to re-impeach Donald Trump, or to impeach him a second time, begins literally while the mob is still inside the Capitol.And for me, this was always this sort of incredible moment, where it took months and months and years arguably to go to the first impeachment of Donald Trump, and it took minutes to go to the second impeachment of Donald Trump.

And so actually, it was the members of Congress, the Democratic members and many Republican members, had been ushered into a safe space in the Capitol, all in a room together.And many of the Democratic members are furious with the Republican members, and they believe that they were responsible.And that shouting actually begins even before they're evacuated on the House floor itself.You look at Adam Schiff, the congressman who's very close to Nancy Pelosi.His account of what happened on Jan. 6, inside the House Chamber, there is Democratic members of Congress shouting at the Republican members: “You did this.You did this.”

And so that's the frame of fury and anger and understanding: that there were many Republicans in their midst who were, if not outright members of the mob, the mob in suits and ties.And so this discussion seems to break out, actually, almost simultaneously among several different groups of Democratic members of Congress, at the same time as they're seeking refuge from the mob inside the Capitol.And by 5 o'clock, this has already gone public.People are talking about it.They're tweeting from the safe room that they want to talk about impeachment.You know, Liz Cheney, who has emerged as this sort of almost alone Republican voice of opposition to Donald Trump at this point, and actually, you know, made this unusual alliance after the Trump presidency with Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney is already talking with Democratic members of Congress with whom I've spoken about impeaching him.And frankly, as soon as I heard it, I knew they were going to do this unprecedented thing.

And for Pelosi, who stood in the way as long as possible of the first impeachment, the impulse in her party, which she's been trying to ignore Trump, trying to do all the things she's been trying to do, now is there an imperative for her, something she has to worry about as the person who's acting like the president of the United States, sort of rectitude or something she has to bring to the job?Or is she also going to join the Democrats and create unity by saying, “We're going to clean this up”?

Well, there's the overriding imperative at this point, when you realize how shockingly close American democracy came on that day, it seems to me that the overriding imperative for Speaker Pelosi was to get the country to Jan. 20 and to Joe Biden's inauguration.And there are very limited tools in the speaker of the House's toolkit.She does not have an army.She does not have even much of a police force, as we saw, unfortunately, on Jan. 6.Impeachment is her one constitutional tool.But she's already seen, in the first impeachment, that it has a certain, you know, kind of bully pulpit aspect to it.But without Republicans joining along with her in a bipartisan impeachment, or without the Republican Senate being willing to go along with it, it's essentially a symbolic gesture.

And so she has this, on the one hand, feeling of crisis, and how do I get the country successfully to Jan. 20?On the other hand, she has these very limited tools.And so I think Pelosi will go down in history as having reimagined what impeachment is.And so rather than being this fearsome tool that can be used potentially to remove a president, it becomes sort of another almost rhetorical weapon, constitutional certainly, and grave.But essentially, it's a political weapon.It's a rhetorical weapon that the speaker of the House possesses at this point, rather than an actual mechanism for the removal of a president.

Pelosi as a Transformational Leader

… Pelosi as the whip, going to her first meeting at the George W. Bush White House.She realizes that she's the only woman who's ever been there in the company of all these men for the kind of momentous decisions and discussions that are happening in the White House.What was the impact from your point of view, do you think, of Pelosi?What was probably on her as pressure, but what did it mean that she, as a high-ranking member of the Democratic Party, was creating a sort of historic precedent by being there in that room?

You mean by being sort of the breakthrough woman?

Exactly, the breakthrough woman.

You know, Pelosi—Nancy Pelosi grew up in politics, as has been, you know, often stated, with her father as the mayor of Baltimore.And so she had the experience that many women of that generation had, my mother as well, of being a woman used to being the only woman in the room, or the first woman to have this job, or the lone woman to play a significant role in negotiations.And that sense of sort of permanent marginalization, but … you get used to it, I think.And so Pelosi was a trailblazer, but she was from a generation of women for whom trailblazing was the only option in politics.

And so I think she had a comfort and a willingness to sort of proceed there that you might not see in a woman political leader today.… Pelosi was used to being exceptional.

