THE WASHINGTON POST: ‘Let him stew in his own juice,’ Nancy Pelosi advises ahead of Trump’s speech

Nancy Pelosi still recalls the precise nature of how she ripped Donald Trump’s speech into shreds during his last State of the Union address.

Then the House speaker, she was sitting directly behind the president the night of Feb. 4, 2020. She put a slight tear on each page when the San Francisco Democrat heard something she considered false.

“Then, when I saw that every page was a lie, I had to tear it up,” Pelosi recalled. The stiff paper required “a few” rips instead of “one smooth” motion to obliterate it, she added. “Parchment is very hard to tear.”

Some five years later, Pelosi will attend Tuesday’s joint session of Congress when Trump returns to the House chamber for the first time since that raucous speech. That one began with the president refusing to shake her hand and ended with her waving the shredded speech to her family and supporters in the gallery above.

Now a rank-and-file lawmaker, Pelosi retains a great degree of clout inside the Democratic caucus. Younger lawmakers continue to seek her counsel, with recent discussions including warnings to not turn themselves into part of the story during Tuesday’s speech and urging them to narrow their party’s message in next year’s midterm elections.

“Any demonstration of disagreement, whether it’s visual or whatever, just let him stew in his own juice. Don’t be any grist for the mill to say this was inappropriate,” Pelosi said Thursday morning.

Democrats have struggled in these opening weeks of Trump’s term to unify around a rebuttal to his controversial actions. Pelosi wants Democrats to focus on the recent vote that set a budget outline that can only be met with steep cuts to popular health-care entitlements. It was supported by 217 of 218 House Republicans and not a single Democrat. In the Senate, a few Republicans remain leery of supporting some of the House’s more extreme proposals.

“I’m going there to hear what he has to say about Medicaid, about taking medical care away from more children, middle-income seniors who need long-term health care, and people with disabilities,” she said of Trump’s upcoming speech.

After 20 years leading the caucus, Pelosi has largely ceded the spotlight to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) and his younger leadership team. She relishes her role as someone who still raises big money for Democrats but doesn’t have to answer for every lawmaker’s concern.

She sees similarities today to the two most recent times Democrats were completely locked out of power: in 2005 after George W. Bush’s reelection coincided with GOP wins of the House and Senate, and in 2017 after Trump’s first victory.

Early moves by Jeffries mirror what Democrats did in those years. In 2005, Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada) came up with a narrow campaign message (“Six for ’06”) that started with a simple defense against Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security.

Every time she was asked about the Democratic alternative to Bush’s plan, Pelosi delivered a two-word response: Social Security.

Democrats dug in and defended the program, leading to Bush’s retreat. They focused on a few key issues, such as ethics reform and winding down the Iraq War, and drove them home the final year before winning more than 30 seats in the House and six in the Senate, claiming both majorities.

“You got a mountain of rocks,” Pelosi said, metaphorically referring to all the potential issues in an election. “What are the three or four? You’re going right for the jugular.”

To drive home the point, Pelosi gently swung her right hand into my neck. Pelosi stood comfortably for the 15-minute interview on the Capitol’s first floor, loosely holding a walking stick to help with balance.

Pelosi, 84, underwent hip replacement surgery in mid-December after a fall while traveling in Europe with a bipartisan congressional delegation. She has steadily moved from the use of a walker to two walking sticks and, now, down to one.

She dismisses her recovery compared to her husband, Paul, who was attacked in October 2022 by an intruder searching for her in their San Francisco home.

In an unrelated issue in mid-February, Paul Pelosi underwent kidney transplant surgery with one of their daughters, Jacqueline, serving as the donor. When Pelosi has to be in Washington, one of their other four children tends to Paul Pelosi in San Francisco.

She believes Trump and Republicans made a similarly unpopular move as Bush did 20 years ago with their budget outline calling for $2 trillion in spending cuts that would inevitably lead to deep changes to some entitlements, with Medicaid being the leading contender.

Medicaid, the federal-state health plan for the low income, has grown over the last decade to include millions of middle-class workers. She noted how Rep. David G. Valadao (R-California), who regularly wins in California’s 22nd Congressional District despite those Central Valley voters rejecting Trump all three times, has almost half his constituents receiving Medicaid benefits.

“Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Let’s hear what he has to say,” Pelosi said ahead of the speech. “More important, let’s see how the Republicans react to it.”

In 2005 Democrats held 203 seats, compared to 201 in 2017; today, they sit at 215, on the cusp of the magic number of 218 to give them control of the chamber.

But Democrats face a problem today in terms of the different sets of voters and the messages they want to hear. Party leaders believe that cost-of-living issues crippled Kamala Harris and some Democrats in last fall’s election with the decisive bloc of swing voters.

In this current moment, with Trump inching close to Russia and Elon Musk eviscerating some federal agencies, a large portion of the Democratic base wants a more fire-and-brimstone approach to fighting Trump.

Her advice is to give room for Democrats from particularly safe districts to make those angry appeals away from Washington.

“The most important thing in all of this is to prioritize. And Hakeem, he has that down. I have every confidence that he has that down,” Pelosi said. “Again, members will say I want this, I want that. Yeah, that’s interesting, talk about that at home.”

The big advantage 20 years ago, compared to now, is that the issue driving liberals, the quagmire in Iraq, also connected with independent voters, who swung heavily toward Democrats in 2006.

Trump-inspired scandals, for now, are not animating centrist votes. He is off to a more popular start than his first term, but his February approval ratings - 45 percent approve, 51 percent do not approve - are historically bad compared to other first-year presidencies, according to Gallup.

That provides the opening for Democrats to drive down Trump’s approval ratings - if they can make independents believe he’s hurting their bottom line.

“So when people ask me are you going to win the election, I say, I’ll tell you a year before the election,” Pelosi said.

In October 2005, Bush’s approval had fallen to about 40 percent, according to Gallup; Trump dropped to 35 percent in October 2017. Joe Biden’s approval rating was at 42 percent in October 2021, a year before Republicans won the House majority.

That’s when incumbents and candidates started making decisions about running. By early 2018, ahead of a Democratic landslide, 29 GOP incumbents had said they were retiring, more than the 22 who quit ahead of the 2006 rout.

And dozens of Democratic challengers launched bids a year ahead of those elections, some that were long shots that turned into surprise victories.

Democrats need to stop worrying about the entire arc of Trump’s term, Pelosi said. “It’s not four years, it’s not even two years. It’s between March and September. Where are the numbers?”

Still, Pelosi knows that Trump can cross lines and distract Democrats. In that fiery speech five years ago, Trump even presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, a far-right icon.

A prominent anti-gun violence advocate was arrested for shouting at Trump. Many Democrats stormed out of the speech rather than listen to the president.

“He was frivolous that day he came. He dishonored the House,” Pelosi recalled.

She hopes Democrats can refrain from interjecting Tuesday, unlike House Republicans during the last two Biden addresses in the House chamber. Yet Pelosi has let younger Democrats know everyone has a breaking point.

“Unless you have something that is a moment,” she said. “That’s what a moment was, when I tore up the speech.”

But if they can focus the next seven months, Democrats could be poised for something bigger than just the narrow victory they need to win the House majority.

“This fall is everything. And we only need three seats,” she said. “I don’t want three seats, I want many more than that.”

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