Former President Donald Trump called Speaker Nancy Pelosi an “animal” at a rally near Dayton, Ohio on the eve of the midterm elections.
Mr Trump, appearing at the event to boost Republican Senate candidate JD Vance, lashed out at Ms Pelosi less than two weeks after the Speaker’s husband Paul Pelosi was brutally assaulted in a politically-motivated attack in the couple’s San Francisco home.
“Nancy Pelosi said please don’t call them animals, they’re human beings,” Mr Trump said, referring to alleged members of the MS-13 gang. “I said no, they’re animals. Of course, I think she’s an animal, too, if you want to know the truth.”
Mr Trump, who again said on Monday night that he is exceedingly likely to run for president again in 2024, told the assembled crowd that Ms Pelosi impeached him twice for “no reason.”
Mr Trump’s decision to call Ms Pelosi an animal comes as a number of observers have again noted a link in the rise in violence against elected officials and their families to his rise to power in the Republican Party and rhetoric in office and on the stump.
But that did not seem to deter Mr Trump on Monday, much as similar warnings have done little to deter him since he launched his only successful campaign for the presidency in 2015.
“They’ll [the media] say, these people, the fakers back there, ‘What a horrible thing. He called Nancy Pelosi an animal.’ Let me tell you — what she does to this country, and the turmoil ... and yet, we got more done as an administration and a president than just about any president in the history of our country in four years,” Mr Trump said.
The crowd responded to his rambling statement about Ms Pelosi and his administration’s achivements by cheering and shouting “USA!”
Mr Trump and Ms Pelosi had an extremely fractious relationship when Mr Trump was in the White House, with Ms Pelosi’s anger at the former president boiling over when she threatened to “punch him out” if he came to the Capitol during the January 6 riot that he is now under investigation for inciting.
Ms Pelosi later said she had no regrets about making that threat.
“That’s right,” Ms Pelosi told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “I would have punched him out. I said I would have punched him out. I would have gone to jail. And I would have been happy to do so.”