And what she brings to that situation as the whip especially is a kind of contradiction.She's … a groundbreaking woman.At the same time, she represents a kind of transactional politics that comes from Baltimore. …Let's do all those things.So she's both things in one person at that moment, I think.

Yes, I think that's an important insight.So Pelosi both represents a kind of San Francisco progressive liberalism, sort of the ideological left wing of the Democratic Party.At the same time, she comes out of this tradition of organization and grassroots politics.And whipping is fundamentally about: Do you have the votes or do you not have the votes?And if you don't have the votes, you don't bring the measure to the floor.And it's a very practical form of politics in which compromise is at the heart of it.

And so those are almost inherent contradictions in Pelosi's profile.She's now become this sort of national figure of caricature and revulsion on the part of Republicans.She's become kind of like the Ted Kennedy for a new era, right?When I was growing up, when Nancy Pelosi was coming into politics, what did national Republicans do?They talked about Ted Kennedy liberalism or Tip O'Neill, maybe, liberalism.And now, Nancy Pelosi, on the one hand, is this sort of national symbol of left-wing ideology.On the other hand, inside the Democratic Party, on Capitol Hill, she has got her fearsome reputation, because she's so good at the practical politics of knowing what individual members need, knowing their districts, knowing, essentially, the nuts and bolts of politics.

One of the things that grows out of Baltimore, and even San Francisco, is that she never really has to deal with Republicans.Her father didn't deal with Republicans.She didn't watch—there's no training for her about how to—that you have to collaborate.… It's something she really brings, which is: We're not going to play the bipartisan game; we're going to take care of ourselves.Does that feel accurate to you?

You know, I think that is an important insight, that Nancy Pelosi is all about understanding the Democratic Caucus on Capitol Hill, and she's not so much immersed in the Republican conference as she is in understanding how to move her own party along.And that, by the way, is a big difference between the House and the Senate.It is the difference between Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.It is the difference between a much more partisan institution in the House of Representatives.That's been true for a long time.It's especially true, now that the country itself has become so much more divided and partisan.But it was always, I think, much more of a tradition in the House of Representatives, whereas you have senators, for years, who believed that they were all about the art of bipartisan compromise, and sort of the backs up and gets things done across party lines.

And I think Nancy Pelosi, in that sense, is the sort of perfect expression of what the House of Representatives is today.It's a much more partisan institution historically than the Senate.

She exercises that instinct and that style around—shockingly to some, including people in her own party, around—Bush's treatment of the Iraq War: first, going; second, his conduct of the war almost right away as the whip.And then, as the speaker, she's on his case big time.She doesn't seem to like him.She doesn't care whether she likes him or whether he likes her.It's just—it's really fascinating.And of course, as you say, a lot of the Republicans and a lot of other observers say: "Well, wait a minute.She's stoking."She's the first of a kind who's really making division with the president of the United States and others part of her toolkit, and a big part of how she builds her reputation and climbs the ladder in the Democratic Party.

Yeah.Nancy Pelosi anticipated, in a way, where the politics were going to move in the country overall, which is to a much more both nationalized and hyperpoliticized, hyperpartisan moment.I think Pelosi was ahead of the curve perhaps in anticipating that reality, perhaps in helping to shape that reality.And there's an interesting moment in Susan Page's biography of Nancy Pelosi, actually, dating all the way back to the Bush presidency, in which Pelosi gets on the case of a number of Democratic members of Congress for co-sponsoring bills with Republicans, which historically, you've got to remember that the Congress that Nancy Pelosi was elected into, bipartisan bills were often seen as a very positive thing for a member of Congress to have on their résumé when it came time to seek reelection every two years.That was—there was an incentive structure in Washington politics that's basically evaporated today, in which you would want to work with members of the other party and at least be seen by your constituents as being reasonable enough to come together on the things that you could come together on.

And so it was kind of shocking, actually, for Pelosi, early on in her tenure as a leader, to go to Democratic members and to ream them out, to chide them for co-sponsoring bills with members of the other party.And to me—I believe that was back in 2006, in the Bush presidency—I felt like that is a very interesting kind of moment that prefigures the moment that we're in.

The Financial Crisis

… The financial crisis forces her, unwillingly, I think, to find bipartisanship all of a sudden.There's that terrible meeting where [Secretary of the Treasury Henry] Paulson and [Chair of the Federal Reserve Ben] Bernanke come to her office.Suddenly she's the center of attention on this.They issue the threat that the economy will be dead by Monday if something doesn't start happening.

