Prologue
It was sometime around 5 a.m. when Nancy Pelosi decided she might as well just give up.
January 3, 2019, was a day she had been looking forward to for a long time, the day she would, for the second time, become Speaker of the House. The previous day had been a whirlwind of ceremonial and official duties: a meeting at the White House about the ongoing government shutdown, a tea in honor of the women of Congress, a celebratory dinner at the Italian embassy, where Bill and Hillary Clinton toasted her and Tony Bennett sang. And then she went home, to her airy penthouse apartment overlooking the Georgetown waterfront, to put the finishing touches on the “rules package,” the sixty-page document that sets out the changes to how Congress governs itself.
Most of the package had already been agreed to, but Pelosi wanted it to be perfect. She had been up until 2 a.m., calling colleagues, tweaking this clause and that, refreshing herself as she did so with a watermelon-lime seltzer. At seventy-eight, she found her preternatural energy undiminished. She never drank alcohol, rarely had caffeine that wasn’t from her beloved dark chocolate and didn’t need more than a few hours’ sleep per night. But there must have been something in the seltzer she sipped, because when she finally lay down to sleep, Pelosi—two-time Speaker of the House, second in the line of succession for the presidency, the most powerful woman in American political history—was wide awake.
She lay there for three hours, until the dull sun began to stream through the windows and melt the dirty clumps of snow on the ground. She tried to put the time to productive use, organizing her thoughts for the big day ahead. It was impossible not to feel a glimmer of excitement. Not trepidation—fear was one of the emotions she never allowed herself to experience. (She liked to say it was not in her vocabulary.) But as dark gave way to dawn and she realized she might as well just get up, she felt a spark of glee. Time and again, she’d been counted out, insulted, dismissed. But she was still here, and she was back on top.
For years, pundits, the press and even some members of her own party had treated her as little more than an inconvenience. They fretted about her age and her polarizing public persona. They argued that, however skilled her leadership, she was a liability for the Democrats, and some called her selfish for clinging to her position in the party leadership rather than making way for a “fresher” face. When she pointed out that she was good at her job—“I am a master legislator,” she didn’t mind saying, because nobody else would—she only earned more ridicule: arrogant, delusional, tone-deaf, out of touch. Even after she helped engineer a landslide victory in the November 2018 midterm elections, the grumbling continued, and some Democrats tried to deny her the speakership.
But what happened on December 11, 2018, changed everything. That morning, Pelosi walked into the Oval Office to meet with President Donald Trump, along with Vice President Mike Pence and the leader of the Senate Democrats, Chuck Schumer. She was expecting a routine, private negotiation on government funding; as was often the case throughout her career, she was the only woman in the talks. But Trump liked to humiliate people and keep them off balance. He invited the press to stay and record the discussion, then began to harangue the two Democrats about his desire for a border wall. As they spoke up to contradict him, the president, unaccustomed to being challenged, especially by a woman, became infuriated. And then Trump insulted her, attempting to undermine her very leadership position by implying she was hamstrung by her party’s divisions, saying, “Nancy is in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now.”
At that, Pelosi drew on the experience of a lifetime of refusing to let men speak for her, interrupting them if necessary. “Mr. President,” she said icily, “please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats.”
By the end of the meeting, Washington’s balance of power had shifted. Pelosi and Schumer had gotten Trump to take sole responsibility, on camera, for the tremendously unpopular action of shutting down the government. (“I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down,” he said.) They had told the president to his face that he was a liar and that even his own party didn’t want his stupid wall. Not for the first time, by asking the cameras to stay, Trump had humiliated no one but himself. When the meeting turned spectacle was over, Pelosi collected her coat, a knee-length rust-red overcoat with a funnel neck. She then strode out of the White House smiling and, smoothly, with both hands, affixed a pair of large, round tortoiseshell sunglasses to her face.
