The night of November 8, 2016, was meant to be one of historic triumph.
Many women throughout the nation looked forward to it with excitement and anxiety, nervously hoping that a sexist barrier would be destroyed and the first female commander in chief would take office. What was to be the former secretary of state’s victory party was held at the Javits Center on Manhattan’s West Side, a massive convention center that, unsubtly, featured a massive glass ceiling.
But it didn’t break. And Hillary Clinton’s loss left Democrats reeling.
Instead, Democrats of both genders were left with tears streaming down their faces. The same was true a few miles away at the impromptu party that had gathered at the intersection of President Street and Clinton Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Democrats throughout the nation were numb and stunned by the night, as it wasn’t just that Clinton lost—it’s that she lost to him. She lost to the candidate who bragged about sexual harassment and openly mused about grabbing women by their private parts. She lost to the candidate who cavalierly rated women on their looks and discussed sleeping with his friends’ wives. She lost to the candidate who complained bitterly about a beauty pageant contestant’s weight. And she lost to the candidate who was accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women. It felt like a repudiation of their values, maybe of an entire gender.
To make matters worse, there wasn’t much in the way of roadblocks for Trump, as Republicans in 2016 also claimed both the House and the Senate. The day after the election, Barack Obama made a point of walking through the West Wing to tell teary-eyed, shell-shocked aides that things would eventually be okay, that not everything for which they had worked over the last eight years was lost. But when he addressed staffers—and the nation—from the Rose Garden that afternoon, Joe Biden standing forlornly alongside, it appeared that many of those gathered didn’t quite believe him.
Leading Democrats were left grappling with how to handle Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach, how to deal with a president who attacked mercilessly and lied brazenly and seemed to suffer no consequences for it. Trump would end up often emerging as his own enemy, damaged by his own arrogance and incompetence, but that was difficult to see during the Democrats’ dark winter of 2016. Capitol Hill aides, Obama veterans, party leaders in deep-blue enclaves were racked with worry. Trump, to them, was so deeply offensive, so completely unfit for office, and yet he won. Now he wouldn’t just be a candidate with a knack for dominating cable, he’d be the man in charge of both the nation’s nuclear codes and its civil liberties.
And the lessons from the campaign felt dire. Trump seemed close to self-immolation so many times, from warring with John McCain to insulting a Gold Star family to making the vile remarks revealed in the Access Hollywood tape. Yet he could not be beaten; Trump now held the Republican Party firmly in his grasp, with so many of the rank-and-file members—and an increasing number of GOP officials—suddenly willing to believe or go along with anything he said. Democrats felt that they had been delivered a body blow.
But while party leaders were dazed by Clinton’s loss and left scrambling, many of their rank-and-file members took to the streets. After that mammoth Women’s March, the hashtag resistance came to define their approach, with Democrats taking to the airwaves to condemn Trump’s defiance of the office’s norms while also trying, as best they could, to slow his agenda.
At first, some Democrats harbored hopes that Trump would be reasonable. Maybe he would mature and grow into the job. Perhaps he would be restrained. Maybe he would learn to compromise. Indeed, many Democratic lawmakers spent four years wondering if the entirety of the Trump presidency might have gone differently if he had reached across the aisle to begin his term with a long-overdue infrastructure plan, a proposal that had bipartisan support and could have brought the temperature down across Washington. Instead, Trump dove in on a rancorous effort to overturn the Affordable Care Act and pushed through a massive, polarizing tax cut, while weaponizing his Twitter account to deliver broadside after broadside at the other party. He played only to his base. There would be no compromise.
Democrats needed to regroup.
They did not hold the House or the Senate and had been systematically wiped out at the state level too, as the Obama team had paid little mind to growing the party beyond Washington. Over Obama’s eight years in office, twenty-nine state legislative chambers in nineteen states flipped from Democratic to Republican control. Those changes could lead to gerrymandering in the short term and, though no one knew it yet, would loom large five years later when voting rights were scrutinized on the state level in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Trump ate up all the oxygen in the room. He was everywhere: on Twitter, on cable, at his continued rallies. It was difficult to break through, to gain any control. Democrats were forced to be reactionary.