… So place Pelosi in that situation for me, will you?And talk a little bit about what she was confronting, this woman who we've created as one of the early drivers of partisanship, in the modern era anyway.

Well, you know, when I look back on that 2008 financial crisis, to me, it's really the last moment that you can see the leadership in both parties saying, “We have to prevent a national catastrophe, and we have to work together to do so.”And that required Pelosi overriding the sort of habits and instincts of partisanship that had gotten her to where she was, to a position of leadership.And as unpopular as Donald Trump was among Democrats and in his final days among Americans overall, George W. Bush was incredibly unpopular.And Nancy Pelosi had ridden that and had been very successful at helping to shape the deep unpopularity of the Bush presidency in its final few years.

And so, right, you have this outgoing president, who Pelosi has sort of made her career around bashing.And yet, to me, it was an example where each party was able to override, at that time, significant internal factors pushing against a bipartisan, a national, a unity solution, and to come together.And it feels like a long time ago in the sense that it's hard to imagine that we could get to that response today.Democrats, I think, that's part of their narrative of grievance, their sense that we've been a much more responsible party than Republicans have; their sense that if we're in this terrible state of division and polarization, it's because Republicans started it.

And, you know, that's an example where Pelosi got her caucus to do something that went against many of their fundamental views of fairness and equity, to bail out Wall Street essentially, but were convinced to do so for the greater good.And I think there's a sense that, you know, what do we get out of that?Republicans have just taken the country down the road to ruin.

And so I think that financial crisis in 2008 is kind of the last moment of its kind and also maybe the origin story of a lot of the grievance that exists on the left today.

… Here she is, at this moment: We'll hold our hands,and we'll jump off the cliff together, was the phrase they kept using.And she stands there and watches the bill fail, you know."The bill failed!The bill failed!,"they say on the CNBC coverage of it, as you watched the stock market sinking. And Nancy Pelosi, I've got to believe, as you just said, learned a very important lesson about how to cooperate or not cooperate with Republicans at that moment.

Well, I mean, look, these are the Republicans.That is the origin story, on the other side, in many ways, for what John Boehner ultimately called legislative terrorists and political terrorists inside his own party, who now are in charge of not only the Republican Party on Capitol Hill but are actually in charge of the Republican Party in the country and have forged this alliance with Donald Trump, which I know we'll get to.But I see that financial crisis as sort of the origin story, the beginning of the end of a phase in American politics when it was possible to come together around a crisis like that.Jan. 6 shows us that we can't do that anymore.

Pelosi, Obama and the Affordable Care Act

Let's go to a new president, a different president, Barack Obama. ... Talk a little bit about what was at work between those two at the very beginning, especially based on what we now know about Pelosi, and what I hope you'll tell us about him and her, when they finally confront the difference, this fundamental difference in how they feel about legislating.

Yeah, that's right.I mean, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi couldn't be more different political figures.And Barack Obama was all about transformational rhetoric.He was all about inspiring people in the art of the possible, and he was not about the nitty-gritty of getting it done.And he didn't like Congress.He only served not even a term as a senator from Illinois, and he felt like, “Sure, I'll run for president.”And he was basically the opposite of Nancy Pelosi, who spent her entire career mastering this one institution that Barack Obama, you know, couldn't be bothered to spend more than a couple years in, as far as, you know, Pelosi and other lifetime members saw it.

And I think that, you know, this clash in philosophy.Also, Obama was—to the extent he knew anything about Congress, it was from the Senate.And, you know, the House is a very different institution, and Pelosi is not only a creature of the House, but she's a creature of the Democratic Caucus of the House.It has its own particular politics, and Obama did not want to be bothered by that.And he had really famously distant relations with members of Congress, and I think in particular, he and Nancy Pelosi were just polar opposites throughout the eight years of his presidency.

… Help me understand what was going on in the Republican Party at that time around the [Affordable Care Act] and what she knew she had to do, apparently, with her own caucus.

