Nancy Pelosi just made that look way too easy
At one particularly low point during Donald Trump’s offensive and ineffective State of the Union address, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi took things to the next level. She’d been handed an advance copy of his speech, so she began reading it just to see how badly he was going off the rails.
The fact that Pelosi was reading at all was surely offensive to her seat mate Mike Pence, who thinks women shouldn’t be taught how to read, and to Donald Trump, who can’t read. But that was just the beginning. At another point, when Trump looked back at Pelosi during an applause break, she did this weird sarcastic sideways clap that sparked a thousand memes.
It wasn’t just that Nancy Pelosi took her shots at Donald Trump for all the world to see. It’s that she seemed to know exactly how much she could get away with, coming just shy of the threshold that would have resulted in mainstream criticism of her decorum. Instead she threaded the needle perfectly, and simply owned him.
Nancy Pelosi’s mastery of the moment was also on full display when Donald Trump began telling a particularly offensive lie, and some of the House Democrats began a murmur that was on the verge of booing. Pelosi quickly waved them off, because it would have looked bad in the eyes of the moderates and nonpolitical types who had tuned in for the speech.
House Democrats promptly listened to Nancy Pelosi in that moment, because they’ve completely bought into the idea that she’s the kind of skilled leader who can get them where they need to go. Even while showing full command of her own team, Pelosi dominated her opponent Donald Trump on such a sophisticated level, he didn’t even seem to understand whether he was being taunted.
Nancy Pelosi is only a month into her current tenure as Speaker of the House, but she already has Donald Trump so spun around, he doesn’t know what to do with her. Just wait until the Democratic House hearings into Trump’s criminal scandals start later this week – and then we get to the impeachment part. She’ll eat him alive, and he’ll wish he were dead.
