January 6, 2021
PROTESTERS [chanting]:
USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
MALE PROTESTER:
Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!
MALE PROTESTER:
Nancy Pelosi! Where you at, Nancy? Nancy! Nancy, we’re coming for you! Where are you, Nancy? We're looking for you!
PROTESTERS [chanting]:
Nancy! Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!
SUSAN PAGE, Author, Madam Speaker:
It was like a monster movie, or like a horror film.
PROTESTERS [chanting]:
Nancy! Nancy! Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!
SUSAN PAGE:
“Nancy, where’s Nancy?”
MALE PROTESTER:
Oh, look what we have here.
PROTESTERS [chanting]:
Nancy! Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!
SUSAN PAGE:
That was pretty ominous.
FEMALE PROTESTER:
Where is she?
MICHAEL LONG, Fmr. Pelosi senior adviser:
I knew that we really had a problem.
MALE PROTESTER:
Can I speak to Pelosi? Yeah, we're coming, bitch.
MICHAEL LONG:
There was an intent to harm in the voices.
MALE PROTESTER:
Check this out. We are inside her, Nancy Pelosi's office.
SUSAN PAGE:
I asked her if that made her afraid. Nancy said that they would've had a fight on their hands. They would've had a battle on their hands, because she's a street fighter. And then she lifts up her foot. And you know she always wears those four-inch stiletto heels. And she points at her shoe and says, “Besides, I could've used these as weapons.”
The next day . . .
MALE NEWSREADER:
National Guard has been called in to the Capitol. The Capitol is secure now.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Tensions are still high following the chaos at the Capitol.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Our nation's Capitol under a state of emergency under a citywide lockdown.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Law enforcement has surrounded and secured the U.S. Capitol.
REP. ANNA ESHOO (D-CA):
Nancy understood that it was the defilement of the tabernacle of our democracy.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Busloads of National Guards outside the Capitol. Order has been restored. The security perimeter has been put back up.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Approximately 1,800 troops are deployed around the Capitol perimeter to prevent any more violence.
ANNA ESHOO:
There is, to her, a real sacredness to it.
REP. RAHM EMANUEL (D-IL), 2003-09:
And everything that she knows in life Jan. 6 upended. That a president of the United States is responsible for an insurrection.
NANCY PELOSI:
Good afternoon. My friends, we are in a very difficult place in our country as long as Donald Trump still sits in the White House.
MOLLY BALL, Author, Pelosi:
She really saw him as so reckless and dangerous. It was such a white-knuckle moment. Whatever the rules said, you just had to hold down the fort and make sure this thing didn’t get further out of hand.
NARRATOR:
Alarmed, Pelosi called the top general at the Pentagon, Mark Milley.
"Peril" by Woodward & Costa
MALE VOICE [reading book excerpt]:
Unexpectedly, Milley’s executive officer came into the office and passed him a handwritten note: “Speaker Pelosi would like to speak to you ASAP."
ROBERT COSTA, Co-author, Peril:
When you read that transcript, you’re taken into a moment of pure crisis in American history. It is an amazing historical moment to be in on the call with Pelosi and Milley.
MALE VOICE [reading book excerpt]:
“What precautions are available,” Pelosi asked, “to prevent an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or from accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike?“
ROBERT COSTA:
Pelosi, at her core, is a realist. She believes the country needs to be protected. She was going to do something.
MALE VOICE [reading book excerpt]:
“He’s crazy and what he did yesterday is further evidence of his craziness.”
"Madam Speaker," Milley said. "I agree with you on everything."
ROBERT COSTA:
Pelosi takes charge. She goes to Schumer and she says, “We need to get Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment.”
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY), Senate Majority Leader:
We thought he didn’t belong as president, and so our goal was to reach the vice president and ask him to invoke the 25th Amendment, which allows the Cabinet to replace the president under dire circumstances. This was dire.
ROBERT COSTA:
And they call up Pence. The phone rings and rings.
CHUCK SCHUMER:
We asked for the vice president. We were waiting there for 20 minutes on the phone.
ROBERT COSTA:
Pence won’t take the call.
CHUCK SCHUMER:
Our thoughts were the vice president was scared and ducking it and not living up to his responsibility.
ROBERT COSTA:
Pelosi turns to Schumer and says, "If he's not going to take this call, we need to move toward impeachment."
JUDY LEMONS, Fmr. Pelosi Chief of Staff:
There was a total void of leadership in our country at that moment. Nancy Pelosi was the one leading the country in that moment. She had to be the one dealing with this crisis. And that’s what she did.
MATT BAI, The Washington Post:
She found herself in a singular position of power, with a singular responsibility at this crucial and dangerous moment, and that was not an accident. That was a long time coming.
NARRATOR:
Nancy Pelosi, the first woman speaker of the House, second in line to the presidency, at a perilous time, the most powerful woman in American politics.
EUGENE ROBINSON, The Washington Post:
You really have to start with who she is. She grew up in the rough-and-tumble of Baltimore politics, where her father was mayor.
EUGENE ROBINSON:
So she’s a very down-to-earth politician. And she’s very tough.
EUGENE ROBINSON:
She’s very pragmatic in a lot of ways, but she’s very determined. She can be very magnetic and the sort of person you naturally perceive as a leader and that people are willing to follow.
1987
PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN:
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
HOMER SIMPSON:
Good drink, good meat, good God, let's eat.
LARRY KRAMER:
We cannot wait 10 years. AIDS patients don't have enough time to live.
MALE NEWSREADER:
—with revelation that his wife, Tammy, was addicted to prescription drugs.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Here in San Fransisco, the Democrat Nancy Pelosi defeated Harry Britt, a city supervisor who is gay.
Pelosi is now favored to win a June runoff election against a Republican challenger.
REP. JIM WRIGHT (D-TX):
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi would raise her right hand. Do you solemnly swear that you—
MOLLY BALL:
When she arrived in Congress in 1987, there were 23 women in the 435-member House of Representatives.
CHRISTINE PELOSI, Daughter:
That's a very, very, very small group. Easy to get talked over. Easy to get ignored. Easy to get second-guessed and one-upped all the time. That's just the nature of it.
JIM WRIGHT:
So help you God?
NANCY PELOSI:
I do.
JIM WRIGHT:
You are a member of the House of Representatives.
CHUCK SCHUMER:
The first time I met Nancy Pelosi she had just won an election. I think it was a special election in San Francisco. We had a little dinner group, 10 or 12. We’d go to dinner Tuesday night, usually in an Italian restaurant.
ANNA ESHOO:
They called it the Gang. And Tuesday nights they would always have dinner, all kinds of conversations.
"Know Your Power" by Pelosi & Hearth
NANCY PELOSI [reading]:
On Tuesday evenings, I would often have dinner with a group of members of Congress. The men never turned and asked, “What do you think?” Never.
ANNA ESHOO:
They would talk right over you. Talk right over you. And there is that famous conversation of the guys talking about when their children were born and how difficult it was for them. [Laughs] So Nancy remembers it well.
"Know Your Power" by Pelosi & Hearth
NANCY PELOSI [reading]:
All the men were discussing their experiences with childbirth. Meanwhile, we women were sort of elbowing each other, trying not to laugh. We were all thinking, well, now surely they’ll ask us. It never happened. Eleven childbirths among us, and not once did it occur to the men that we might have something to contribute on the subject.
JUDY LEMONS:
When you think of the entrenched paternalism and crude sexism, that's what she came into. A totally paternalistic society with a lot of crudeness.
NARRATOR:
Nancy Pelosi was used to being surrounded by men. She grew up the only girl among five brothers and a powerful father, the newly elected mayor of Baltimore.
SUSAN PAGE:
When her father won that first election for mayor of Baltimore, they had a family portrait painted of victory night. At the center of the portrait is not her father, the mayor, or her mother or any of her brothers. It’s her. They’re all in dark clothes. She’s in this iridescent white dress.
ANNA ESHOO:
Nancy was the baby and the only girl. So she was extraordinarily special.
MOLLY BALL:
She’s on the front page of the newspaper the day after she’s born. “It’s A Girl For The D’Alesandros” is the headline after they’d had five boys. So there’s never a time when she’s not in the spotlight.
NARRATOR:
The woman she would become had a lot to do with her mother. She was known as "Big Nancy."