Well, I think, again, Barack Obama came in, and he had arguably a sort of misreading of where the Republican Party was at, right?He believed that there were on-the-level partners for him in the Republican Party, when it came to governing, when it came to legislating.And I think the experience of the ACA showed that that was not the case.How could it be possible that Republicans wouldn't even go along with something that had been a bipartisan idea before Barack Obama proposed it?And this was almost unthinkable.What do you mean, you don't support the thing that you supported? …

I think Pelosi must have had sort of an “I told you so” moment with Barack Obama, because she understood, and I think she was very close to this development inside Congress, inside the House of Representatives, where the Tea Party was gathering force, the elements that would give rise to the Tea Party, the elements among Republicans who would say, “If Democrats want it, if Barack Obama wants it, we're going to oppose it, no matter what it is.”And that made dealing with your own Democrats so much more important.And of course that's the dynamic that we live with now in American politics every day.

And I think Pelosi was frustrated because she was trying to explain this to the White House, and it was only with the bruising experience of getting the ACA passed that they probably came to understand that.

Republicans Campaign Against Pelosi

… They have this victory.He signs the bill, says, “Nancy, Nancy, Nancy,” and everybody's kissing and making up, and everybody is happy about it.But for her, the law of unintended consequences is the Republicans realized she's really powerful and that they don't need to chase—for the 2010 election midterm, they don't need to chase him; they need to chase her.… Talk a little bit about what the Republican strategy was to run against the speaker of the House instead of running against the president of the United States.

Well, look, the demonization of Nancy Pelosi as, you know, sort of this, this—almost a caricature of a powerful woman is something that you saw in 2010, when she does lose the speakership.But, you know, it's reminiscent of these sort of attacks on liberals going back decades, right?She has become the new Ted Kennedy, but she's Ted Kennedy in a pantsuit, and she's got all the baggage that comes with being a woman in politics laid onto this national Republican campaign, where she's sort of a caricature of the out-of-control left wing of the Democratic Party.She's a San Francisco liberal, she's a woman, and she's a fearsome backroom deal maker.So it's almost the trifecta of, you know, bogeymen that Nancy Pelosi has become.

And they elevated her profile so dramatically.It's very interesting, because, you know, her main skills as a Democratic leader really have been in backroom politics.She's not that famous.She's not the kind of person who gives big sweeping rhetorical speeches like Barack Obama at rallies.She's not the kind of person who is going to be famous for what she says at the Democratic Convention every four years.She is not an orator.She is a doer.And she's a practical politician of, really, unparalleled skills, right?She understands what individual members of Congress need.She knows their districts.She knows how much money they need to raise.She knows what bills are their pet projects, and she's that kind of legislative technician.

And yet now, she's become this kind of outsize national figure.And again, that's the origin of the two sides of Nancy Pelosi that we now see today, that she is almost contradictory in the way that she's framed that for the public, both as this kind of unparalleled ideologue, but also as this kind of master technician.

Pelosi and Trump

And as fate and history and American culture would have it, along comes a candidate of the Republican Party for president, 2016, who—she's in the wilderness, but he finds that, as he runs against the establishment, she is the establishment, in lots of ways. …Explain the moment Nancy Pelosi and America and Democrats find themselves in, when Donald Trump enters the White House.

You know, I think that Nancy Pelosi, the reason she's become such an iconic political figure in the last few years is because she had this incredible, brutal clarity about Donald Trump from the very beginning.And it's really important to understand that.She understood—I think early on, she said, “This man is the most dangerous political figure ever, potentially, in American politics.”And she just—she had the ability to read him, to get under his skin.I've always felt, in general, that you saw a lot of women who were maybe more immune to the kind of appeal to Donald Trump and understood more quickly what the political threat posed by Donald Trump was.

And Pelosi, of all the political figures in 2016 and early in his presidency, she just—she got Donald Trump.She was able, as became evident throughout the course of his presidency, she was able to get under his skin in a way that almost no other political figure was.And given all that, it's actually kind of surprising.Donald Trump and Pelosi did not go into open warfare with each other in the first year of his presidency, and that's kind of been forgotten.I think that's important.Donald Trump, even through the fall of 2017, even after things like "fire and fury" and some of his, you know, really kind of crazy initial things, there was always this possibility that Donald Trump might actually try to make deals with Democrats.

