Late one night in July 2022 when she was House speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) got word that House Republicans had pulled support for a bipartisan bill to reenergize America’s semiconductor industry.
Some liberal Democrats were also squeamish about providing corporate welfare, so some of her advisers suggested pulling the bill from the next day’s schedule.
“Let me do it my way,” Pelosi recalled, giving instructions to her staff. “Go tell the Republicans to go to hell. We’re going to go without them. We’re going to go without them.”
Not a single Democrat voted against the bill. Once it was clearly passing and heading to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature, a couple dozen Republicans voted for what would become a popular piece of legislation.
Now the former House speaker, Pelosi recounted that story in a 100-minute interview Wednesday with a half-dozen veteran reporters and columnists who chronicled her 20-year reign as the Democratic leader. The long sit-down was part of her book tour promoting “The Art of Power,” which includes many of these tales of her rise, then fall, and then rise back up to the most powerful post in Congress.
The book, which she started planning many years ago, serves as a lesson in how she wielded power more effectively than most of the other 55 speakers — all White men. It also published just in the wake of another illustration of Pelosi’s continuing influence, even as she has rejoined the rank-and-file without even a seat on a legislative committee.
Many media appearances over the past week have focused on Pelosi’s behind-the-scenes role in helping advise fellow Democrats in their effort to push Biden to step aside from his reelection effort.
While she says she did not call anyone, Pelosi acknowledged receiving “hundreds” of messages from concerned Democrats. She believes the outpouring of support for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has validated the actions to persuade Biden to step aside, but it’s left her more than four-decade-friendship with the president upended.
“History’s in a hurry. We’re right in the center of it all here. At some point, I will come to terms with my own piece, my own role in this,” she told reporters Wednesday.
Pelosi intended to write this book many years ago and focus on four key issues that framed her first stint as House speaker: her battles with China over human rights abuses; her opposition to the Iraq War; her critical help to the Bush administration in passing the 2008 financial relief package; and passing the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
But by the time she got around to writing after leaving her leadership post at the end of 2022, Pelosi had experienced the Donald Trump presidency, the 2021 Capitol insurrection and the brutal attack on her husband in October 2022 — all topics that had to be addressed.
In the preface she writes about “Know Your Why,” a slogan she has cited for years as advice to those who want to run for elective office so that they can be grounded by the right principles in the job. Her “why” has always been a three-word mantra — “for the children” — signifying leaving the planet cleaner and safer with a bottom-up economy.
But throughout the Wednesday discussion, and after her actions last month, it is clear that Pelosi has a new “why” in this epilogue phase of her career: defeating Trump.
She pounded a table nine times as she explained that her motivation in opposing Biden’s continued campaign was solely about stopping Trump. “My goal in life was that that man would never set foot in the White House again,” she said.
There’s an echo in her second stint as speaker, which began with the last two years of Trump’s presidency, of her first tenure, beginning with George W. Bush’s final two years in the Oval Office.
Each of those congressional terms, 2007-09 and 2019-21, included strong clashes with the GOP president but then also included major bipartisan deals on global crises that ended up being a political burden for Democrats and not Republicans.
In the fall of 2008 as the financial system collapsed, Pelosi’s Democrats provided the vast majority of votes for the $700 billion bailout, stabilizing the system and avoiding an economic depression. But once Obama took office with massive Democratic majorities, Republicans blamed his administration and Pelosi for the lingering Great Recession and its high unemployment.
Voters recoiled as the titans of Wall Street avoided any criminal liability as millions of homes were lost and the unemployment rate topped 10 percent. “Nobody paid a price,” Pelosi lamented.
Obama officials were unsuccessful in creating a campaign to sell their legislative achievements — including a nearly $800 billion stimulus that cut taxes on the middle class — and it all got lumped into bitter feelings about the economy and the bank bailout.
“I truly believe that was why we lost in 2010,” Pelosi said, a midterm drubbing that lost 63 seats and handed the GOP the majority for eight years.
In 2020, fresh off impeaching Trump over his Ukraine actions, Pelosi again worked with the GOP administration when the coronavirus pandemic killed millions and shuttered parts of the global economy. Democrats again provided most of the votes for several relief packages that tallied almost $3 trillion — even sending direct cash payments to taxpayers that were signed by none other than Trump.
Biden won in November 2020 and Democrats, with majorities in both the House and Senate, set out to clean up the Trump administration’s disjointed handling of the pandemic — beginning with a nearly $2 trillion recovery package.
Month by month, with no effective pushback from Biden and Democrats, voters came to place more blame on the new administration for a crisis that started under the GOP’s watch. Republicans won back the House majority in 2022, this time by a narrow four-seat margin, but they have since used that power to boost Trump at almost every turn.
Pelosi resigned from leadership and returned to life in the rank-and-file, working across the street in a House office building for the first time since 2001.
Pelosi will attend the Democratic National Convention this month in Chicago with no real responsibilities — as leader of her caucus she was the co-chair for the previous five conventions — other than a likely speaking role.
Her main political role these days is still raising money and giving advice when asked by others. No speaker in modern times has left the post and stuck around this long in office, but Pelosi rather enjoys the freedom and dispensing wisdom that sounds like a mix of a crime boss and local party activist.
For dealing with Republicans who made fun of the attack on her husband, she said: “Treat everyone as a friend but know who your friends are.”
But a few unnamed GOP lawmakers received the bluntest of messages. “Some of them,” Pelosi said she replied to them, “I just say: ‘We’re out to get you, you’re dead.’”
When it comes to her discussions with Biden, she returned to a motto that former California governor Jerry Brown taught her when she chaired the state Democratic Party in the early 1980s: “Those who talk don’t know and those who know don’t talk.”
She believes Democrats have essentially missed their window to sell the legislative accomplishments, such as the semiconductor plan and the infrastructure bill, ahead of the November elections.
She is advising the Harris campaign team to focus on future proposals such as the expanded child tax credit that expired.
“Really, if I could do one thing, it would be child care. It’ll make the biggest difference in our economy,” she said.
Her “why,” at least through November, is squarely on defeating Trump, whom she called “unpatriotic” and whom she compared to fascist regimes for his attempts to destroy faith in independent media.
She rejected the thoughts from book reviewers that her book title was meant as a tweak on Trump’s original best-selling memoir in the 1980s, “The Art of the Deal.”
“Nothing that I do has anything to do with him, except his downfall,” Pelosi said.
She treasures some friendships with GOP elder statesmen. George W. Bush is a legitimate friend who hosted her at an event early last year, and Pelosi still hasn’t cooked the steaks that Elizabeth Dole sent her three years ago after she visited Bob Dole before he died.
But she’s got no time for new friendships with younger Republicans who like Trump. Pelosi recalled several of the first-term Republicans from New York asking her to attend events tied to their shared Italian heritage.
“When you’re not there, maybe I’ll come,” Pelosi responded to the crew, several of whom are in swing districts that will determine the majority.
She declined their pleas.
“I do not like you. I’m out to get you, I’m out to get you,” she said. “Your defeat is my goal.”