Nancy Pelosi’s Art of Power

Johnson, of course, had a radically more domineering style—and not only when contending with senators foolish enough to resist his will. He was also a terror with people “unable to defend themselves,” Caro wrote in his biography of L.B.J. “Storming into a hotel kitchen, a towering figure holding a large steak in one hand and waving it in a cook’s face, he raged: ‘Who told you you were a cook? Didn’t you ever hear of cutting the fat off? I’ve never seen so much fat on a steak in my life.’ ”

Pelosi’s methods of persuasion are, it is fair to say, significantly less beastly, yet Johnson would surely appreciate her brand of Machiavellian arm-twisting. And right now, as we witness the transformative results of Joe Biden’s decision to stand aside in the 2024 election and cede the nomination to Kamala Harris, it is worth remembering Pelosi’s interview on July 10th on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Her stated reason for appearing was to stand beside, and promote, the cause of freedom in Belarus with the dissident politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

“That’s why I went on the show,” Pelosi insisted when we spoke for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Pelosi is gifted in many things; one of them is keeping a straight face while shovelling a certain amount of barnyard material on your wingtips. She told me, still maintaining an even gaze, that she thought she might actually escape the studio without anyone asking about Biden. “I was hoping not,” she told me. “I was going to talk my way through my five minutes and get out of there.”

Sure. Pelosi went on to say that she had been “startled” by Biden’s performance in the June 27th debate with Donald Trump, that she had “never” seen him in such an alarming and confused state. “In fact, earlier in the day, when I was with the members, they were, like, Oh, how’s it going to be? ‘Trump will be so awful,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about it. The Joe Biden of the State of the Union is going to show up. It’s going to be great.’ In fact, I didn’t even want him to be in a debate. . . . I said, [Trump’s] doggy doo-doo. You’re going to get doggy doo-doo on your shoe. It’s not a good thing. You can’t. We’re just talking shorthand here, right? You can’t do that. But [Biden] was going to do it. He felt great. And I had confidence in him. I didn’t think it wouldn’t be good. I just didn’t want him to be seen with that guy. And then that happened, and I think everybody was stunned. It was stunning.”

And so, on “Morning Joe,” when asked, inevitably, about Biden’s prickly reluctance to give up the race, Pelosi responded as if the President had not said, over and over, that he had no intention of giving in to the calls for him to step aside. “It’s up to the President to decide if he’s going to run,” she said evenly for the cameras. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short. . . . He’s beloved, he’s respected, and people want him to make that decision.” And then, to make sure her audience of one got the message, she added, “I want him to do whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is. Whatever he decides, we go with.”

Pelosi did not deny the craft or the intent of what she had done. Countless members of the commentariat and more than a few politicians had already pressed Biden to call off his campaign, but, after Pelosi’s breakfast-time performance, something began to give way, perhaps even in the Biden household. Pelosi’s message delivery was arguably as essential to Biden’s decision to stand aside as the moment at the conclusion of the Watergate scandal when, on August 7, 1974, the Republican congressional heavies Barry Goldwater, John Rhodes, and Hugh Scott went to the White House to make it plain to Richard Nixon that he had lost all support on the Hill. On August 8th, Nixon announced that he would resign.

Without quite admitting to playing a singularly decisive role in the Biden drama—and it would be uncharacteristically vain to do so—Pelosi told me, “Here’s the thing: I’ve known Joe Biden for over forty years, since I was chair of the California Democratic Party, and I love him so much. I think he’s been, really, a fantastic President of the United States. I really wanted him to make a decision for a better campaign, because they were not facing the fact of what was happening. . . . We couldn’t see it go down the drain, because Trump was going to be President and then he was going to take the House. Imagine! Imagine how that would be! Well, we don’t have to imagine. We saw.”

When I pressed Pelosi to talk in greater detail about her language on “Morning Joe,” she looked at me silently, unblinking. Finally, as the silence expanded past the boundary of awkward, I said, “You’re looking at me and waiting for this moment to pass.”

“Yeah, but I’m trying to think of why you’re even asking it, because, you know, I’m not going to answer it the way that you want,” Pelosi said. “I didn’t plan to do that on [‘Morning Joe.’] In fact, if I did, I probably would’ve worn a different suit or something, because I didn’t look too professional.”

“It was like you felt his pain,” I said.

Then Pelosi dropped her calculated reserve. “I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she admitted. “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The President has to make the decision for that to happen. People were calling. I never called one person. I kept true to my word. Any conversation I had, it was just going to be with him. I never made one call. They said I was burning up the lines, I was talking to Chuck [Schumer]. I didn’t talk to Chuck at all.