SUSAN PAGE:
She sees her mother being thwarted. Her mother, who her whole life wanted to go to law school and never could, and who wanted to buy some property in Ocean City, Maryland, and her husband wouldn’t let her. So her mother was this restless and in some ways unsatisfied person.
CHRISTINE PELOSI:
My grandmother was a tour de force behind the scenes. She was in some ways the tough one behind the scenes so that my grandfather could be more gregarious out in person.
REBECCA TRAISTER, Author, Good and Mad:
For women raised in Pelosi's generation, the message was that the highest thing you could aspire to, and should aspire to, was married motherhood. And that wanting anything besides motherhood was a kind of violation of feminine expectation.
CHRISTINE PELOSI:
So when my mother wanted to go to Washington, D.C., for college, my grandfather said, "No, over my dead body." And my grandmother apparently said, "Tom, that can be arranged." So my mother went off to college in Washington, D.C.
MOLLY BALL:
And then she met Paul Pelosi, and when he asked her to marry him, she said yes. And so that was sort of it in those days. You got married and you followed your husband and you started having babies. He pursued a career in finance and moves to San Francisco.
SUSAN PAGE:
She was happy to fall in love with Paul Pelosi and to have five children in six years, which as she says is a pretty remarkable feat. She called it "the Catholic way.”
1969-1984
TV COMMERCIAL:
[Singing] You’ve come a long way, baby.
FEMALE ANNOUNCER:
Introducing new Virginia Slims, the slim cigarette for women only.
SHIRLEY CHISHOLM:
I stand before you today as a candidate for the presidency of the United States of America.
HOWARD COSELL:
Live from the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, the tennis battle of the sexes, Billie Jean King versus Bobby Riggs.
DOLORES HUERTA:
Abajo! Down with sexism! Abajo! Sí se puede! Sí se puede!
RUTH BADER GINSBURG:
Fear must not deter us now, for the Equal Rights Amendment represents the highest American ideal.
MALE ANNOUNCER:
Our choice, our next vice president, Geraldine Ferraro.
REBECCA TRAISTER:
In that period, Nancy Pelosi never lost her interest in politics through the years in which she was having babies and raising them as a stay-at-home mother. She described on Halloween going with the stroller brigade, pamphleting apartments.
CHRISTINE PELOSI:
Wherever there was a meeting of Democratic Party officials at a barbecue or a fundraiser or a veterans' parade, we were there, all five of us, loaded up in the car and my mom driving us around. So she was the key volunteer.
NARRATOR:
In 1987, with the kids grown, an opportunity: an open congressional seat. She'd follow in her father’s footsteps, run for office.
RAHM EMANUEL:
Just one thing you need to know about Nancy. Nancy is more D’Alesandro than she is Pelosi. And she’s always her father’s daughter.
SUSAN PAGE:
Nancy Pelosi is more comfortable with power than any other person I have ever covered. She grew up in a household where power was like electricity and running water. From the day she was born, she was in a family that was accustomed to seeking power, holding power and using power. And it's in her bones.
DAVID AXELROD, Fmr. Obama chief strategist:
I asked her once, "Well, what'd you learn from your father?" She didn’t hesitate. She said, "I learned how to count." She was trained at the ward level about how to count votes, how to get votes and how to produce a result.
MOLLY BALL:
She was also, from an early age, involved in the "favor file" that was kept in the parlor of their row house on Albemarle Street.
CHRISTINE PELOSI:
In their house, when someone would knock on the door, my mom, from a very young age, would know how to get somebody a hot meal, a job, how to get somebody in jail or out of jail, depending on the circumstance.
MOLLY BALL:
And then their name would be kept on file for when the next election came around and the mayor needed a favor in return. So she was in charge of that from the time she was about 11.
SUSAN PAGE:
And when she decided in 1987 to run for this congressional seat, she was taking the role her father had played as the candidate herself.
MOLLY BALL:
She believed, from her years watching her father get elected, the campaign was won on the ground.
NANCY PELOSI:
We have a masterful organization plan.
MOLLY BALL:
That it was the work that you did, block by block.
MALE CAMPAIGN VOLUNTEER:
We were attempting to reach 15,000 people by the end of this weekend.
MOLLY BALL:
Finding your volunteers.
FEMALE CAMPAIGN VOLUNTEER:
Can I tell you a little bit about Nancy Pelosi?
MOLLY BALL:
Finding each individual voter.
NANCY PELOSI:
How are you? I'm Nancy Pelosi. I'm running for Congress.
ANNA ESHOO:
I remember her brother Tommy flying out to San Francisco because her mother and father wanted to know how the campaign was going.
WOMAN:
Nancy, good morning!
ANNA ESHOO:
So he came out. He surveyed everything. He went home and reported to his mother and father that she had a superb ground operation. And superb it was.
1991-2002
HILLARY CLINTON:
Join me and the president in working for fundamental change in America’s health care system.
ANITA HILL:
I felt I had a duty to report. I have no personal vendetta against Clarence Thomas.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON:
I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.
TOM BROKAW:
The Democrats make a little history of their own by voting for Nancy Pelosi of California, the first female party leader ever.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Pelosi has spent her 15 years in the House crusading for liberal causes—abortion rights, AIDS funding, the environment.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
And Pelosi supporters say having her at the top of the party will energize women voters, who are key to Democratic victories.
REP. STEVE ISRAEL (D-NY), 2001-17:
She truly believed that that old generation of bulls, of white dudes automatically entitled to become the whip, the leader, the speaker—enough of that. That that just represented a different time in American history. It was her time.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
And at age 62, Nancy Pelosi reveled in making history.
NANCY PELOSI:
I’m not finished yet. [Laughter] I’ve been waiting over 200 years for this! [Laughter]
MALE NEWSREADER:
For Pelosi, winning the leader's race could be the easy part. Then she'll try to unite a party that's in disarray.
NARRATOR:
By 2006, the Democrats had lost six congressional elections in a row. As minority leader, Pelosi was determined to change that.
EUGENE ROBINSON:
One thing that Nancy Pelosi has never been accused of is bringing a knife to a gunfight. If the game is everybody to their corners, then we're going to play that game, and we're going to win that game.
MOLLY BALL:
Nancy Pelosi came up in a historical era where you increasingly did see politics as combat. So she always said, “Every morning I put on a suit of armor, eat nails for breakfast and go out and do battle.”
NARRATOR:
To help lead the battle to win back the House she elevated a brash young congressman, Rahm Emanuel.
RAHM EMANUEL:
I was her wingman and it was about winning. That was what we were about. It was about taking the majority and winning. I said, “To do this, I'm going to have to push in a way that is going to ruffle a lot of people.” She goes, “That's why I'm selecting you.”
DAVID AXELROD:
It was absolutely a brilliant thing to do, because Rahm is a heat-seeking missile. Much like Pelosi, when he gets a target in his mind, he’s relentless.
MOLLY BALL:
She was making procedural changes to the way that the caucus operated in order to enforce more party unity in order to get the Democrats more unified.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Pelosi’s blunt style is polarizing, but she’s used it to pull off something nobody thought was possible: organizing the congressional Democrats. Under her leadership they voted as a bloc against the Republicans almost 90% of the time.
SUSAN GLASSER, The New Yorker:
It was kind of shocking, actually, for Pelosi, early on in her tenure as a leader, to go to Democratic members and ream them out, to chide them for co-sponsoring bills with members of the other party.
REP. ERIC CANTOR (R-VA), Fmr. House Majority Leader:
Nancy Pelosi sent the word out to her members that they shouldn't be cooperating at all with the other side, just like she didn't, because they didn't want to give our members any shot at claiming legislative victories in the political game. She's a no-holds-barred politician that was about partisan warfare 100% of the time. Rahm Emanuel helped put that on steroids for her on the floor of the House.
October 2006
LESLEY STAHL:
You have called your Republican colleagues immoral, corrupt. You say they’re running a criminal enterprise.
NANCY PELOSI:
Well, actually, when I called them those names I was being gentle. There are much worse things I could have said about them.
SUSAN PAGE:
She learned her politics in Baltimore. Republicans were irrelevant. You do not need to worry about the Republican Party in Baltimore. Then she moves to San Francisco. You don’t need to worry about Republicans very much if you’re going to be a politician in San Francisco. It is a Democratic game.