The image was indelible. “You come at the queen, you best not miss,” one Twitter user captioned it. The internet immediately seized upon the moment, citing Pelosi as the epitome of a poised and competent woman who knew how to put men in their place. Another tweeter described her expression as “that look when you just got finished man-handling a man baby on the big stage.” Others Photoshopped mushroom clouds or smoking rubble into the shot’s background. Before long, Pelosi’s coat had two parody Twitter accounts to speak for it—@NancyCoat touted its “Big Coat Energy”—and Pelosi’s image was on T-shirts, cell phone cases and even greeting cards sold at a hip DC bar. The coat hadn’t been on the market in years, but the designer, Max Mara, announced it would be reissued, citing demand. “This is diplomacy in motion, soft power wielded like a machete,” the Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins declared.
It wasn’t just that Pelosi looked cool walking out of that meeting. After two years of Trump running roughshod over every institution, norm and cherished ideal in America, he had come to seem unstoppable, even almighty. In a single interaction, Pelosi had stopped him cold—and it wouldn’t be the last time. All she needed was a little bit of leverage, her favorite word, and she would proceed to run rings around this amateur president as the political world watched in awe. Trump seemed positively flummoxed. She walked into the White House that day under a cloud of conflict and controversy, but she walked out an icon.
* * *
When she first set foot in the Capitol’s marble hallways, she was six-year-old Nancy D’Alesandro, a little girl from Baltimore, watching her father get sworn in for his fifth term as a member of Congress. She was never supposed to follow in Daddy’s footsteps, no more than her mother had been allowed to fulfill her dream of going to law school in the 1930s. Nancy’s father became the mayor, boss of the city, while her mother had to settle for being her husband’s unseen, uncredited political brain. Nancy, too, was expected to one day fulfill her role as a behind-the-scenes helpmeet to the men who did the world’s important work. Her five brothers were groomed to follow their father into the family vocation; she was groomed to be a nun. Women didn’t have power. Women had responsibilities.
She didn’t become a nun, but nor did she join the bra burners and dropouts and establishment smashers of her generation. Her rebellion was a quieter one. When she attended the March on Washington, she left before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in order to prepare for her upcoming wedding. While some were burning their draft cards during Vietnam, she was pushing a stroller around her upscale New York City neighborhood, slipping Democratic leaflets under apartment doors, while her husband, a banker, put in long hours at the office. When violent riots broke out at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, Pelosi was not with the protesters but inside the convention hall, watching her father and brother cast their delegate votes. Married straight out of college, she became a full-time housewife and mother, moving across the country to San Francisco to support her husband’s career in finance and giving birth to five children in six years.
But her seeming conventionality was camouflage for a revolutionary soul, one that would defy stereotype and history to achieve something no woman ever had before. In fact, she never planned to follow her father into elected office. But when the opportunity came, she took it and made the most of it, trouncing a dozen other candidates in her first election to earn her seat in Congress in 1987. A decade later, when she decided to seek a spot in party leadership, the men who’d always been in charge grumbled, “Who told her she could run?” That only made her more determined. She spent three years lobbying her colleagues and finally defeated, by a handful of votes, the man who thought he was next in line for the job. In 2002, she became minority leader, the first woman ever to lead her party in Congress.
Four years later, in 2006, she powered Democrats to victory in the midterm elections based on voters’ fatigue with George W. Bush and the Iraq War. That gave Pelosi’s party the majority in the House, and made her the first woman Speaker. She soon established herself as a master of the game, using techniques she’d learned as a young Catholic mother. Nothing teaches you to deal with unreasonable egomaniacs like having five young children in the house. In Pelosi’s home, the children formed an assembly line to make their own school lunches, and they set the table for breakfast as soon as dinner was cleared. Decades later, when congressional meetings grew contentious and lawmakers started talking over one another, Pelosi would silence them by barking, “Do I need to use my mother-of-five voice?” She rarely had to punish those who crossed her—the fear of her cold disapproval was enough to keep them in line. She led the charge to block Bush’s attempted privatization of Social Security, and when the 2008 financial crisis was spiraling out of control, she worked with the unpopular president to pass a bank bailout and prevent further collapse, taking a major political risk to do what she thought was right.
