Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) remarked on Tuesday that saying former President Donald Trump’s name is “like swearing,” referring to the Republican presidential nominee as “what’s his name.”
Pelosi, 84, sat down for an interview with The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland where she slammed Trump while trying to avoid using his name.
“I hardly ever say his name,” she said, adding, “I think [Trump is] a grotesque word. … You just don’t like the word passing your lips. I just don’t. I’m afraid, you know, when I grew up Catholic, as I am now, if you said a bad word, you could burn in hell if you didn’t have a chance to confess. So I don’t want to take any chances.”
“It’s up there with, like, swearing,” Pelosi added.
Pelosi broke her own rule and uttered Trump’s name later in the interview, The Hill reported.
“When we talk about democracy being on the ballot, it’s a woman’s issue, but it’s an everybody issue. When we talk about freedom of speech, do you see now that Trump is talking. … I said his name, oh my gosh. I hope I don’t burn in hell,” she said.
Pelosi frequently uses grave language to refer to Trump, including calling him a “threat to democracy.” During the Democratic National Convention in August, the former House speaker compared the Democrats’ 2024 election against Trump to the American War for Independence and the Civil War.
“We have to defeat a person who is a threat to our democracy of the kind that we have not seen,” Pelosi said at the time. “At the beginning of our country, Thomas Paine said ‘The times have found us — declare war, establish a new nation.’ Abraham Lincoln took up that charge to keep our country together years later, decades later.”
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“And now the times have found us to save our democracy,” she added. “That is what we are here to do.”
At another point in her interview with The Guardian, Pelosi said that she has not spoken with President Joe Biden since he dropped out of the race in July. Pelosi was reportedly a leading voice in pushing for Biden to end his 2024 campaign following his disastrous debate performance against Trump.
“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,” she 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.”