NARRATOR:
When it came to Republicans in Washington, she saw a stark clash of values, as she made clear in interviews with FRONTLINE over the years.
NANCY PELOSI:
Well, I think it should say something about the right-wing, ideological, anti-government attitude of the Republicans. Clean air, clean water, food safety, public safety, public education, public health, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. They do not believe in the public role. They don't—bless their hearts, they do what they believe. They act upon their beliefs, and they do not believe in this.
NARRATOR:
But she needed more to beat the Republicans in the 2006 midterms. She found it in Bush’s Iraq War, a war she’d opposed from the beginning.
MALE NEWSREADER:
It’s the final word—Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The United States' invasion of Iraq is proving to be a Pandora’s box.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Now, adding to the crisis of credibility, allegations of torture.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The daily death toll has risen dramatically over the past year in Baghdad—
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Just how long are U.S. soldiers going to be in the thick of this fight?
MOLLY BALL:
She concluded early on, based on conversations with some sort of branding experts, that the most important thing to do was drive down Bush’s popularity, drive down the Republicans' popularity, cover them in mud.
GEORGE W. BUSH:
In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.
NANCY PELOSI:
As of today, 736 soldiers have died in Iraq, nearly 600 of them since the president stood before a sign that said “Mission Accomplished.”
DAVID AXELROD:
It was very clear that the war was going to become a line of demarcation, and she also saw that this was going to divide the country and it was better for the Democratic Party to be on the right side of that issue, which was in opposition.
NANCY PELOSI:
The president has dug us into a deep hole in Iraq. It is time for him to stop digging.
ERIC CANTOR:
She saw early on that the harder she fought, the more attractive she was as a leader for her caucus members so they could go home and represent to their constituents that they’re fighting hard every single day and not giving an inch.
NANCY PELOSI:
The president of the United States says, “Stay the course.” Stay the course? I don’t think so, Mr.
President. It’s time to face the facts.
CHARLIE SYKES, Fmr. conservative radio host:
She became the face and the symbol of an aggressive, progressive Democratic Party. She became a talking point on every single talk show because she was the lightning rod. She was a very polarizing figure.
RUSH LIMBAUGH:
Greetings and welcome back. Rush Limbaugh. Nancy Pelosi saying that our president is an idiot. The clown or whatever. It’s just unseemly.
REBECCA TRAISTER:
Pelosi makes a remarkably rich target for the right wing.
RUSH LIMBAUGH:
Pelosi and her crew have been trying to undermine the troops since we went into Iraq.
REBECCA TRAISTER:
She is a woman who is challenging the president and the head of the Republican Party.
RUSH LIMBAUGH:
Nancy Pelosi was stalking Bush like she wanted to have an affair. All these Democrat women wear red at the State of the Union—ever wonder what that’s all about?
REBECCA TRAISTER:
Within a capitalist white patriarchy, Nancy Pelosi is a person who is not supposed to have the authority to talk back to the president of the United States during a war. So she is a tremendous threat.
RUSH LIMBAUGH:
The long 200-year national nightmare, without a woman at the top, is now over. This is a triumph of estrogen!
JUDY LEMONS:
She's been brutally demonized, brutally. I think that toughens her up. I think that makes her even tougher. But I know it must be hard.
2006 midterms
WOLF BLITZER:
I think we are now ready to make a major projection. The Democrats will in fact win control of the House of Representatives.
EUGENE ROBINSON:
One of her modus operandi is basically that you can't do anything unless you win elections. You have to have the power in order to exercise the power.
REP. JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH):
It’s now my privilege to present the gavel of the United States House of Representatives to the first woman speaker in our history, the gentlelady from California, Nancy Pelosi.
NANCY PELOSI:
Before we move forward, because there’s so many children here, I wanted to invite as many of them who wanted to come forward to come join me up here. I know my own grandchildren will. Let’s hear it for the children! We’re here for the children. [Laughs]
MOLLY BALL:
She always says that her lodestar is the children, the children, the children.
REP. KATHERINE CLARK (D-MA), Asst. Speaker of the House:
She always talks about her top three priorities are the children, the children, the children.
JUDY LEMONS:
“Children, children, children. That’s why I came to Congress.”
CHUCK SCHUMER:
The children, she always repeats it. The children, the children.
NANCY PELOSI:
Applaud these children again!
REBECCA TRAISTER:
She describes loving motherhood. She describes loving having babies. But it’s also true that Nancy Pelosi has been one of the most powerful women in American politics. There is an attractiveness in presenting yourself as, “I am a mom. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been as a mom.”
NANCY PELOSI:
For these children, our children, and for all of America’s children, the House will come to order.
REBECCA TRAISTER:
It’s a way of sanding down the edges of “I’m the most powerful woman you’ve ever dealt with.”
2008
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The stock market dropped by hundreds of points right from the open—
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
—stock price dropped 45% Tuesday after—
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
—the second-largest financial institution ever to fail.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
And the number of U.S. banks in danger of failing is rising.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Oil’s up, gasoline’s up, food prices up, stocks way, way, way, way down.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
AIG plunging. At one point they were down 70%, now down about 50% on the trading session.
PAUL KRUGMAN, Economist, Princeton Univ.:
And this is DEFCON 4, or whatever. This was the complete nightmare. By Wednesday we basically had a complete shutdown of the world capital market. It’s just—no, this is absolute terror.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
It seems the turmoil in the mortgage market is far from over.
MALE NEWSREADER:
—seeing the risks of a recession rising. Now some say they see one lurking right around the corner.
ANNA ESHOO:
Nancy picked up the phone and called, at that time, Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson. And she said, “I’m not comfortable with what I’m reading. I think that we need to meet.”
NANCY PELOSI:
Can you come to my office tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock so that you can brief the House Democratic leadership on what’s going on and how we can be helpful? And he said, “Madam Speaker, tomorrow morning will be too late.”
September 18, 2008
JOE NOCERA, The New York Times:
On Thursday late afternoon we go to Nancy Pelosi’s office, and there’s a meeting of the senior legislators from both parties, in both House and Senate.
SEN. CHRIS DODD (D-CT), Fmr. Chair, Senate Banking Cmte.:
Sitting in that room with Hank Paulson saying to us, in very measured tones, no hyperbole, no excessive adjectives, that unless you act, the financial system of this country and the world will melt down in a matter of days.
NANCY PELOSI:
They came in, described a financial meltdown of epic proportions and when that was finished the chairman of the Fed said, “If we do not act now, we will not have an economy by Monday.”
RAHM EMANUEL:
There was like this—everybody was trying to pinch themselves or get the cobwebs out of their eyes. “What’d you say?”
NARRATOR:
Paulson wanted $700 billion to bail out Wall Street.
MOLLY BALL:
The politics of this were very fraught. They knew people weren’t going to like it. The conservatives hated it. You’re spending all this money, you’re meddling with the free market. The liberals hated it. You’re bailing out George W. Bush, who’s done all these irresponsible things and caused this to happen. Why not make him pay for his mistakes?
RAHM EMANUEL:
We’re two months before the election not only for a new president, a new Senate, a new House. If we wanted to, we could have just thrown this at George Bush. Let it collapse on George Bush’s watch. It’s two months before the election. George Bush is a Republican. Let him go. Serious.
NANCY PELOSI:
Good evening. We just had what I believe was a very productive meeting.
EUGENE ROBINSON:
Even though they were Republicans, she understood the gravity of the crisis and saw it as a matter of duty, really, and responsibility that transcended partisan politics.
JOHN LAWRENCE, Fmr. Pelosi Chief of Staff:
Speaker Pelosi told John Boehner, her Republican counterpart, "You’re going to have to put up 100 votes and we’ll put up the rest."
MOLLY BALL:
The only way to do it was to sort of hold hands and jump. This is the sort of classic bipartisan situation where if everybody agrees to do the unpopular thing, no one can be attacked for it.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The billion-dollar package to bail out the U.S. financial industry is moving ahead through Congress.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The United States Congress is set to vote on the biggest corporate bailout in history.
NARRATOR:
But Boehner’s Republicans were in revolt.
MALE NEWSREADER:
There’s a bill here, but this drama is not over.
NARRATOR:
They weren’t going to go along with him, President Bush or Nancy Pelosi.
REP. MIKE PENCE (R-IN):
I rise in opposition to the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act.
REP. SCOTT GARRETT (R-NJ):
America, you should be outraged about Washington is about to do.