After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Speaker Pelosi became his essential legislative partner. She helped him rack up a generation’s worth of long-sought liberal gains, from Wall Street reform to equal pay for women. When Obama’s signature achievement, health care reform, was floundering, she was the one who convinced him to press on. “You go through the gate,” she said at the time. “If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”
Republicans spent years caricaturing Pelosi as the epitome of a “San Francisco liberal,” to frighten heartland voters by conjuring images of hippies in Haight-Ashbury and gay pride marches in the streets. In 2010, they turned it into a campaign strategy, stoking the Obamacare backlash with a 117-city “Fire Pelosi” bus tour and ads depicting her as a rampaging fifty-foot-tall giantess. They succeeded in taking back the majority, and they proceeded to redraw the congressional maps in many states to make it nearly impossible for them to lose it. People expected Pelosi would quit, but that wasn’t her style. She waited and worked, convinced that one day she’d win again.
The Republican men who succeeded Pelosi as Speaker didn’t have her talents. Both John Boehner, the Speaker from 2011 to 2015, and Paul Ryan, the Speaker from 2015 to 2019, were unable to rein in the right-wingers swept in by the Tea Party wave. When she was Speaker, Pelosi had never lost a major vote on the floor of the House, because she wouldn’t bring anything to the floor unless she could get the votes to pass it. She was so good at the job that she sometimes made it look easy. Boehner and Ryan, however, quickly discovered how hard it really was. Despite their large majorities, they repeatedly brought bills to the floor only to see them fail.
The Republican Speakers’ failures were, in a way, the best illustration of Pelosi’s mastery. The Republicans excused their defeats by pointing out how varied the members of their caucus were, from suburban moderates to Texas right-wingers, an inherently fractious bunch that was difficult to corral into agreement. But Pelosi’s Democratic majority had been, if anything, even more diverse: male and female, black and white, liberal and centrist, urban and rural, and all animated by the freethinking, rebellious Democratic spirit. Still, she got them to do what she wanted nearly every time.
The Democrats spent eight grinding years in the minority as Pelosi tried and failed to get her gavel back. Even in that powerless position, she managed to be effective. The hapless Republicans couldn’t keep the government open or get crucial bills passed without Democratic votes. They were forced to come to Pelosi and beg for her help. She used her leverage to negotiate deals that funded her party’s priorities and protected liberal accomplishments, from the Affordable Care Act to family planning funds to labor and environmental regulations. In the two years Trump was president and Pelosi was House minority leader, Trump didn’t get his health care bill and didn’t get his border wall. Her techniques were a master class in the art of the deal—an art the rest of Washington seemed to have totally forgotten as it descended into chaos and gridlock.
Pelosi was determined to win again in 2018. She crisscrossed the country convincing potential candidates to run for Congress and appearing at event after event, from VIP receptions to rubber chicken dinners, to raise money to fund the campaigns. She drilled candidates on what to say, convincing them to run on health care and economic fairness rather than fixating on Trump, and she relentlessly pushed the idea that Trump’s one legislative achievement, tax reform, benefited only the rich. Once again, the GOP’s strategy was to put the supposedly scary “San Francisco liberal” in its ads—she appeared in more than a hundred thousand of them across the country. Nervous Democrats worried the blitz might be effective, and some called on Pelosi to step aside. “I think I’m worth the trouble,” she responded. This time, the attacks didn’t work, and the Democrats won an enormous, 40-seat victory.
But the years in the wilderness had left Democrats restless and frustrated. Even though Pelosi had masterminded and funded the winning campaign, even though 2018 was supposedly the Year of the Woman, she had to fight to overcome dissent in her own ranks in order to be elected Speaker once more. She called in the doubters one by one, and one by one, like a sniper, she picked them off. A congresswoman from Ohio agreed to support her in exchange for a subcommittee assignment. A congressman from upstate New York who had signed a letter pledging to oppose her announced he’d changed his mind. When the leader of the anti-Pelosi brigade, a young congressman from Massachusetts, decided he would negotiate with her instead, Politico dubbed the failed effort to oust her “the Pathetic Pelosi Putsch.” The campaign to exploit her weakness ended up showcasing her strength instead—giving her an opportunity to demonstrate the very wheeling-and-dealing skills that qualified her for the speakership.
