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Nancy Pelosi detailed how medical professionals expressed concern to her regarding then-President Donald Trump’s mental health during her time as Speaker of the House, according to her new memoir.
A copy of The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House, to be published next week, was obtained by The Guardian.
At a 2019 memorial service for psychiatrist Dr David Hamburg, doctors and other mental health professionals shared their deep concern “that there was something seriously wrong” with Trump and that “his mental and psychological health was in decline,” Pelosi detailed in the book.
Pelosi said she found Trump’s behavior “difficult to understand.” The former speaker frequently clashed with Trump during her second stint in the top job in the lower chamber. She was speaker between 2007 and 2011 and between 2019 and 2023, which coincided with the latter half of Trump’s presidency and the beginning of President Joe Biden’s time in the White House.
Trump is now the Republican presidential nominee yet again, for the third straight election cycle. The 78-year-old former president is the oldest-ever candidate for the office.
His often bizarre behavior has come under increasing scrutiny following his two impeachments, including for the Capitol riot, his 34 felony convictions, the orders for him to pay hundreds of millions in damages in several civil cases, including one in which he was found liable for sexual abuse, his comments that he would spend day one of his next term as a “dictator, and his questioning of Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity during an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists on Wednesday.
By the time January 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection, came, Pelosi wrote that she “knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. I had seen it up close.
“His denial and then delays when the Covid pandemic struck, his penchant for repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots and his total separation from reality and actual events. His repeated, ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time.”
She notes how staffers, such as Trump’s last Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, indulged his odd behavior, and allowed him to listen into meetings on Capitol Hill, leading to the speaker banning phones in her meeting rooms.
“People still ask me how I remained so calm,” she writes about the Capitol attack. Pelosi and other Capitol leaders were evacuated to Fort McNair in southern Washington, DC.
“My answer is that I was already deeply aware of how dangerous Donald Trump was,” she writes.
“He continues to be dangerous. If his family and staff truly understood his disregard for both the fundamentals of the law and for basic rules, and if they had reckoned with his personal instability over not winning the [2020] election, they should have staged an intervention,” she adds. “Whether because of willful blindness, money, prestige or greed, they didn’t – and America has paid a steep price.”
Pelosi added that “it was clear to me from the start that he was an imposter – and that on some level, he knew it.”
After the insurrection, Pelosi and the Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer placed a call to then-Vice President Mike Pence about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump.
Pelosi writes elsewhere that she admired Pence for his actions on January 6, when he presided over the certification of the 2020 election results after refusing to leave the Capitol even as the mob of Trump supporters chanted that he should be hanged.
But after being on hold for 20 minutes, Pence never got on the phone with Pelosi and Schumer and didn’t return their call, the former speaker wrote.