And there was always this possibility, especially, actually, in the fall and towards the end of his first year in office, that he might say, on immigration or other things: Work with Pelosi on the "Dreamers," for example, and, you know, you look—so she's cautious, in terms of holding that open as a possibility. And Trump, you know, he had positive words to say about Pelosi.He understood that she was a doer and that she might be able to get things done.

And remember, Donald Trump will flatter people whom he thinks he might need, whether it's Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin.Not so much Nancy Pelosi.It does tell you something about the former president of the United States, that he consistently had nicer words for autocratic adversaries of this country than for Democratic leaders in Congress.But of all of them, he respected Pelosi, and he saw that, maybe someday, they would make a deal.But of course that didn't really happen.And the relationship became more spectacularly adversarial than really any relationship between a speaker of the House and a president of the United States.

When she decides they're going to make a push in 2018, but she tells everybody: “Don't run against Trump.You're not running against Trump.… Let's talk about what Democrats can do for America at this moment."So your thoughts about that?

Yeah.In the 2018 midterm election, Nancy Pelosi did take arguably sort of a surprising course of embracing issues, as opposed to the issue being Donald Trump.And healthcare was the mantra, once again, going back all the way perhaps to what she saw as her signature achievement in her first time as speaker, healthcare, and the desire to protect and grow the legacy of Obamacare.And, you know, this was controversial, actually.This was not without its detractors.There was a sense that, you know, the one thing that could bring Democrats together and bring Democrats out to vote was opposition to Donald Trump.

But she was a big believer that, while that might be a motivating factor, you had to have a positive agenda, and that that was the way back to a majority in Congress.And of course the math was always on their side, to a certain extent.Historically, a president in the first midterm election, never mind a president as unpopular and divisive as Donald Trump, has lost enough seats that would have brought the majority back to Democrats.

But I think the other thing that's really important is that Pelosi never felt that she got her due from her first tenure as speaker.She had never felt that she was regarded as a kind of historic figure that the first woman speaker of the House of Representatives should be.And perhaps she always felt overshadowed by Obama and his historic presidency.But, you know, really, for years that she was in the minority, I think there was this sense of: I need a do-over.I want another chance to show what I can do as the speaker of the House.

Division in the Democratic Party

But of course members of her caucus are not so sure they want to keep Nancy Pelosi around.… What was she facing, and what was the importance of that—what would you call it?—I guess a mild revolution in the Democratic Party to bounce the very woman who executed this plan that got them back in the majority?

So I think this is totally not written out of history, but it's largely forgotten how perilous a position Nancy Pelosi was in after the 2018 election, and whether she was actually going to become the speaker was an open question.And that is remarkable.First of all, it's important to remember that Pelosi—had Hillary Clinton become president, as she anticipated—[Pelosi] wouldn't have been in that position.She was absolutely prepared to step aside.I don't think anybody anticipated the kind of gerontocracy that we now have on the top of the Democratic Party, where you have Nancy Pelosi as speaker; you have Joe Biden as president.These were people who were on their way out of politics, if Hillary Clinton, as they all assumed, became the president.

And so it was already sort of an accidental extension of their time in politics, combined with a lot of dissatisfaction accumulated from their years in the wilderness:"And look at what the ruin that these old politics have brought us.We have Donald Trump as president.We have a very tenuous majority.It's not really enough to get much done.What is our vision?"It was really a sense that, you know, this was a time for new leadership, and there were challenges to Pelosi throughout the first couple years of Trump's presidency, culminating in, after the election, this uncertainty.In fact, Donald Trump was taunting her and saying, “Well, maybe we'll provide you the votes, Nancy, for you to become speaker.”

And I always remember that moment, because it would have been infuriating to Nancy Pelosi.And Trump, he has this sort of, not a lot of knowledge about politics, but he has an instinct for the weakness in his adversaries and potential adversaries.And he sees that Nancy Pelosi is weak at that moment.And to me, that was always really a powerful moment, when Trump is literally saying, like: “Hey, Nancy, you know, you need some help getting over the line there?We'll help you out.”And of course she emerged in such a formidable way that people tend to forget that it was actually a question whether she would even win the speaker vote.

