Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Donald Trump lacks the “sanity” to be president of the United States.
“It takes vision, knowledge, judgment, strategic thinking, a heart full of love for the American people, and sanity to be president of the United States,” the Democrat told The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in an interview today at The Atlantic Festival.
“To be sane is probably an important characteristic to have if you’re going to have control over our nuclear weapons. Don’t you think? I don’t think he’s on the level,” Pelosi said. “His thinking is not straight. Not on the level.”
Pelosi also criticized Trump for being unable to recognize reality (though she avoided using his name, repeatedly referring to the former president as “what’s-his-name”). She noted that he frequently claims that he sought to send the National Guard to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a claim not supported by any evidence and contradicted by what evidence does exist.
“You hear him lie about it and say he did,” Pelosi said. “I hate to use the word lie and I hate to use the word hate, but he was lying about it. He just would never face the reality that he lost the election.”
Despite stepping down from the leadership of the House Democratic caucus in 2022, Pelosi has remained a key political figure. In July, she was the single most important force in pushing President Joe Biden to exit the presidential race. No book publicist could have dreamed up a campaign that would have better justified the title of her memoir, published in August: The Art of Power. Pelosi said she has not spoken to Biden since then.
Biden had made the defense of democracy the central message of his campaign; Vice President Kamala Harris has downplayed that, focusing instead on issues of personal freedom, such as abortion, and the economy.
“What is at stake in our election is our very democracy,” Pelosi said. “Is that a winning issue in the polls? If you look up from that, you want to know what the candidates are going to do for you in terms of your kitchen-table issues.” But she said issues such as abortion are issues of democracy.
She said the rot in the GOP extends far beyond Trump, though she has not given up hope that a more functional relationship between the parties could return to Capitol Hill. “We have a clique in Congress that is a Putin clique,” she said. “Republicans say to me, ‘We can’t beat some of these people in the primary. You have to beat them in the general.’”
This week, Trump experienced a second attempted assassination in a little more than two months. Pelosi’s own family has been touched by political violence: In October 2022, a man broke into her house in San Francisco, searching for her, and brutally assaulted her husband, Paul. She said she hasn’t discussed the relationship between her political career and the attack with him. Pelosi doesn’t shy away from the rough-and-tumble nature of politics. “When you’re in the arena, sometimes you have to take a punch, and sometimes you have to throw a punch,” she said. “For the children.”
Nonetheless, she said, Americans must feel that they can get involved in government without risking their family’s lives. “You just have to make it worth it to stop political violence in our country,” she said.
That’s one topic on which Pelosi and Trump might actually agree.
