Nancy Pelosi Loses Her Last Great Battle With Donald Trump

Former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has failed in the last big political goal of her storied career: keeping Donald Trump from returning to the White House.
Trump and Pelosi are two of the politicians who have most defined 21st century American electoral politics, and have been bitter political rivals for years. Pelosi served as speaker during the second half of Trump’s White House term with the two frequently, and publicly, sparring over legislative issues over the years.
Between the policy disagreements, they also traded personal barbs, having perhaps the most contentious political relationship of the past decade. Trump refers to her as “Crazy Nancy” while Pelosi says she won’t even utter the president-elect’s name.
After a hammer-wielding assailant violently attacked her husband, Paul, at their San Francisco home, Trump mocked the assault. “How’s her husband doing, by the way?” he asked at a 2023 rally, to laughter.
And at his final campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump referred to Pelosi as an “evil, sick, crazy b—,” stopping short of completing the sentence. (His campaign said he meant to say “braindead.”)
The 2024 presidential race was almost certainly the last major battle between the two. Pelosi was instrumental in the events leading to Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. She privately pushed for President Joe Biden to drop his reelection bid following his debate against Trump in June, when his performance sparked concerns about his age and ability to mount a successful campaign.
It was her push that is widely believed to have been what finally convinced Biden, after three weeks of backroom drama, to withdraw.
She told The Guardian last month that she pushed for his exit because she did not believe the “course” of the election as it stood would result in a Biden victory, and that she vowed to never let Trump return to the White House.
“Elections are decisions. You decide to win. I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity,” Pelosi said.
“So when you make a decision, you have to make every decision in favor of winning…and the most important decision of all is the candidate.”
The move was a gamble that, in the end, did not pay off. It came late in the race, and some Democrats were uneasy about the prospects of a Harris nomination, despite Biden’s plummeting polling numbers post-debate. Whether Biden could have beaten Trump after that debate will remain one of the unknowable questions of this tumultuous political cycle.
But one thing is certain: Harris didn’t, and she didn’t even come particularly close.
Come January, both Trump and Pelosi will be back in public office for the first time since 2021, when their feud reached a climax over his false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race.
But Pelosi, 84, is no longer serving as a party leader, at least in an official capacity. New York Representative Hakeem Jeffries is now the defacto Democratic center of gravity in the House, with the only outstanding question whether he takes the reins as Minority Leader or Speaker come January, depending on how the last outstandingCongressional races come in.
While Pelosi is no longer in leadership, she hasn’t made official any plans to retire yet.
Grant Davis Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, told Newsweek that Trump and Pelosi truly despise each other.
“The level of apparent animosity” between the two is “different, and reminds me of the 19th century,” he said.
“Trump has involved female members of his own family in his business dealings, he comes from a very male-dominated industry. Having to deal with a woman in that powerful role may have irritated him,” he said by way of explaining Trump’s dislike of Pelosi.
“Pelosi is a champion of women’s rights and was a female trailblazer in Congress, and Trump’s many derogatory comments directed toward women probably irritated her more than someone else. So I think there’s a personal element to the mutual hostility.”
Pelosi, meanwhile, views Trump as a “threat to the American political system.”
Meena Bose, the executive dean of Hofstra University’s Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs, told Newsweek that their longstanding conflict “represents the current party divisions in American politics.”
“Major differences on issues such as economic growth, immigration, and U.S. foreign policy, as well as multiple other factors, are the source of this conflict, and the 2024 election results will be significant for assessing which views have more public support at this time,” she said.
Pelosi emerged as a top Trump foe at the very start of his political career, telling CNN in 2016, when he was still just a longshot candidate, that she did not believe he would ever “have power.” The early attack foreshadowed years of quarrels between the two, one a political novice and the other a veteran machine politician.
But the feud reached a breaking point following the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, when a mob of the former president’s supporters violently protested the certification of the 2020 election, whipped up by Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him via widespread voter fraud.
