Pelosi on Her Role in Biden's Exit: 'You Decide to Win'

Nancy Pelosi's book, The Art of Power, dropped over the summer, not long after President Biden dropped his reelection run. Now, the former speaker of the house is making the rounds to talk about her role in pressuring Biden to step aside, as well as her thoughts on former President Trump and his new rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

• On Biden: Speaking to the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland in a Politics Weekly America podcast that aired Tuesday, Pelosi said she still thinks of Biden as a good friend and ally, per the Guardian. But when asked if she's spoken to Biden since her intervention in July, she responded, "Not since then, no. But I'm prayerful about it."

• More on Biden: "I have the greatest respect for him," Pelosi continued. "I think he's one of the great consequential presidents of our country. I think his legacy had to be protected. I didn't see that happening in the course that it was on, [that] the election was on. My call was just to: 'Let's get on a better course.'"
• All about the win: That's what it comes down to in politics, Pelosi noted. "Elections are decisions," she said. "You decide to win. I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity ... So when you make a decision, you have to make every decision in favor of winning ... but the most important decision of all is the candidate."
• On Trump: Pelosi told Freedman that she barely utters the former president's name. "I think it's a grotesque word," she said. "It's up there [with] swearing."
• More on Trump: She also called the former president out for recently calling Harris "retarded"—"This is a person running for president of the United States"—and said she agreed with former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who has called Trump "fascist to the core."
• On Harris: Pelosi said that "I always thought America was more ready for a woman president than a woman speaker of the House," noting her own arduous climb to the top in that "marble ceiling" chamber. She added that she was glad Harris wasn't running as "the first woman or first woman of color. She's running on her strength, her knowledge of policy and strategy and presentation and the rest. And I think that's a different race than Hillary Clinton ran."
• Interview No. 2: Pelosi also spoke this week at London's Chatham House, per Sky News, noting of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu that "I don't think he's ever believed in peace or [a] two-state solution." Watch here.
• Vanity Fair: That outlet has a new profile on Pelosi's role in halting Biden's run, and how she'd expected that other big-name Democrats would chime in. "But the men were MIA," an insider told the magazine. "She wasn't happy that the only bloody fingerprints on the knife were hers." Read in full here.

(More Nancy Pelosi stories.)