REP. JOHN CULBERSON (R-TX):
It is an unprecedented and unaffordable and unacceptable expansion of federal power.
REP. LOUIE GOHMERT (R-TX):
Please, please don’t betray this nation’s great history.
MOLLY BALL:
And then the vote goes down, and the stock market crashes as it becomes clear that the Congress doesn’t have the votes to pass this bailout, and she’s watching this happen.
MALE NEWSREADER:
They didn’t pass it! They did not pass it.
MOLLY BALL:
And she mutters to herself, “We’re finished.”
MALE NEWSREADER:
And I see that the Dow traders are standing there watching in amazement, and I don’t blame them.
FEMALE REPORTER:
—and the Dow is now down 697—
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Traders say this is the craziest day they have ever seen.
CHRISTINE PELOSI:
The lesson is, you can only depend on your own votes. You can only depend on your own votes. If somebody says they're delivering other people, you can't trust that. You have to have what Nancy Pelosi calls the speaker's secret whip list that she won't reveal to anyone.
STEVE ISRAEL:
That experience where a Republican president and a Republican leader cannot deliver the votes to rescue the country from economic abyss was a turning point. If she was going to lead, she was going to have to do it by herself. She couldn’t count on her colleagues, particularly in the Republican caucus, to deliver.
NARRATOR:
Pelosi went back to work, using her power to persuade enough Democrats to help pass the bill and bail out the banks.
EUGENE ROBINSON:
The financial crisis probably was seminal in her development as a leader. She watched the evolution of the Republican caucus and watched as it became more difficult to deal with and more willing to grandstand for the Republican base. She had very little patience for that.
2008-2009
GEORGE W. BUSH:
Yeah. So what if the guy threw a shoe at me?
JON STEWART:
It’s an ugly little world up there in Washington, isn’t it? It’s not fun.
NANCY PELOSI:
But it’s not for the faint of heart to be there. It's a rough—
JON STEWART:
What happens when you see a guy from the other side and you guys look at each other and—you ever walk up to somebody, just be like, “Let’s go outside, my brother. Let’s take this thing.”
NANCY PELOSI:
[Laughs] No, just right there I go "pow."
JON STEWART:
Boom!
SARAH PALIN:
I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?
Lipstick.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Now Barack Obama takes the reins of government with Democrats also in charge of Congress by, as we’ve just seen, a hefty majority.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Democrats holding big majorities in both the House and Senate.
MALE NEWSREADER:
That means when Democrats are united, Republicans will be powerless to stop them.
SERGEANT-AT-ARMS OF THE HOUSE:
Madam Speaker, the president of the United States.
DAN BALZ, The Washington Post:
We all remember Obama said, “We’re not red America or blue America; we’re one America. We’re the United States of America.” And that was the campaign he ran. "Let’s turn the page on this ugly chapter of purely partisan politics, let’s try to bring the country together and unify the country."
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:
Madam Speaker. Mr. Vice President. Members of Congress. What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face and take responsibility for our future once more.
NARRATOR:
The test case for bipartisanship: health care reform.
BARACK OBAMA:
We can no longer afford to put health care reform on hold. We can't afford to do it. It’s time.
NARRATOR:
He could do it without Republicans, but he wanted to win them over. Nancy Pelosi knew better.
MOLLY BALL:
It was clear that she believed that he was naive. It was clear that she believed that he was too trusting, too confident. And she was telling him, “These Republicans aren’t going to help you.”
DAVID AXELROD:
She had spent years in the hothouse of Washington politics as it became more and more and more partisan. So her expectations were low.
NARRATOR:
The new president courted one Republican after another.
RAHM EMANUEL, Fmr. Obama Chief of Staff:
Obama believed that if you were going to do health care, which was a major social policy, it was better to have bipartisanship for its legitimacy.
JUDY LEMONS:
Nancy knew better than he did at that point. She had been so conditioned by that time that you couldn’t trust them. They couldn’t keep their word. "Why are you going down this path when we know that they cannot be trusted?"
NANCY PELOSI:
The Republicans were very clever in what they did. They pretended that they were interested in this. I call it "the dance of the seven veils." I’m going to be there, and then I’m not, and then I’m going to be there, then I’m not. Now you see it, now you don’t. Could I have two more weeks, three more weeks?
Hanukkah. You know, every holiday. Halloween. Thanksgiving. But it was a tactic, and a successful one, on the part of the Republicans.
FRANK LUNTZ, Longtime GOP pollster:
She was so determined to keep Republicans out of the process, and so emotionally negative. It wasn't Obama's approach that turned them off; it was actually Nancy Pelosi's approach.
REP. ERIC CANTOR (R-VA), Fmr. House Minority Whip:
So at that point, the White House was following what Nancy Pelosi wanted to do and jamming everything they wanted. They weren’t getting our help.
FRANK LUNTZ:
When Obama would give on some issue, she immediately spoke up. “We're not doing that. That's not coming out of the House.” Every time that he would say, “I'm reaching out to Republicans,” she would publicly say, “No, we aren't.”
CHARLIE SYKES:
And Republicans were very angry and they were very bitter about it. But the reality was they weren't going to work with her. There were no Republicans that were going to ultimately support this.
NARRATOR:
Across America, that anger was exploding.
MALE PROTESTER:
God will take care of health care.
MALE PROTESTER:
You dirty thieves!
RUSH LIMBAUGH:
The whole point of this is to get everybody enrolled in the government health care plan.
MALE SPEAKER:
You’ve got a plan that increases deficit spending when we already have trillion-dollar deficits.
MALE PROTESTER:
Radical communists and socialists.
MALE SPEAKER:
—that something is not right with the health care plan.
RUSH LIMBAUGH:
We now have leftist radicals in charge of your health care decisions rather than doctors. We’re hanging by a thread.
MALE PROTESTER:
Democrat or Republican or whoever, senator or congressman, vote for this bill, we will vote you out!
SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY (R-IA):
There’s a bill out of the House of Representatives, put together under Speaker Pelosi’s leadership. [Crowd booing] I’m—I would not vote for that. [Applause]
NARRATOR:
With public opinion turning, back in Washington health care reform was now imploding, even among Democrats. Pelosi headed for the White House.
MOLLY BALL:
The political advisers within the White House, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, thought, “It’s time to cut our losses, get something small done so we can save face.”
CHRISTINE PELOSI:
And Nancy Pelosi says, “Wait a second, we’ve been trying this for a generation. No, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to do what we set out to do. We’re going to do as much as we set out to do.”
MOLLY BALL:
It was really in this climactic meeting where she said in front of everyone, ”Mr. President, I know there are people telling you to take the namby-pamby approach. I’m here to tell you we can still get this done.”
SUSAN PAGE:
She basically said to Obama, “You can go big and I can tell you I can deliver this, or you can go small and you can do it yourself.”
YAMICHE ALCINDOR, Washington Week:
Nancy Pelosi, in being the first woman to be speaker of the House, wants to remind the Obama White House that she has the power to get big things done.
NANCY PELOSI:
We go through the gate. If the gate's closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we'll pole-vault in. If that doesn't work, we'll parachute in. But we're going to get health care reform passed for the American people.
CHARLIE SYKES:
When Nancy Pelosi says, “OK, the ball's at the 5-yard line. I am not going to blink on all of this,” it took Republicans by surprise. And clearly she was the driving force, not the sitting president of the United States.
NARRATOR:
Once again, as with the bailout, she exercised her power to lock down Democratic votes.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
She understands that sometimes she has to muscle lawmakers. She understands that working with Democrats means that she has to sort of twist arms and really get people to get on the same page by force.
STEVE ISRAEL:
When I would walk into her office, there’d be chocolates on the table in front of you from her beloved Ghirardelli, which is a chocolate manufacturer in her district, but there’d also be a stack of baseball bats signed by the San Francisco Giants. The message was we can do this the sweet and easy way, or we can do this the hard way. But we will do it.
NARRATOR:
For Pelosi, the time for bipartisanship with Republicans was over.
REP. CATHY McMORRIS RODGERS (R-WA):
It’s a huge piece of legislation. And it is extremely unusual that not a single Republican in the House or the Senate ultimately voted for the health care bill.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The Democrats' health care overhaul, finally, a series of votes last night put it over the top.