Pelosi’s animosity toward Trump went into overdrive after Jan. 6, when she helped lead the second impeachment of him in the days that followed. Video footage released earlier this year showed that Pelosi described Trump as a “domestic enemy” in the days after the riot.
She said in December 2021 that she would “never forgive” Trump for Jan 6.
“There is a domestic enemy in the White House. Let’s not mince words about this,” Pelosi said on the day after the riot, footage released earlier this year showed.
Trump has maintained that he did not engage in any wrongdoing, calling Jan. 6 a “day of love.” He has accused Pelosi of engaging in a partisan investigation by impeaching him and establishing a select House panel to investigate the Capitol riot.
“The highly partisan Unselect Committee Report purposely fails to mention the failure of Pelosi to heed my recommendation for troops to be used in D.C., show the ‘Peacefully and Patrioticly’ [sic] words I used, or study the reason for the protest, Election Fraud,” Trump said in a post to Truth Social in December 2022, when the committee released its final report. “WITCH HUNT!”
Pelosi and other critics blame Trump for the riot, saying his election fraud claims and infamous speech at the Ellipse speech inflamed the mob. Trump, for his part, has blamed Pelosi for allegedly ignoring is “recommendation for troops to be used” in D.C. on January 6.
One of the most viral moments of their feud came a year earlier, after Trump’s State of the Union address in 2020 when Pelosi — sitting directly behind him — rose and theatrically ripped up a copy of his speech, which she has described as a “manifesto of mistruths.”
The move drew praise from Democrats, then exasperated with the president, but also drew the ire of Trump and his supporters, who viewed it as disrespectful.
“He shredded the truth in his speech. He’s shredding the constitution in his conduct. I shredded his state of his mind address,” Pelosi said.
Trump responded to Pelosi by suggesting her protest was illegal.
“Well I thought it was a terrible thing when she ripped up the speech. First of all, it’s an official document. You’re not allowed. It’s illegal what she did. She broke the law,” he said.
Just weeks earlier, Pelosi led the first impeachment against Trump for alleged abuse of power over allegations that he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate President Joe Biden, then viewed as a likely contender for the president in 2020.
Trump has maintained, again, that he did nothing wrong and has said the earlier impeachment was also politically motivated, famously describing it as “presidential harassment.”
On Christmas Day 2019, he tweeted: “Why should Crazy Nancy Pelosi, just because she has a slight majority in the House, be allowed to Impeach the President of the United States? Got ZERO Republican votes, there was no crime, the call with Ukraine was perfect, with ‘no pressure.'”
Pelosi, however, viewed that first impeachment as a matter of protecting U.S. democracy.
“It is a matter of fact that the president is an ongoing threat to our national security and the integrity of our elections—the basis of our democracy,” she said on the floor of the House in December 2019.
The State of the Union one year earlier also came with its share of drama, with Pelosi postponing the address over security concerns amid a lengthy government shutdown she blamed on Trump.
Beyond the big scandals, the Trump era was, in part, defined by the day-to-day back-and-forth between Pelosi and the then-president. In August 2019, CNN reported that they had not spoken for 10 months, despite the Speaker and president typically maintaining at least a baseline working relationship.
Pelosi told The Guardian last month that she does not even like to say Trump’s name, adding it is a “grotesque word” and “up there with, like, swearing.”
“You just don’t like the word passing your lips. I just don’t. I’m afraid, you know, when I grew up Catholic, as I am now, if you said a bad word, you could burn in hell if you didn’t have a chance to confess. So I don’t want to take any chances,” she said.
In May 2020, she said, “He comes in with doggy doo on his shoes, and everyone who works with him has that on their shoes too.
A year earlier, Trump questioned Pelosi’s mental acuity while discussing a trade agreement between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
“Look let’s face it, she doesn’t understand it,” he said at the time. “And they sort of feel she is disintegrating before their eyes.”