Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told The Guardian’s Politics Weekly American podcast that she hasn’t spoken to President Joe Biden since he dropped out in July.
But she’s “prayerful about it.”
Pelosi denied being a part of a coalition to pressure Biden to drop out, but admitted she didn’t think his campaign could beat former President Donald Trump:
“I have the greatest respect for him. I think he’s one of the great consequential presidents of our country,” Pelosi said in the interview posted Tuesday. “I think his legacy had to be protected. I didn’t see that happening in the course that it was on, the election was on. My call was just to: ‘Let’s get on a better course.’ He will make the decision as to what that is. And he made that decision. But I think he has some unease because we’ve been friends for decades.”The former House Speaker also admitted that some in the president’s corner might not have forgiven her for the role she played, but argued that a Trump victory might have been worse.”You decide to win. I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as President of the United States or in any other capacity … So when you make a decision, you have to make every decision in favor of winning, and that is mobilization, message, money, to have that to win the election, but the most important decision of all is the candidate and the campaign of the candidate,” she added, according to the Guardian.The Guardian pressed, “and you just felt he couldn’t win?””No, I thought his, the campaign that they were on couldn’t win, he might have won, but they had to change what was happening, and he decided that change would be his stepping aside,” she said.
But did Pelosi have a hand in it? She made some interesting remarks to Jake Tapper in August (emphasis mine):
“I know that it was very difficult for him,” Tapper said. “That’s been made very clear by some of his top aides like Anita Dunn and Ron Klain, and there does seem to be- even though Anita Dunn said earlier today, ‘Nobody wants to have a fight with Nancy Pelosi at this time.’ It does seem like there’s some residual bad blood or resentment, and I‘m wondering if you‘ve spoken to him and what your response is to that.”Pelosi replied to the news host by joking, “Sometimes you just have to take a punch for the children.”Tapper pressed further on Dunn’s comments and whether Pelosi had spoken to Biden.“You know what?” Pelosi said as she made a gesture to stop. “I had to do what I had to do. He made the decision for the country. My concern was not about the president, it was about his campaign. As he has seen with the exuberance, the excitement that has come forth in our country.”
Biden has never named names.
In August, he told CBS that Democrats pushed him out because many thought he would hurt their chances at winning seats in the House and Senate:
BIDEN: “Look, the polls we had showed that it was a neck-and-neck race, we would have been down to the wire. But what happened was, a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was gonna hurt them in their races. And I was concerned, if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic. You’d be interviewing about why did Nancy Pelosi say, why did so and — and I thought it would be a real distraction.”
On the other hand, Biden’s former adviser Anita Dunn lashed out at Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and others for pushing out Biden without any reasoning.
Dunn also didn’t deny that Biden was angry with the top Democrats.
Dunn even mentioned the fact that the Democrat Party ignored the primary voters, concentrating on donors for their decision:
Are you talking about senators and House members? Or do you mean like when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV twice when things feel like they’re dying down and reopens the debate?Absolutely.Key moments.Key moments where people made the decision when it looked like we were reaching a point where we would fight our way through it. I had a lot of Republican friends who were sending me texts during this period saying, “Your party is insane.” They were saying, “We’ve never seen anything like this. Our party closes ranks. You know, you fight it through. You have a 24-hour news cycle. He had a bad debate, and you move on.”They could not believe what was going on here. And then you had this decision that the Democratic Party made to ignore their primary voters and ignore their primary process, and that was a very donor-driven thing.
Dunn never called it a coup, though, nor did she explain why Biden dropped out. Gotta wait for the book on that one! Jill will probably write it.
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