MALE NEWSREADER:
219 to 212, no votes from Republicans.
MALE NEWSREADER:
All Democrats, no Republicans.
BARACK OBAMA:
We are done. [Applause]
RAHM EMANUEL:
I'm pretty confident I'm speaking for the president. From the White House perspective, there would not have been a bill with the president's signature if Nancy Pelosi wasn’t the speaker of the House.
CROWD [chanting]:
Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!
CHARLIE SYKES:
One of the extraordinary things about Nancy Pelosi is that she can be aggressively partisan, but also willing to say, “I’m going to do this even if it may cost me an election.” She literally put her speakership on the line by pushing through Obamacare.
POLITICAL TV COMMERCIAL:
Once, Nancy Pelosi was safely confined to liberal San Francisco.
ROBERT COSTA:
When I would go to dinner with House Republicans in 2009, 2010, they would tell me they wanted to make Pelosi a villain.
POLITICAL TV COMMERCIAL:
Pelosi has grown into a power-hungry Goliath defying the will of—
ROBERT COSTA:
Let’s make her the target for the 2010 midterms.
POLITICAL TV COMMERCIAL:
Who can save America? You, the Pennsylvania voter! Vote May 18, the day we fight back!
ROBERT COSTA:
That’s our goal: make Pelosi the enemy.
POLITICAL TV COMMERCIAL:
—one party. Want to put the brakes on Pelosi? Vote against Roy Herron.
POLITICAL TV COMMERCIAL:
To stop Nancy Pelosi, you have to replace Gene Taylor.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
Politics is about personality.
POLITICAL TV COMMERCIAL:
Instead of working for us, he’s working for Nancy Pelosi.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
It’s also about fear.
POLITICAL TV COMMERCIAL:
Don’t let Chad Causey and Nancy Pelosi play games with our money.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
And it’s about galvanizing people and getting people excited about something.
POLITICAL TV COMMERCIAL:
Annie Kuster. Isn’t one Nancy Pelosi enough?
POLITICAL TV COMMERCIAL:
Ben Chandler: Pelosi’s lap dog.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
On the Republican side you have this real effort, this coordinated effort, to really make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a villain.
REP. JASON CHAFFETZ (R-UT):
Job number one, fire Nancy Pelosi. That ought to be job number one.
FRANK LUNTZ:
Let’s face it, Nancy Pelosi's one of the most unpopular political figures across the spectrum.
BILL O'REILLY:
—Democratic Party will be destroyed—destroyed—if it embraces Mrs. Pelosi’s vision.
JUDY LEMONS:
Number one, she was a woman.
DENNIS MILLER:
I don’t want Pelosi making calls on plastic surgery because you look at her, if she was pulled any tighter she’d be an unopened braunschweiger tube.
JUDY LEMONS:
Number two, she was a smart woman.
BILL O'REILLY:
All right, if she is, in her heart, a nice woman—
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
She has a heart? No, I’m kidding, I’m kidding!
JUDY LEMONS:
Number three, she was a smart woman from San Francisco.
SARAH PALIN:
It’s all over this country.
BILL O'REILLY:
But—she’s a San Fransisco liberal, but do you think she’s actually crazy?
SARAH PALIN:
I doubt—
JUDY LEMONS:
There’s a lot of ire that gets stirred up about that particular combination.
MALE TV ANNOUNCER:
This is an ABC News election update.
MALE NEWSREADER:
A big night for Republicans on this Election Day.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Republicans have indeed taken control of the U.S. House of Representatives. That means the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, will have to step down from that position.
ERIC CANTOR:
Obamacare was the thing that carried us into the majority, and Nancy was a big part of allowing that to happen. She's got this no-holds-barred attitude that she's going to go run the tables and the other side be damned. And that came to cost her the majority in 2010.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Outgoing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said despite the Democrats’ huge loss, she has no regrets.
NARRATOR:
On television she was pressed to reveal how she felt about the loss.
DIANE SAWYER:
The president said he was sad. It was sad. And for you? Sad? Bruising?
NANCY PELOSI:
Well, it’s sad in terms of my colleagues who won’t be coming back. For me, I’m a professional.
REBECCA TRAISTER:
Pelosi’s approach has been one of extreme control. She simply did not express or share her interior life with the public.
NANCY PELOSI:
—that, you know—
DIANE SAWYER:
Never felt it? You didn’t feel what we all feel?
NANCY PELOSI:
Well, I felt it for my colleagues. I felt it for the American people, because I do believe that there is a distinction.
REBECCA TRAISTER:
She decided it was not relevant to her career and that it would not in any way help her to be sharing her feelings. It’s just a strategic approach that she took.
NANCY PELOSI:
So I believe that there was a lot at stake.
DIANE SAWYER:
But we all have to talk to ourselves in moments when it feels bruised, when it feels rough.
NANCY PELOSI:
Well, let me tell you, when I get time for that, I’ll call you, and I’ll let you know how it feels.
MATT BAI:
She's not a whiner. And why isn't she a whiner? Look at where she grew up. Look at her political grounding and with her father. Look at her background in Baltimore. She knows what politics is. She's known it her entire life. She knows it can hurt and she knows it can be brutal. And she was taught you don't whine about it, and she doesn’t.
NARRATOR:
For the next eight years she would be relegated to the minority in Congress, but she wouldn’t give up.
2010-2017
"THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE" THEME SONG:
Money, money, money, money! Money!
MALE REPORTER:
Colin Kaepernick, 49ers quarterback, knelt instead of standing during the national anthem.
HILLARY CLINTON:
The first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president.
DONALD TRUMP:
When you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything.
BILLY BUSH:
[Laughs] Whatever you want.
DONALD TRUMP:
Grab ‘em by the p----.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
A sea of protesters, mostly women, one of the largest inauguration-related demonstrations in U.S. history.
MALE NEWSREADER:
An unusual and sometimes wild day at the Trump White House following a weekend of new beginnings, new controversies.
MALE NEWSREADER:
President Trump is making some waves on the first business day of his presidency.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Trump is scheduled to meet with Congressional leaders for the first time.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle here at the White House. Very, very busy Monday here.
NARRATOR:
Once again, Nancy Pelosi was the only woman in the room.
SUSAN PAGE:
When Trump took over in that unexpected victory in 2016, Republicans were then holding the House and the Senate. And while Nancy Pelosi was no longer the speaker, she was the minority leader in the House. She was the face of the Democratic opposition to Trump, and she had a weak hand, but she played it pretty well.
NANCY PELOSI:
How would the president begin this very historic meeting, and what this means to him.
NARRATOR:
It was a moment Pelosi recounted in a recent interview with FRONTLINE.
NANCY PELOSI:
He puts his hands on the desk, like this, slouches into the desk and said, “You know, I won the popular vote, because 5 million people voted who were not legal to vote, and so I won the popular vote.” So I thought I would take the opportunity to tell the president that what he was saying was not true. “There is no data, no truth, no facts, no evidence to support what you’re saying.”
REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA):
She made it very clear very early on that she had the toughness, the tenacity to stand up to him and to do so in some very blunt terms.
REP. ERIC CANTOR (R-VA), Fmr. House Majority Leader:
She is a partisan warrior and she saw in Trump somebody to come up against as an equal. He’s the president. She’s the Democratic leader, somebody he has to reckon with. And she didn’t give up any opportunity to make a real spectacle of that.
NANCY PELOSI:
So then the press converged. They said, “What did you think when he did that?” And I said, “Well, I prayed for him, but more importantly I prayed for the United States of America.” Imagine abusing that first historic meeting for politics.
EUGENE ROBINSON:
She had never met a president who would just lie. She was just genuinely appalled by Trump, from that first meeting. It started pretty low and it went downhill from there.
CROWD [chanting]:
Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp!
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:
It is time to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.
NARRATOR:
Trump came to Washington attacking the establishment.
DONALD TRUMP:
We are led by very stupid people.
NARRATOR:
“The swamp,” he called it.
DONALD TRUMP:
It’s a corrupt and crooked system.
CROWD [chanting]:
Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp!
MOLLY BALL:
Symbolically, Nancy Pelosi is the institutionalist. She represents everything people hate about the system, everything people want to smash using the bluntest instrument available to them, even if it’s Donald J. Trump.
DONALD TRUMP:
It’s time to clean up our nation’s capital.
