Nancy Pelosi wants you to know she wields power

Jackie Calmes, Tribune News Service

Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s new book about major events of her two decades as House speaker or Democratic leader is titled “The Art of Power” — an unintended, she insisted to me, echo of Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” She writes of the actual, consequential deals she helped deliver, like the Affordable Care Act and rescue packages after the global financial crash, and of the deals that Trump failed to make on infrastructure and so much more.

And Pelosi also tells of her amazement that, of the four presidents she served alongside as House leader, people only want to know about Trump, or “What’s-his-name,” as she calls him.

That should be a small wonder, however, given Trump’s outsized impact and ongoing threat, and her famed forte: standing up to him like no one else. Pelosi provides some behind-the-curtain stuff, including about Trump’s “whiny” call to her in 2019 begging her not to impeach him over his “perfect” call to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, and how she corrected him when he opened his first White House meeting with congressional leaders by lying, “You know I won the popular vote.”

“I’ve had a lot of conversations with this man,” she writes, “and at the end of nearly all of them, I think, Either you are stupid, or you think that the rest of us are.”

Yet as Pelosi hit the book-promotion circuit, there’s been a shift: Now she is asked mostly about another president: Joe Biden. And specifically, about her latest power play, one too recent to be included in the book: Her role in nudging the struggling Biden, her (former?) friend of four decades, to end his bid for reelection.

Pelosi, ever cagey, won’t go there, though she leaves much to read between her carefully chosen lines.

Her book rollout, with TV appearances and interviews, and nondisclosure agreements to control it all, is competing for attention with the new Harris-Walz Democratic presidential ticket she greatly helped into being.

“Look at the response they are getting!” she exclaimed to me and several other journalists at a roundtable on Wednesday. But she resists any credit for the excitement: “At some point I will come to … peace with my own role in this.”

Though “hundreds” of panicky Democrats called her after Biden’s calamitous debate with Trump, she said she spoke to few and told them to direct their concerns to the president’s circle. “I didn’t make one call,” to build outside pressure on Biden, she said, and repeated for emphasis. Yet she was the obvious emissary to the president himself, given their relationship, similar age — at 82 in 2022, she’d stepped down as Democratic leader — and, yes, her artful exercise of power.

As Biden stood fast, some of Pelosi’s closest allies, including California Reps. Adam B. Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, urged him to retire. “I had nothing to do with that,” she insisted on CNN. And she adamantly denies reports that on a call with Biden she demanded that he put a top advisor on the phone when the president said his staff had more encouraging polling data.

Pelosi does acknowledge she spoke to Biden: “I was really asking for a better campaign. We did not have a campaign that was on a path to victory.”

She wouldn’t take Biden’s public no for his final decision, she told us.

Referring to Trump, and slamming the table with each word, she added: “My goal in life was that that man would never step foot in the White House again.” Yet Democrats seemed to be throwing “rose petals” in his path, and endangering their other down-ballot candidates as well. Then what of Biden’s legacy, and hers?

Since Biden quit the race July 21, Pelosi says she hasn’t spoken with him. Perhaps to foster a rapprochement, she extols him in each interview. He’s “a Mount Rushmore kind of president,” she said on “CBS Sunday Morning.”

Trump, who in 2020 actually tweeted a photo of himself on Mount Rushmore, of course gets no such elevation in Pelosi’s book.

Despite Biden’s debate performance, Pelosi says she’s seen no mental decline in him. Trump is another case, literally. Pelosi writes of attending a memorial service for an eminent psychiatrist and being a magnet for the many doctors there, expressing concern to her for Trump’s mental health. His family and staff “should have staged an intervention,” she writes.

“I knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. I had seen it up close. His denial and then delays when the Covid pandemic struck, his penchant for repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots, and his total separation from reality and actual events. His repeated, ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time.”

Take it from a true GOAT, Trump is not one.

Trump did succeed in keeping Pelosi in Congress. She’d planned to retire after 2016, once Hillary Clinton was elected. When that didn’t happen, Pelosi stayed mainly to prevent Trump from repealing Obamacare. Arizona Sen. John McCain confided to her that he’d oppose repeal, so she wasn’t surprised, as Mitch McConnell and so many Republicans were, when McCain’s thumbs-down doomed the effort. “Every day, I wish he were still here,” Pelosi writes.

She is explicit that her book isn’t a memoir. Pelosi focuses at length on four tortuous debates: Iraq and Afghanistan; China’s trade and human abuses; the financial crisis and recovery efforts; and Obamacare. Bookending those chapters are accounts of the near-fatal bludgeoning of her husband, Paul, in 2022 and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. In both, the pro-Trump attackers yelled “Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?”

She’s still here, running for a 20th term representing San Francisco. And she might write another book, she suggested. It might even deal with what might have been among the most artful and consequential uses of her power, the one of past weeks.