Nancy Pelosi outmaneuvers Donald Trump, reminds us why she’s the Democratic House leader

| 11:02 pm EDT September 6, 2017
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Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is the Rodney Dangerfield of politics: she gets no respect. The mainstream left takes her for granted. The fringe left disses her to try to score cheap street cred. The right demonizes her. And those who don’t follow politics don’t really know what she does. But here’s a clue: she just keeps winning.

Pelosi got Donald Trump to cave to the Democratic Party’s agenda on the debt ceiling without having to give him anything in return. Part of that was because Trump is flailing in general and has no idea how to negotiate. But the other part of it was because Pelosi is one of the most shrewd negotiators in recent Congressional memory.

It was Nancy Pelosi who became Speaker of the House for the final two years of George W. Bush’s presidency, and she promptly convinced him to stop pushing his extremist conservative legislative agenda altogether. She got no credit for it, however, because her job was basically to make sure that Bush couldn’t do any more damage, meaning that net output was zero.

Nancy Pelosi helped President Obama ram through a smorgasbord of liberal reforms during his first two years. Obama got too little credit for those accomplishments, while Pelosi got none. But the reality is that Pelosi just keeps winning, often when she’s holding few cards. If the Democrats win a majority in the House in the midterms, she’ll become Speaker of the House again – and then we’ll see how much winning she can do against Trump once she retakes her gavel.