NARRATOR:
Pelosi wasted no time demonstrating her power in the Washington way, with a campaign to retake the House.
NANCY PELOSI:
The day after the election we didn’t agonize, we organized.
DAVID AXELROD:
It goes back to the lesson she learned as a child in her household. Politics is a lot about learning how to count. She wanted to get to 218 and above.
NANCY PELOSI:
I don’t think that what the president said is a reflection of our values.
MOLLY BALL:
She's doing the strategy. She's doing the fundraising. She's flying around the country, constantly campaigning for candidates.
NANCY PELOSI:
We don’t agonize, we organize. We have to win this election.
DAN BALZ:
She has this incredibly prodigious ability to raise money for people who are running for office. And money is the coin of the realm.
STEPHEN CLOOBECK, Democratic Party donor:
And she’s the best at what she does.
FRANK LUNTZ:
For the first time ever in an off-year election, the Democrats significantly out-raised the Republicans, and that's because of Nancy Pelosi.
MALE SPEAKER:
Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, and they have a message for you.
FRANK LUNTZ:
So much money came in that in the last three weeks they didn't even know what to do with it.
NANCY PELOSI:
You will make the difference for America. Please vote.
FRANK LUNTZ:
I've never seen anything like it. And it's because of Nancy Pelosi.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Democrats picked up more than two dozen House seats to take control for the first time in eight years.
MALE NEWSREADER:
A big day for female candidates. At least 114 women won their races.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
She knows how to count votes. If she knows nothing else, she certainly knows how to count votes.
CROWD [chanting]:
Speaker, speaker, speaker!
NARRATOR:
But with the victory, a surprising challenge to her power. It came from within her own ranks.
SUSAN GLASSER:
It's largely forgotten how perilous a position Nancy Pelosi was in. And whether she was actually going to become the speaker was an open question.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
After the 2018 midterms, Nancy Pelosi faces a real push to possibly retire, possibly not become House speaker. You hear Democrats sort of grumbling aloud about whether or not a new generation of Democrats should be allowed to take the reins of power.
MALE PROTESTER:
When will you embrace a Green New Deal? When, Speaker Pelosi?
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
More than 200 protesters demonstrated outside her Washington, D.C., office.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The protests gathered inside Pelosi’s office included Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Ocasio-Cortez's first day on the Hill, and she chose to join a protest outside of Nancy Pelosi’s office about climate change.
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY):
I just want to let you all know how proud I am of each and every single one of you.
MARIANNA SOTOMAYOR, The Washington Post:
After that 2018 election, you saw a newer generation of Democratic members come in. They quickly became known as the Squad.
ALEXANDRA ROJAS, Exec. Dir., Justice Democrats:
The Squad is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib. And they really represent the diversity of not just ethnicity, but background and lived experience that has been so missing in a Congress that is majority white, that’s majority millionaire.
MARIANNA SOTOMAYOR:
Unsurprisingly, they were a little skeptical of Pelosi. They did see her as the first woman to ever be able to reach the place of power and influence, but at the same time they also thought that she was representative of an older generation.
DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press:
They had different ideas about how to do things in the House. They wanted more bold action on some things, whereas Pelosi and Congressman Hoyer and Congressman Clyburn, they were seen as more of the old guard, more traditional, not on board with some of the new ways of doing things that the new members wanted.
NARRATOR:
The challenge to Pelosi’s leadership extended to moderate Democrats, too.
REP. SETH MOULTON (D-MA):
We need a new vision. We need a forward-looking vision. It’s time, I think, for a new generation of leadership.
FEMALE REPORTER:
Who is the leader of the Democratic Party?
SETH MOULTON:
Who is the leader of the Democratic Party?
FEMALE REPORTER:
Yeah.
MALE REPORTER:
That’s what she asked. She asked you that. [Laughter]
SETH MOULTON:
Does my silence say something? I mean—
FEMALE REPORTER:
Yeah, it does.
SETH MOULTON:
This is the challenge that we have right now. I don’t think that people are looking at Leader Pelosi, with all due respect to her, and saying, “Here is the future of our party.”
ROBERT COSTA:
There is a push to get her out of there, even though she carried them back to power. Some House Democrats privately meet in the days after the election and say, "Hey, we have an opening here. Maybe we can get someone else to step in."
MALE REPORTER:
Are you supporting Leader Pelosi for speaker at this point?
REP. PETER DeFAZIO (D-OR):
This—you know—I’ll see you later.
MALE REPORTER:
[Laughs] Thanks, congressman.
REP. MARCIA FUDGE (D-OH):
We tout diversity in this party. There’s no diversity in our leadership.
REP. TIM RYAN (D-OH):
What you basically have is the establishment surrounding our current leadership, and the American people want change, and we’re going to try to give it to them.
REP. KATHLEEN RICE (D-NY):
And this is all about moving on to the next generation of leadership.
SUSAN GLASSER:
Trump sees that Nancy Pelosi is weak at that moment. He has not a lot of knowledge about politics, but he has an instinct for the weakness in his adversaries.
MALE VOICE [reading Trump tweet]:
I can get Nancy Pelosi as many votes as she wants in order for her to be the speaker of the House.
SUSAN GLASSER:
Trump is literally saying like, “Hey, Nancy, you need some help getting over the line there? We’ll help you out.” It would have been infuriating to Nancy Pelosi.
December 11, 2018
NARRATOR:
Trump continued to taunt Pelosi in an Oval Office meeting in front of the television cameras.
DONALD TRUMP:
OK, thank you very much. It’s a great honor to have Nancy Pelosi with us and Chuck Schumer with us.
MOLLY BALL:
Trump had this tactic where he liked to set people off balance. He'd sometimes keep the cameras in the room.
NANCY PELOSI:
People are not—the morale is not—
DONALD TRUMP:
And we've gained in the Senate. Nancy, we’ve gained in the Senate. Excuse me, did we win the Senate? We won the Senate.
NANCY PELOSI:
Let me say this. Let me say this.
DONALD TRUMP:
We did win North Dakota and Indiana.
NANCY PELOSI:
This is the most unfortunate thing. We came in here in good faith, and we’re entering into this kind of a discussion in the public view.
DONALD TRUMP:
But it’s not bad, Nancy.
NANCY PELOSI:
No, but it’s—
DONALD TRUMP:
It’s called transparency.
MATT BAI:
Pelosi keeps trying to get it to stop, like, “Do we need to do this in front of the cameras?”
DONALD TRUMP:
I also know that, you know, Nancy’s in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now, and I understand that.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
He questioned her strength because he wanted to try to embarrass her on national television. And what Nancy Pelosi does is what she’s really, really good at, and that is to turn the moment around and say, “Actually, I am the one with the power in this situation.”
NANCY PELOSI:
Mr. President, please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
There’s sort of this reality TV show playing out. And she somehow is the person who seems to be the most powerful in the room, even though she’s at the Oval Office speaking to the president of the United States.
NANCY PELOSI:
This isn’t about—this is about the security of our country you take an oath to protect and defend. And we don’t want to have that mischaracterized by anyone.
FRANK LUNTZ:
Pelosi had his number. Donald Trump to this day does not realize how embarrassed he was by her, how the public looked at this. And even if they didn’t like her, they still thought, “Way to go, sister.”
NANCY PELOSI:
And let me just say one thing. The fact is you do not have the votes in the House.
DONALD TRUMP:
Nancy, I do. And we need border security.
NANCY PELOSI:
Well, let’s take the vote and we’ll find out.
DONALD TRUMP:
Nancy, Nancy—
FEMALE TRUMP AIDE:
Thanks, guys. Thank you.
FRANK LUNTZ:
Way to speak up to the man. You just swatted him away with a single statement. You owned him.
PRESS CAMERAMAN:
Heads up. Heads up. Here we go.
SUSAN PAGE:
When Pelosi comes out, she’s got this swingy red coat on. She’s got sunglasses on. She looks like James Bond. She looks like she is in control of the world.
"HAMILTON" LYRICS:
[Singing] You don’t have the votes, you don’t have the votes. Aha-ha-ha ha.
CHRISTINE PELOSI:
I called her and I’m like, ”Mom, you’re an internet meme!” She said, ”What are you talking about?” I said, “No, you’re an internet meme. What you said in the meeting. People are already saying they want to have that tattooed on their arm. They’re already turning it into T-shirts. And then your coat! Your coat already has a Twitter account.”
