Pelosi is now the anti-Trump — disciplined and implacable
WASHINGTON >> For months, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi kept a wary distance from fellow Democrats clamoring to impeach President Trump. She wanted her tenure defined by legislation, not litigation.
But once Pelosi agreed to authorize a formal impeachment inquiry, she leaned in — and made herself manager and chief strategist.
The leader second in line to the presidency invited me and several other columnists to her office in the Capitol this week to explain her thinking.
She began with the ritual disclaimer that the House has not decided whether Trump’s conduct merits impeachment.
“When we have what we need, we will be ready … and we will be ironclad,” she said.
She has described Trump as both a danger to the republic and a “grotesque personality.”
“There’s something wrong” with Trump, she said. “He doesn’t know right from wrong — or doesn’t really care.”
“He’s always projecting,” she said. “If he says this about Adam Schiff, he means it about himself. He says that about me, he means it about himself. … He says, ‘She’s in meltdown,’ means he’s in meltdown.”
Trump accused Pelosi of a “meltdown” after their latest tense face-off in the White House, on Oct. 16, when she accused him of being in thrall to Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
“He wasn’t going to send the military assistance to Ukraine. Who benefits from that? The Russians,” she said.
“He did what he did in Syria, who benefits from that? Putin.”
“That’s what I was saying to him the other day, ‘All roads lead to Putin,’ ” she said.
And how did Trump react? “He was furious!” she said with a smile of unmistakable satisfaction.
“All I know (is that) he is absolving Putin of any responsibility” for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
Pelosi said she does know that Trump has violated his oath of office and needs to be removed from the White House, whether through impeachment or defeat in the 2020 election.
“I think we’re on a good path,” Pelosi said.
The next step, she noted, will be public hearings in the House Intelligence Committee to examine Trump’s request to Ukraine for “a favor” — an investigation of Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden — while the president withheld nearly $400 million in military aid.
“I do think we have enough” evidence for impeachment, she said, but if “there’s corroboration, we might as well get some more.”
Then, she said, House Democrats must decide whether to expand the probe beyond Ukraine, and when they will draft any articles of impeachment. Pelosi wants any articles of impeachment to be “focused (and) indisputable.”
The speaker claims she doesn’t care that the Republican-controlled Senate will brush the charges aside and refuse to remove Trump from office. “The courage of the House … is not affected by the cowardice of the Senate,” she has said.
Other Democrats believe even if Trump stays in office, impeachment hearings could damage his reelection prospects.
But Pelosi portrays the battle as a struggle to preserve the Constitution’s balance of power against a president who has asserted that Article II allows him to ignore the will of Congress.
She quotes the Revolutionary-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine: “The times have found us to protect our Constitution.”
Pelosi was already assured a place in history as the first woman elected House speaker, and as the legislator who steered President Obama’s health care bill into law.
Now she has become the anti-Trump: steely, disciplined and implacable. It is the president’s misfortune that his principal adversary is at the top of her game.