As speaker of the US House, Nancy Pelosi bested Donald Trump in budget battles, mocked him at the State of the Union and won an outsized place in his brain. The self-proclaimed “very stable genius” taunted her as “crazy Nancy” while she scorched him as a “psychopathic nut”. A mother of five, grandmother to 10, she knew a bit about unruly children.
Hakeem Jeffries now leads House Democrats but Pelosi, 84, still has clout. Ask Joe Biden. Pelosi recently helped engineer his exit from the presidential race.
“I wasn’t asking him to step down,” she said recently. “I was asking for a campaign that can win. And I wasn’t seeing that on the horizon.”
The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House is Pelosi’s second memoir. With assists from Aaron Bennett, her speechwriter and communications director, and the author Lyric Winik, she delivers a drily written but illuminating read.
Pelosi conveys her anguish over the October 2022 attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi, by David DePape, a far-right conspiracy theorist who repeated the shouts of pro-Trump insurrectionists as he broke into the Pelosi home.
“The same taunting chants and jeers of, ‘Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?’ … echoed through the hallowed halls of the Capitol on January 6 would less than two years later echo through our family home.”
The daughter of a Baltimore mayor, Pelosi knows how to hold a political grudge. She recalls how Donald Trump Jr mocked the attack: “On Twitter (now X) he shared a meme with a hammer with the tagline, ‘Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.’”
Less than two years later, Thomas Matthew Crooks fired at Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, coming within inches of killing him. The Trump era comes with spasms of violence – a reality Pelosi laments.
She takes pains to describe her rapport with Republicans. She describes the late senator and presidential candidate John McCain as a friend, recounting how he shared his opposition to repealing the Affordable Care Act, AKA Obamacare, a key GOP aim when Trump was in the White House.
“On the day of the Senate vote,” Pelosi begins, “McCain said, ‘Nancy, I … know what is going on.’ He also told me that, under the circumstances, his vote would be no. I kept his comment a secret from everyone.”
McCain died the following year.
Pelosi also recalls working with John Boehner, an Ohio Republican and speaker, and Hank Paulson, treasury secretary under George W Bush, to craft a rescue during the 2008 financial crisis. Pelosi’s relationship with the younger Bush was fraught, yet she squashed Democratic moves to impeach him over Iraq – a move Trump advocated.
Not surprisingly, Pelosi does not discuss how before the crash, she and Boehner disregarded Paulson’s objections to enlarging government guarantees of jumbo mortgages.
“In a meeting with Pelosi and Boehner, Pelosi told Paulson they were going to raise the limits,” Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera reported in All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. “She said it in a way that suggested he would be unable to stop her. Then she laughingly showed him a note that Boehner had slipped her. ‘Let’s roll Hank,’ it said.”
Other Republicans are targets for Pelosi. “The House of Representatives, as run by Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich, was not a healthy place for children and other living things.” Zing!
Pelosi also focuses on China-US relations and human rights, writing: “But if I do say so immodestly, my knowledge of China is second to none in Congress.”
She takes to task administrations that turned a blind eye to human rights abuses. She castigates George HW Bush for giving China a pass after the bloodbath at Tiananmen Square in 1989 but also tags Max Baucus, a former Democratic senator from Montana, for touting a future China that never was.
Mockingly, she quotes him: most favored nation status “in place, China will become the great, respected nation that we all hoped to see”. Later, Pelosi and Baucus would be forced to join forces, to enact healthcare reform.
As for Trump, she captures his indifference to the plight of the Uyghurs, China’s oppressed Muslim minority. She conveyed the concerns of both Democratic and Republican leaders to Trump, and asked that he raise the issue with Xi Jinping.
“After the meeting, President Trump reported back to me that when he asked President Xi about the Uyghurs, Xi had responded, ‘Those people like being in those camps.’ To which I replied, ‘That’s what authoritarians always say.’”
Trump is enamored by strongmen. Heck, he wants to be one. He has called for voiding the US constitution and making himself dictator for a day. He pursues bromances with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un.
He has also heaped praise on the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, who recently stole an election. In a recent interview, Trump gave Maduro props for his supposed law enforcement skills.
“If you look at Caracas, it was known for being a very dangerous city, and now it’s very safe,” Trump said. “It’s safer than many of our cities.”
For the record, the Global Organized Crime Index gives Venezuela the world’s highest crime rate.
Back in Congress, Pelosi sits on, representing San Francisco, 37 years in the job. She has seen her fair share of history.
More than three years ago, at 3.42am on 7 January 2021, she was there when the rioters were spent and cleared, the formal challenges to electoral college results were done, and Joe Biden’s election victory had been secured.
Pelosi declared: “To those who strove to deter us from our responsibility, ‘You have failed.’”
As we know now, Trump came back for seconds. On election day, we will know if Pelosi has helped to beat him back once again.
The Art of Power is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
• This article was amended on 19 August 2024 because George W Bush’s treasury secretary was Hank Paulson, not John Paulson as an earlier version said.