DARLENE SUPERVILLE:
And it did really cement her reputation as someone who could go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump.
MOLLY BALL:
In so many ways, the contrast with Trump made people see her in a new light. She was such a contrast with him—as a woman, but also as an institutionalist, who was a stickler for the rule of law, as someone who believed in building up government rather than tearing it down.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
You quickly find that Democrats, after their grumbling, coalesce around Nancy Pelosi. And it’s once again a moment where she shows that she has the power to hold onto the speakership.
REP. KEVIN McCARTHY (R-CA):
I extend my hand of friendship to every member of this body, and to the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, I extend to you this gavel.
NARRATOR:
Her power secure, she sent a message to the Squad.
FEMALE VOICE [reading Pelosi quote]:
If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it.
MATT BAI:
I think it was probably galling to her, that, “Here you come. You haven’t achieved anything yet, you don’t know anything about policy, when I’ve spent all of these years learning the institution, learning the policy, learning how to pull the levers.” I think it had to be galling and sort of ironic at the end of the day.
FEMALE VOICE [reading Pelosi quote]:
All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.
MATT BAI:
Nancy Pelosi has to deal with something no one’s ever had to deal with. You have people coming to Congress, on both sides, who are basically building brands—lucrative brands, marketable brands. These are celebrity politicians who’ve never cast a vote and don’t feel like they should have to bow to any institutional norms.
FEMALE VOICE [reading Ocasio-Cortez tweet]:
That public “whatever” is called public sentiment.
DARLENE SUPERVILLE:
There was this difference of opinion about power and how to use it and how to get it. You had the Squad members who just wanted to come in and boom, boom, boom—
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ:
Hi! This is the progressive caucus in the building!
DARLENE SUPERVILLE:
—kind of ramrod their way through Congress. But Speaker Pelosi was more of a tactician, more of a negotiator.
MARIANNA SOTOMAYOR:
Pelosi was saying, “I know how to count votes. We have a majority. We can afford to lose those votes.” The bigger thing that she was trying to say is they don’t influence the party. They can try. They can be loud, but they’re not going to change the legislation.
MOLLY BALL:
Her message was clear, that she didn’t view them as serious. That she was saying, “We’re the adults doing legislation over here. And you might have some beautiful ideas, but you’re not part of this process.”
MALE TV ANNOUNCER:
This is CNN Breaking News.
WOLF BLITZER:
We’re following breaking news on President Trump’s contacts with Ukraine.
MALE NEWSREADER:
—about the phone call that inspired a whistleblower complaint.
PROTESTERS:
Impeach Trump!
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
President Trump makes this phone call to the president of Ukraine where he pretty clearly says he wants to get dirt on Joe Biden.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The president pressured Ukraine’s leader about eight times—eight times in that single call.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
It is a gift in some ways to Nancy Pelosi, because here’s an act that is so outrageous that Nancy Pelosi is forced to act.
EUGENE ROBINSON:
Pelosi thought that this was an outrageous act for a president to commit and that there’s no choice but to go to impeachment.
NANCY PELOSI:
Today, I'm announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry. The president must be held accountable. No one is above the law.
ROBERT COSTA:
Trump takes it personally. Impeachment chops the relationship in half. If there was any thread left, it’s gone after impeachment.
MALE VOICE [reading Trump letter]:
Dear Madam Speaker: You are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution and you are declaring open war on American democracy.
ROBERT COSTA:
He says she’s despicable. He rails against her mental acuity. Every name in the book is hurled at Pelosi by Trump.
DONALD TRUMP:
Because Nancy Pelosi is grossly incompetent.
She’s totally incompetent.
Nancy Pelosi should be impeached.
These people are crazy.
—and crazy Nancy Pelosi—
Nervous Nancy. Ah. Nervous Nancy.
NANCY PELOSI:
Thank you.
MALE REPORTER:
Thank you.
JAMES ROSEN, Fox News:
Do you hate the president, Madam Speaker? Because—
NANCY PELOSI:
I don't hate anybody. I was raised in a Catholic house. We don't hate anybody. Not anybody in the world. So don’t you accuse me of—
JAMES ROSEN:
I did not accuse you.
NANCY PELOSI:
You did. You did.
JAMES ROSEN:
I asked a question.
NANCY PELOSI:
You did.
MOLLY BALL:
We saw her become more comfortable in her own skin, more assertive. Perhaps less tolerant of dissent. Perhaps less tolerant of criticism. She certainly was comfortable asserting power when it came to Trump.
NANCY PELOSI:
And as a Catholic, I resent your using the word "hate" in a sentence that addresses me. I don't hate anyone. I was raised in a way that is full—a heart full of love, and always pray for the president. And I still pray for the president. I pray for the president all the time. So don't mess with me when it comes to words like that.
NARRATOR:
Pelosi’s Democrats would line up behind her to impeach Trump, but that wasn’t enough to overcome Republican opposition in the Senate.
DONALD TRUMP:
This is what the end result is. [Applause]
SUSAN GLASSER:
Trump really was even more emboldened, in part from his feeling of vindication and that he could do whatever he wanted with impunity.
NARRATOR:
The partisan warfare between the president and Pelosi escalated.
SERGEANT-AT-ARMS OF THE HOUSE:
Madam Speaker, the president of the United States!
WOLF BLITZER:
He’s walking up. He’s going to be I guess shaking hands with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House. Let’s watch this moment.
MALE REPORTER:
Uh. It looks like she went to shake his hand and he did not—he did not take it.
REBECCA TRAISTER:
There’s almost never a moment that a speaker of the House knows all eyes are going to be on them in the way that she knew in that moment. It’s a Trump State of the Union. You get the shot of the president, the vice president and the speaker.
DONALD TRUMP:
The state of our union is stronger than ever before.
REBECCA TRAISTER:
We know that political media analyzes every eye roll, every decision to stand or not stand, to clap or not clap. So she knows every eye is on even her most subtle gesture.
DONALD TRUMP:
We will never let socialism destroy American health care.
DAN BALZ:
You could just sense Pelosi feeling tighter and angrier and just watching him perform. All of that is kind of coming out in the House chamber. And it’s Nancy Pelosi’s chamber. She’s the speaker of the House.
DONALD TRUMP:
Here tonight is a special man, beloved by millions of Americans. Rush Limbaugh, thank you for your decades of tireless devotion to our country.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
Rush Limbaugh is this conservative radio host who, of course, had been attacking Nancy Pelosi for a long time.
RUSH LIMBAUGH:
So you know, with Pelosi there’s stupid and then there’s Botox stupid.
I don’t think that she is blessed with a tremendous IQ. I don’t think this is the brightest bulb.
Put pictures of Pelosi in every cheap motel room. That will keep birth rates down because that picture will keep a lot of things down.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
He’s also someone who had called women prostitutes, who had said all sorts of things that so many people saw to be racist.
RUSH LIMBAUGH:
Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.
If we are going to pay for your contraceptives we want you to post the videos so we can all watch.
[Mocking Asian accent]
DONALD TRUMP:
I am proud to announce tonight that you will be receiving our country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
JUDY LEMONS:
I don’t know how she sat there. I don’t know how she did it. To have that in your face and to listen to him and see Rush Limbaugh lauded, she must have felt totally disrespected. Totally ignored in her position and disrespected in her House.
DONALD TRUMP:
The best is yet to come. Thank you. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you very much.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Did you just see how Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped up the speech right behind the president’s head?
WOLF BLITZER:
It looked like she was sort of ripping up the advance copy of the speech.
SUSAN GLASSER:
This is a maximum moment of fury, I think, for Nancy Pelosi. If you want a visual, from now on, for history, of how Washington broke, you can do no worse, I think, than to have this image of the speaker of the House literally ripping up the words of the president of the United States.
2020-2021
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The first case of the deadly Chinese coronavirus—
MALE NEWSREADER:
A tragic turn in the coronavirus outbreak: the first death from the disease here in the United States.
FEMALE PROTESTER:
Say her name!
CROWD:
Breonna Taylor!
FEMALE PROTESTER:
Say her name!
CROWD:
Breonna Taylor!
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Mourners gathered in front of the Supreme Court to pay tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
JOE BIDEN:
The question is—
DONALD TRUMP:
The new Supreme Court justice, radical left—
JOE BIDEN:
The question is—will you shut up, man?