* * *
Now, on that January morning when she would ascend once again to her rightful position, she put on a bright fuchsia sheath dress with three-quarter sleeves, which she’d ordered online for the occasion. It was formal, feminine, bold—exactly right. She hated shopping and usually threw on whatever was back from the dry cleaner; her husband of fifty-five years, Paul, would sometimes point out that she needed new clothes. She filed away each outfit in her systematic mind—this dress with these shoes; this pantsuit with this blouse and necklace—the same way she filed away which project a Democratic member of Congress was trying to fund in his district, or which member nursed a grudge against another, or the fine print in a budget deal that spanned hundreds of pages. Properly armored, Pelosi stepped into the black SUV that would take her across town to the U.S. Capitol, where, with 220 votes, she would be elected Speaker of the House for the second time, doubters be damned.
The past decade’s journey had changed her, steeling her will and bolstering her confidence but also rendering her, with her 1950s sensibility, ever more of an anachronism. At her first swearing-in as Speaker, she’d worn a sensible plum-colored pantsuit with a string of pearls. Twelve years later, the Speaker in the hot-pink dress was bolder and more knowledgeable, but also, perhaps, more rigid and out of touch. In the months to come, she would have to walk a tightrope, trying to harness the energy of charismatic young members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while keeping them in line with the mainstream. She would have to negotiate budgets with an increasingly recalcitrant and lawless president. She would have to rein in the impeachment-hungry Democrats until the time was right. And then it would be up to her to lead the third presidential impeachment in American history, in a country that had rarely been so anxious, angry, or divided.
At 2:50 p.m. on January 3, the seventy-eight-year-old Italian American grandmother in four-inch heels who hadn’t slept in a day and a half grinned and hoisted the gavel she’d earned, surrounded by a flock of children—her own grandchildren and the children of many of her colleagues. Outside the Capitol, all was not well. The government had been shut down for nearly two weeks. Trash was piling up in national parks, recipients of federal housing assistance faced eviction and government workers were taking out payday loans to keep their families fed. Even more serious, it seemed possible that American democracy itself was on the precipice. A president with authoritarian impulses shutting down the government and declaring a national emergency could well be the first step toward dictatorship—would he next declare martial law, dismiss Congress, cancel the next elections and begin rounding up dissenters? If he tried to do any of those things, would anyone be able to stop him? With Donald Trump in the White House anything seemed possible.
People had taken to calling it “Trump’s Washington,” shorthand for the surrealism of the situation in the capital—as if he owned the place, this indelicate newcomer, this monster, this buffoon. Trump offended Pelosi’s sense of propriety as much as he threatened her values. But if his election represented the antithesis of everything she held dear, it was also an indictment of the politics she practiced. In 2016, the American electorate had risen up against the kumbaya ethos, cosmopolitan perspective and technocratic style she epitomized. When, during the campaign, Trump boasted that he knew how politicians get bought by donors because he’d done it himself, Pelosi was one of the politicians he was talking about: long before she became Speaker, she had gone to Trump Tower seeking his checks, and he’d given twenty thousand dollars. Later, he wrote her a congratulatory note, scribbled in Sharpie on a copy of the New York Times: “Nancy—you’re the best.”
Now she was the primary obstacle standing between Trump and total domination—standing, perhaps, between democracy and its greatest enemy. And for all her skill at leadership, for all her experience in governing, nothing had quite prepared her for this battle.
The story of Nancy Pelosi is the story of an extraordinary person who shattered the “marble ceiling” and blazed a new trail for women. It’s the story of a career that stamped American history and helped enact policies that affected millions of lives. It’s a story about politics and perception and women in public life. It’s a story that will shape American politics in the Trump era and beyond.
Because, as Pelosi would proceed to demonstrate, it wasn’t Trump’s Washington. It was hers.
Copyright © 2020 by Molly Ball
Afterword copyright © 2021 by Molly Ball