Well, the emergence is itself from whatever that chrysalis—while she was, inside of, being a liberal, smoke-filled-room denizen—when they have that meeting where she and Schumer go up to the White House and have that famous meeting, where she does what has been a liability in the past, which is point the finger, be a scold, act like a mom or something to Trump.But, in fact, times being what they are, I guess, and change in politics being the rule of thumb always, as our politics have changed in some mysterious way, where now it's a heroic thing she does, when she comes out in that red coat and slides the sunglasses on and is a woman in full, at that moment anyway.Take me through that, will you, Susan?And talk about that turn that Nancy Pelosi enjoys, much, I think, probably to her surprise, and certainly to those of us who have been watching closely.

Yeah, that's right.Nancy Pelosi becoming a sort of grandmotherly icon of the resistance to Donald Trump was a great gift that Donald Trump gave to Nancy Pelosi.And you forget, actually, in that meeting, it really was Donald Trump's gift.He sort of laid himself wide open to it.And, you know, it seemed, really for two years, Democrats and many independents as well were just desperate for somebody to speak up and to face down the bully, face to face, and to show that there was some resistance to Donald Trump, that he would face some form of accountability.

And along comes Nancy Pelosi, and she's sort of accountability in a designer coat.She wags her finger at him.And you know, if the image among Trump's critics was that Trump was essentially a toddler in the White House … and so along comes a grandmother and a mother who is able to say: “Hey, wait a minute.You know, I've dealt with my share of screaming tantrums, and I know exactly what to do in this situation.”And I just think that that was this marriage of the woman and the moment for Nancy Pelosi that she had not had before.And, you know, people were just relieved that somebody was going to stand up to Donald Trump, and she became the personification of that.

That's great.She survives the charge of the "five white men" and becomes the speaker.But she has a little trouble in the back 40, with the progressives, the Squad.… What is still going on there?What does that contretemps and maybe more represent about where Nancy Pelosi finds herself in the last years of her speakership?

So one of the consequences, of course, of this increasing polarization is both parties have moved to their margins, and Democrats have become, especially on Capitol Hill, a significantly more liberal, progressive party.And that shift in the ideology of the caucus has also come accompanied with a new generation of members and a new generation of tactics.Nancy Pelosi is not a tweeter.She is not a creature of the social media era.She is a believer in a much more old-fashioned, person-to-person kind of politics, interaction being high touch, you know—the House of Representatives, the ultimate high-touch institution.

And you have new figures in politics, like AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], who are so gifted at essentially mass public communications, using social media, you know, facility in kind of a 24-hour conversation with the electorate, both in their own districts and nationally.And that's just not Pelosi's comfort zone, and it's not her skill as a legislator.And so I think she faces this challenge.Not only is the ideology of her party shifting—and again, Pelosi was always at the left side of her caucus.She is, in fact, a San Francisco liberal.So I think that the ideological shift wasn't as big of a challenge for her as this rise of a completely different generation of lawmakers, with a different set of incentives and skills and a view of politics that's very different from hers.

And so, you know, working with AOC, figuring out how to explain, you know, what kind of power or what AOC could do with the power that she had acquired by becoming a national figure overnight, and trying to get them to buy into the system enough to not blow it up constantly, I think, was an enormous challenge for Pelosi's leadership.

But the other thing that's really important, I think—we haven't really talked about it, but it's relevant to all of these questions about Pelosi as speaker—is that in this period when Nancy Pelosi has wielded power over Congress, Congress has basically broken down, and it has stopped being able to do its job.And I think that is the context for the Trump presidency, and especially now the Biden presidency, is really important.They don't pass bills anymore.They don't do their job because they can't do their job.The incentives have disappeared not only for sweeping bipartisan deals but even for the regular business of Congress.

Nancy Pelosi was an appropriator, and in Congress, and especially in the House, that really means something.That's part of your identity.So it's not just her identity was that of a San Francisco liberal, or of, you know, being the daughter of a machine politician.But Nancy Pelosi comes out of the Appropriations Committee, and their job is the most important job that the Constitution gives Congress, which is to spend the money and to say how the money is going to be spent.

… But it's really important to understand that the old job of being a member of Congress, the one that Pelosi came up in, doesn't even exist anymore.And she did not, when she came back as speaker—after they won the House in 2018, she could have said: “We're going to figure out how to restore regular order.We're going to get our work done.We're going to find a way to work together.”She chose not to do that.And it's all about opposition to Trump.It's all about, you know, there's no hope for us in the old route of being a member of Congress.It's all about being Democrats, and almost Democrat-only, in our strategies.

