House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi discussed the ongoing threat of political violence and the dangers posed by Donald Trump’s 2020 misinformation campaign in an interview Sunday on Face the Nation.
The former top Democrat in the lower chamber said that her husband, Paul Pelosi, still faces medical issues resulting from a violent attack he suffered in 2022, when an intruder in their home attacked him with a hammer. The suspect, David DePape, was convicted of the violent attack and found to have been consumed by far-right conspiracy theories promoted by various figures aligned with MAGA Republicanism, including the 2020 stolen election conspiracies promoted by Trump himself.
After the January 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021, Pelosi claims Trump “called out to these people to continue their violence”, arguing that her husband would be the victim of an attack stemming from the president’s same rhetoric a year later.
“It didn’t end that day,” she told CBS. “My husband, being a victim of all that. And he still has injuries from that attack. So it just goes on and on and on. It isn’t something that just happens, and then it’s over.”
She was asked by Margaret Brennan about Trump’s continued assertion that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, and what effect that has on the county. Brennan pointed out that Trump in recent days screened a documentary disputing the election results at Mar-a-Lago.
Pelosi responded that it was “sad” for the president-elect to still be fixated on his defeat four years ago.
“It’s almost sick... He should be triumphant about [winning the 2024 election],” Pelosi said. “So for him to be trying to fight a fight that he knows he lost is really sad.”
Pelosi’s party will spend at least the first two years of the second Trump presidency in the minority in both chambers of Congress. In the House, however, the Republican Party will only control a single-digit majority. Speaker Mike Johnson will be forced to unify a chaotic and unstable caucus to pass any legislation.
Republicans in the House and Senate are already seeking to temper the incoming president’s expectations while maintaining the appearance of full-throated support for his political agenda.
The speaker emerita has long been a focus of some of the most intense hatred from the far right of any politician. Brennan separately noted during her interview with the first female speaker (a title which fueled much of that hatred on the right) that the House that rioters who besieged the Capitol complex on January 6 openly made threats against her life, as they did with Vice President Mike Pence after the latter refused to interfere in the election certification process and cause a constitutional crisis.
She stepped down from the role after the 2022 midterm elections, passing on the role of House Democratic leader to Hakeem Jeffries. Last week, she was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom by Joe Biden.
