Nancy Pelosi and President Biden are giving each other the silent treatment.
The former House speaker confirmed that she has not spoken with the commander in chief since Pelosi led the final drive to force Biden to abandon his bid for re-election over the summer.
“Not since then, no,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) told The Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast, a new episode of which was released Tuesday. “But I’m prayerful about it.”
“I have the greatest respect for him. I think he’s one of the great consequential presidents of our country,” Pelosi, 84, went on. “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.”
Pelosi reportedly told Biden that if he did not step away from the 2024 race, she would go public with her belief that he could not defeat Donald Trump in November and release polling data to that effect following the 81-year-old’s disastrous June 27 debate against his Republican predecessor.
While Pelosi initially claimed she “did not call one person,” during the turmoil, she has since admitted that “people called me.”
Asked to further elaborate on her conversations with Biden before he dropped out of the race July 21, Pelosi said: “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.”
Biden has publicly claimed that “No one influenced my decision, no one knew it was coming” but acknowledged the internal pressure was a “distraction.”
“A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races. And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic — you’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say [something] … and I thought it’d be a real distraction,” he later reflected to “CBS News Sunday Morning” on Aug. 11.
Immediately after the debate, Pelosi had defended Biden’s performance, in which he appeared to freeze before losing his train of thought, before later backtracking.
On July 10, two days after Biden penned a letter to congressional Democrats saying he was “firmly committed” to the contest, Pelosi went on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” rumored to be Biden’s favorite show, and suggested he consider his position.
“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” she pointedly said at the time, later adding: “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short. It’s not for me to say, I’m not the head of the caucus anymore, but he’s beloved, he is respected, and people want him to make that decision.”
“Elections are decisions,” Pelosi told The Guardian this week. “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,” she went on. “And the most important decision of all is the candidate.”
The former speaker told the podcast that she loathes Trump, 78, so much that she tries to refrain from uttering his name, contending: “It’s up there with, like, swearing.”
“I said his name,” she joked at one point after uttering the five-letter word. “Oh my gosh. I hope I don’t burn in hell.”
