Nancy Pelosi Has Trump Right Where She Wants Him

[orangecrush]

"Out of power and under attack from her own party, the minority leader seemed like a spent force. Then Donald Trump happened."


"Watch Pelosi work the room in a meeting of her members, they say, and you’ll get it. She knows everything about all of them, from children to legislative pressure points. She knows when to approach her colleagues like a multicylinder spring-loaded lock, and when to come at them like the drama counselor at summer camp.

“Your leader, Nancy Pelosi, was amazing,” Schumer reassured nervous Democrats in a closed meeting after the Oval Office deal, according to people in the room. “She was throwing shade at [Speaker Ryan]—‘You got the votes, you got the votes?’ And he couldn’t say anything.”

The Democratic Party is in a rolling existential crisis, with no real power in Washington, the prospect of very rough midterm elections despite the president’s unpopularity and a massive, discombobulated 2020 presidential field that’s like an Egon Schiele portrait of the left’s divisions and lack of leadership. Yet the one veteran with a proven track record of wins in Congress and in campaigns is the one they’re always talking about dumping. Junior House Democrats—who make up many of the rebels in the caucus—joke that the only downside of possibly winning the majority next year is that Pelosi, who is 77, would almost certainly stick around, and have a pretty solid case for being speaker again.

“A lot of our members say, ‘You’ve got to stay because you’re the master legislator,’” Pelosi says. “Self-promotion is a terrible thing, but clearly somebody has to do it. And I guess I haven’t done it enough.”
Polarizing as Pelosi may be, if one thing became clear in the weeks I spent talking to her and dozens of allies and detractors in Congress for this story, it’s this: She’s not going anywhere, and doesn’t really care about the complaints. She insists her priority is winning in 2018. “That is it. I’ve been speaker. I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I want the Democrats to win,” she tells me, arguing that her party is “in excellent shape,” given Trump’s approval ratings, the Democrats’ own recruitment and the historically poor performance of a president’s own party in the midterms."

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/nancy-pelosi-house-democratic-leader-profile-feature-2017-215759