The 2020 State of the Union Address

Let's talk about one moment that tests her in an important way.It's the State of the Union address in 2020.… Talk a little bit about that … because it feels like it's such a symbolic and important, practically speaking, thing she did.

Yeah, the State of the Union in 2020, to me, that image of Nancy Pelosi ripping up the speech, the image of Trump going on to the floor of Congress.Remember, this is right at the moment when he's about to be vindicated, as he sees it, in the impeachment trial in the Senate.The verdict comes, you know, that same week, and this was this moment where he, in his view, defeated Nancy Pelosi, defeated the efforts to hold him accountable, to constrain him in any ways.Much of the reporting that I've been doing on the Trump presidency in its final year suggests that, you know, Trump really was even more emboldened, and that many of the tragedies that were subsequent in 2020 certainly flowed, in part, from his feeling of vindication and that he could do whatever he wanted with impunity, essentially, after this failed impeachment trial of him in the Senate.

And so, you know, this is a maximum moment of fury, I think, for Nancy Pelosi.That image will always be the enduring image, in some ways, of—if you want a visual, from now on, for history, of how Washington broke, you know, you could do no worse, I think, than to have this image of the speaker of the House literally ripping up the words of the president of the United States in that moment.

Remember, they really were not on speaking terms.Nancy Pelosi had decided the previous fall, overcome her previous objections and gone forward with the impeachment of Donald Trump, even though she had said earlier that same year that impeachment should not proceed unless it could be done on a bipartisan basis, unless there was at least a hope that you might get some Republican votes.And she had gone ahead with impeachment anyway, even though it was very clear that it wasn't going to succeed, even though it was very clear that at most there was going to be a very small handful of Republicans in either chamber who would go along with it.

And I think you can say that that was Nancy Pelosi bowing to the reality of the Washington and of the Congress in which she worked, or you could say it was Nancy Pelosi shaping that reality.But I think, just the maximum frustration and anger and fury: We've tried and we have failed to hold this man accountable.He is coming to my chamber, to the floor of the United States House, and lying and lying and lying to us, and there's nothing that I can do about this.

Pelosi and Biden

Let's just deal with the Biden Mack Truck of bills that get brought up to the Hill and pushed.What has her experience, of all the things we've talked about here, how much has all of this shaped, and in what way, shaped her approach to how she'll deal with how she's pushed, how the Biden legislative package, basically the Biden presidency, on a platter is going to be dealt with now by the Congress?

You know, I think that Nancy Pelosi has seen over the last decade how much you can't rely on the other side, that it's going to have to come from within your own party.And the consensus will have to come.When we talk about consensus in Washington now, we don't even talk about consensus between the two parties.We talk about it in your own party exclusively.And I do think that there was a frustration for Pelosi initially, in the Biden presidency, because there is this culture clash.Remember, Joe Biden is not just a former senator; he's literally a creature of the United States Senate.Aside from the eight years that he served as Barack Obama's vice president, which also carries the title of president of the Senate, you know, he spent four decades, his entire professional career, as a member of the Senate.Nancy Pelosi has spent essentially her entire professional career, several decades, as a member of the House of Representatives.

And because we live in such a partisan moment, we tend to think: Well, their party identification is what's shared between them.But in Washington, your institutional affiliation still matters.And I think being a creature of the Senate versus being a creature of the House really matters.And I think there was a frustration, to a certain extent, that Joe Biden's notion of what it takes to make a deal, and you know, sort of windy discussions and, you know, kind of like signaling to people and talking to members of the other party as well as to members of your own party, that that was an antiquated notion of how to make a deal in today's Washington. And that, you know, it was time to roll up and get more nitty-gritty with the members of the 100-person-strong House Progressive Caucus, which didn't really happen until the fall, until Pelosi finally said, like, “OK, I've got to get in here.”And so I think that that's been a dynamic that we have observed, at least in the first year of the Biden presidency.

Latest Interviews

Get our Newsletter

Stay Connected

Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation

Koo and Patricia Yuen

Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.