“I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next.” Her goal, she added, was simple: “That Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”

To those around her who were saying her appearance on “Morning Joe” gave them the “space” to call on Biden to leave the campaign—the “permission structure,” as D.C. lingo now has it—she counselled, Wait for the NATO summit to end; no need to embarrass the President with so many foreign leaders in the country. But then, “We need the President to make the decision.”

Which is precisely what happened. On July 21st, ten days after the NATO summit ended, Biden issued a statement via social media announcing his withdrawal.

Pelosi said she has not been in contact with the President since that dramatic Sunday, and I asked her if she thought her long relationship with him would survive.

“I hope so,” she said. “I pray so. I cry so.”

Do you worry about it?

“I lose sleep on it, yeah.”

Do you think he’s angry at you?

“I don’t know. We haven’t had a conversation. But . . .”

What kind of state do you think he’s in now?

“I think he’s in a good state,” Pelosi said. “I mean, I think he did a remarkable thing, bringing home all these prisoners. Oh, my God, that was so masterful. . . . But my understanding is that he’s good. And the thing is that his legacy will go right down the drain if what’s-his-name ever [returns to] the White House. Whether it’s the planet, whether it’s fairness in our economy, whether it’s the safety of our children . . .”

Since stepping down from her leadership position in the House, Pelosi has had time to write “The Art of Power,” a memoir about her role in various pieces of major legislation. She is also a degree less disciplined in her criticism of other political figures. In the wake of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s recent admission to Clare Malone, of The New Yorker, that, yes, at the age of sixty, he pulled a prank by stashing a dead bear cub in Central Park, I asked her if that would be her own response to such generously proportioned roadkill. “If worms have infiltrated your brain,” she said.

What did you make of that story? I asked.

“So strange,” she said. “It’s really so sad. But he has a name and he’s got the anti-vaxxers. So he commands some attention—but it’s so sad. It’s really a tragedy.”

Pelosi has also had more time to spend with her children and her husband, Paul, who is still recovering from a near-fatal attack. In October, 2022, a forty-two-year-old assailant named David DePape broke into the family’s house, in San Francisco, saying, “Where’s Nancy?” It was the same question heard among the insurrectionists on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, when they went hunting for the Speaker and other politicians who they thought were blocking Trump from the Presidency. DePape’s intent was to kidnap Pelosi, but, after he discovered that her husband was home alone, had to content himself with attacking him with a hammer. Pelosi said that her husband is “about eighty per cent” recovered, but that the shattering blow to his skull still has “ramifications” and requires continued therapy and time to heal.

“It’s a horrible thing,” Pelosi told me. “The physical damage is one thing. There’s also the trauma of it all for our children, our grandchildren. It’s really sad. It happened in our home. In our home.” She said it was still “creepy” to be in the bedroom or the garden room “where he banged his way in.” “We wouldn’t go there for a long, long time,” she said. “To tell you the truth, David, we’ve never ever had this conversation about what happened that night. What I know about it is what was testified to in court and what’s in the public domain. . . . The doctor said he doesn’t want him to revisit it. But, apart from that, I think he knows it would be very painful to me to hear what he went through. The guy was after me—and he gets my husband? Really?”

Pelosi is eighty-four and known as Speaker Emerita. She could have retreated to a well-padded retirement. Her husband has made a fortune as an investor, and, in addition to the house in San Francisco, there is a vineyard in Napa Valley. But, she said, “one of the reasons I ran again was to make sure that Donald Trump never stepped foot in the White House again. He is a danger to our democracy, whether they like that characterization or not. He’s a danger to the air our children breathe, the water they drink, their safety in terms of gun-violence prevention. Freedom of choice, the size, the timing of your family—all that.” After their many confrontations between 2016 and 2020, Pelosi says she has not encountered Trump again. “Oh, my God, what a horrible thought,” she said. “He knows he’s an impostor. He knows he shouldn’t be President of the United States.”

After an hour of conversation, Pelosi seemed to come up with a credo that was in line with Johnson. “You take a punch, but you have to be willing to throw a punch. For the children.”

Throw a punch—for the children?

Pelosi recalled a saying she’d once come across: “It said, ‘When one day I go happily to meet my creator, he will say to me, “Show me your wounds.” And if I have no wounds he will say, “Was nothing worth fighting for?” ’ You’ve got to be proud of your wounds.”