Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s new book about major events of her two decades as House speaker or Democratic leader is titled “The Art of Power” — an unintended, she insisted to me, echo of Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” She writes of the actual, consequential deals she helped deliver , like the Affordable Care Act and rescue packages after the global financial crash, and of the deals that Trump failed to make on infrastructure and so much more.
And Pelosi also tells of her amazement that, of the four presidents she served alongside as House leader, people only want to know about Trump, or “What’s-his-name,” as she calls him. That should be a small wonder, however, given Trump’s outsized impact and ongoing threat, and her famed forte: standing up to him like no one else. Pelosi provides some behind-the-curtain stuff, including about Trump’s “whiny” call to her in 2019 begging her not to impeach him over his “perfect” call to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, and how she corrected him when he opened his first White House meeting with congressional leaders by lying, “You know I won the popular vote.
” “I’ve had a lot of conversations with this man,” she writes, “and at the end of nearly all of them, I think, Either you are stupid, or you think that the rest of us are.” Yet as Pelosi hit the book-promotion circuit this week, there’s been a shift: Now she is asked mostly about another president: Joe Biden. And specifically, about her lates.