DONALD TRUMP:
Listen, who is on your list, Joe?
CHRIS WALLACE:
Wait a minute. You get the final word, Mr. Biden.
JOE BIDEN:
Well, it’s hard to get any word in with this clown. Excuse me, this person.
DONALD TRUMP:
Hey, let me just tell you, Joe—
CHRIS WALLACE:
No, no, no!
SARAH COOPER [lip syncing Trump]:
Whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light. And supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.
DONALD TRUMP:
If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.
CROWD [chanting]:
Trump won! Trump won! Trump won! Trump won! Trump won! Trump won!
Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!
MALE PROTESTER:
Nancy Pelosi! Where you at, Nancy? Where are you, Nancy? We’re looking for you!
CROWD [chanting]:
Nancy! Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!
JUDY LEMONS:
She had to be shaken. That was probably the worst thing she had ever, ever experienced during her time in Congress and in leadership: to have a full-blown physical assault on the institution that you revere and respect and to think that the staff and the people who work there and the members were threatened and their lives were in danger.
ANNA ESHOO:
There were some of us that were hiding in a room. And she came to that room and she announced that we were going to be going back into session. That it was essential for the people of our country and the people around the world to see that our democracy would continue.
EUGENE ROBINSON:
Speaker Pelosi was genuinely horrified—horrified and frightened for the future of our democracy. And that sounds grandiose, but it’s true. The aim was to stop a constitutional responsibility, to stop Congress from certifying the results of the election. The reaction you saw from Speaker Pelosi was genuine.
NANCY PELOSI:
Today a shameful assault was made on our democracy. To those who strove to deter us from our responsibility, you have failed. To those who engaged in the gleeful desecration of our temple of democracy, justice will be done.
JUDY LEMONS:
It was a horrific event. So many people’s lives were put at stake and people died. People died there, and that wasn’t a thing Nancy Pelosi was going to take lightly.
SUSAN GLASSER:
It was a moment of profound fury on Pelosi’s part. She felt that she had been warning and warning and warning about Donald Trump.
MOLLY BALL:
In the moment it really felt like this was the last straw, even for some of his closest allies.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC):
All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough. Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way. Oh, my God, I hate it.
MOLLY BALL:
There was a widespread sense that Jan. 6 might have really been the breaking point for Donald Trump with the Republican Party.
SEN. MITCH McCONNELL (R-KY), Senate Majority Leader:
The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president.
SUSAN GLASSER:
She thought that McConnell and McCarthy finally saw what she had seen.
REP. KEVIN McCARTHY (R-CA), House Minority Leader:
The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Speaker Pelosi is set to put in motion the second impeachment of President Trump.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Impeachment for an unprecedented second time.
NARRATOR:
Pelosi seized the moment.
MALE NEWSREADER:
A growing number of Republicans now joining calls to remove President Trump.
NARRATOR:
It took only a week.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she has no issues with impeaching the president a second time.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
—accusing the president of willfully inciting violence against the government.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
—Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling him "deranged and dangerous."
SUSAN PAGE:
She did think it was a statement they needed to make. Whatever the short-term consequences of a second impeachment, she wanted to put the stain of a second impeachment on Trump for all history.
WILL CAIN, Fox News commentator:
Forgive me if I don’t buy Nancy Pelosi’s crocodile tears about how brokenhearted she is about her second impeachment of President Trump.
SUSAN GLASSER:
The initial shock and horror and dismay inevitably begins to fade.
MALE POLITICAL COMMENTATOR:
Well, the whole thing is just political. It’s a power grab by Nancy Pelosi.
NEWT GINGRICH:
So she keeps violating the Constitution. This latest impeachment is just a simple example.
SUSAN GLASSER:
You have the overwhelming power of the pro-Trump chorus in the media.
DAVID SCHOEN:
This political weaponization of impeachment—
SUSAN GLASSER:
First tentatively, and then louder and louder.
MARK LEVIN:
—by the use of the impeachment power this way she’s destroyed separation of powers.
LINDSEY GRAHAM:
So I think it was a bad, rushed, emotional move that puts the presidency at risk.
SUSAN PAGE:
It was not a huge surprise to her when in very short order they either stopped criticizing Trump or they even began supporting him in his big lie.
SEN. TOM COTTON (R-AR):
But we know we have a House of fools because they elected Nancy Pelosi to be their speaker. [Laughs] I mean, look what they did—
MOLLY BALL:
I don’t think anyone would accuse Nancy Pelosi of being naive about the Republican Party. She’s had decades to become pretty cynical about her opponents and their intentions and their motivations.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY (D-VT):
The question is on the article of impeachment. Is the respondent, Donald John Trump, guilty or not guilty? The clerk will call the roll.
CLERK:
Mr. Graham? Mr. Graham, not guilty. Mr. McConnell? Mr. McConnell, not guilty.
PATRICK LEAHY:
The yeas are 57. The nays are 43.
CROWD [chanting]:
Trump won! Trump won! Trump won! Trump won!
June 2021
PATRICK LEAHY:
The respondent, Donald John Trump, former president of the United States, is not guilty as charged in the articles of impeachment.
CROWD [chanting]:
Trump won! Trump won! Trump won! Trump won! Trump won!
DONALD TRUMP:
We will not bend. We will not break. We will not yield. We will never give in. We will never give up. We will never back down. We will never, ever surrender. My fellow Americans, our movement is far from over. In fact, our fight has only just begun.
CROWD [chanting]:
Trump won! Trump won! Trump won! Trump won! Trump won! Trump won! Trump won! Trump won!
ROBERT COSTA:
For Pelosi, this is a rolling, cascading crisis. It didn’t end on Jan. 20. Pelosi, more than anyone, understands that Republicans now and in the coming months are going to be on the march.
NARRATOR:
From her position as speaker, Pelosi has been doing what she can to stop them.
JUDY LEMONS:
There was just a point of reckoning where you put up or you shut up. And she was not going to shut up about this. She went after this with a vengeance.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she’ll now create a select committee to further investigate the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Lawmakers leading the select committee said no one would be off limits, and now they have issued their very first subpoenas.
NARRATOR:
Aiming for Trump and his allies.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Former President Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon—
MALE NEWSREADER:
Criminal contempt charges against former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
—Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House of Representatives. This is significant news.
JUDY LEMONS:
She had to seek the truth. And no one expected her to do it with anything other than the greatest vigor and vitality and vengeance. You may have turned the page but not the cheek.
NARRATOR:
With the Jan. 6 committee closing in and the midterms looming, Pelosi is once again a lightning rod.
DONALD TRUMP:
Nancy Pelosi has turned the U.S. House of Representatives into a Stalinist show trial, that’s what it is.
SUSAN PAGE:
Republicans have found their favorite villain in Nancy Pelosi. That’s forever, right?
KEVIN McCARTHY:
Pelosi has broken this institution. It shows exactly what I warned back at the beginning of January, that Pelosi would play politics with this.
NARRATOR:
The question in Washington now is whether the Democrats and Pelosi can hold on to power.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden have this urgency to get big bills passed quickly because they understand that their power could be fleeting.
NARRATOR:
Top of Pelosi’s list: President Biden’s reconciliation bill, trillions of dollars in spending for some of her lifelong ambitions.
NANCY PELOSI:
The reconciliation bill was a culmination of my service in Congress because it was about the children—the children, the children, the children—their health, about health, education, the economic security of their families, a clean, safe environment in which they could thrive.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The president's huge social spending bill is stalled in the Senate.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
—with interparty fighting between Democrats over the reconciliation bill.
NARRATOR:
But in a bitterly divided Washington—
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
There’s no path forward right now in the Congress.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Can Democrats in a bitterly gridlocked Senate get anything done?
NARRATOR:
—success is uncertain.
SUSAN GLASSER:
Nancy Pelosi has shown that she really is a historic figure. She is clearly the premier vote counter in Washington today, but Washington is a place where it’s almost impossible to get things done. And she's ending her career at a time where expectations are trimmed, both for Democrats and therefore for Pelosi herself.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The Democrats in imminent danger of losing the majority in the House.
MALE NEWSREADER:
They are of course working against the clock, with a very strong possibility of a Republican takeover in Congress.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Democrats are trying to drag their agenda across the finish line while also staring down the looming midterm elections.