The energy and opposition to Trump that some Democrats wanted to see prior to the election emerged during his first days in office, a heartening development for the party. Days after he was inaugurated, Trump signed a hastily drafted executive order that denied entry to the United States to citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The measure, a modified version of the Muslim ban he had proposed during the campaign, triggered immediate outrage from coast to coast, with thousands of people spontaneously rushing to US airports to protest the restriction. A federal judge moved to block the ban, which had been written by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller with little input from the White House counsel’s office or the Department of Justice’s legal counsel. A week after it was implemented, it was quickly over, as the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would no longer enforce it.
It was an early victory for Democrats. They remained a minority party with little power. But the initial triumph revealed that they would sometimes receive help from unlikely outside allies: figures in Trump’s own White House. The Trump West Wing was often a workplace of dysfunction, with aides undermining one another, basic legislative maneuvers—reaching out to members, clearing bills with counsel—often ignored, and Trump changing his positions on issues based on the input of whomever he spoke to last.
There were some early GOP failures. An initial effort to repeal and replace Obamacare—a talking point at nearly every one of his rallies—collapsed that spring in the GOP-led House of Representatives. His long-promised border wall was slowly and haphazardly built (and easily climbed over).
Moreover, Trump’s entrance on the global stage was chaotic. In his first months in office, he threatened to pull out of NATO, the long-standing military alliance formed as a bulwark to Soviet aggression. He offered deeply personal insults to the leaders of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany, just to name a few, and strained ties with some of America’s closest allies. He seemed far more comfortable with the authoritarian leaders of China, Egypt, Russia, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia. He met with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un—whom he once dubbed “Little Rocket Man” and threatened to eliminate with a nuclear weapon—three separate times in made-for-TV summits, the last of which took place at the heavily militarized DMZ on the border with South Korea. I watched as Trump took a dramatic step into the Hermit Kingdom. He once threw a bunch of Starburst candies at Angela Merkel; he called Justin Trudeau “two-faced” and “a lunatic.” During his maiden overseas trip, Trump stood with autocratic leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt and awkwardly touched a glowing orb at a summit in Riyadh, for some reason. I was there for that too.
White House press releases were rife with typos, world leaders’ names were misspelled, facts were optional, staff turnover was rampant. Trump and much of his senior staff had no experience in government and it showed.
Democrats occasionally benefited from divisions within the Republican ranks, and some in the GOP couldn’t stomach working with Trump. Fueled by a revulsion to Trump, Senator McCain’s July 2017 decision to cast the vote that sank the Republicans’ efforts to defeat Obamacare dealt Trump a humiliating defeat. The GOP effort was one vote away when, long after midnight, an ailing McCain—he would be dead thirteen months later from brain cancer—dramatically stepped onto the Senate floor as the chamber awaited his vote. He paused, building the drama. And then he turned his thumb down, rejecting the Republicans’ best chance to overturn the Affordable Care Act since it had been signed into law seven years earlier. The GOP did not mount another serious effort in Trump’s term.
That McCain was a war hero did not stop Trump from attacking him; the president at first balked at flying the White House flag at half-staff when the senator died and Trump was barred from his funeral. Trump also trained his fire at times at fellow Republicans who dared defy him, attacking members of his own party, including Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, simply for daring to disagree with him. Trump’s poll numbers sank to the upper thirties, even though many of his critics within the GOP—including those two senators—grew weary of the attacks and soon announced their retirements. The president was reshaping the party into something Trumpier and more loyal to him.
Trump also had undeniable triumphs.
Few moments infuriated Democrats more than the new president’s ability to immediately fill a Supreme Court seat. The spot had been vacant since Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016, with Mitch McConnell refusing to fill it, citing Obama’s lame-duck status. That was an outrage, Democrats argued, as Obama still had nearly eleven months left in his term. But McConnell had no qualms about defying decades of tradition, and he would not even schedule a hearing for Obama’s pick, DC Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Merrick Garland. After Clinton’s loss, Garland became a painful reminder of Democratic defeat, of pure powerlessness. He should have been on the court; the Democrats should have won in 2016.
But he wasn’t and they hadn’t. Instead, Trump happily benefited from McConnell’s phony argument and drew upon one of his more effective campaign tactics; in an effort to prove his conservative bona fides, Trump—who, after all, was once a pro-choice Democrat—teamed up with the Federalist Society to create a list of jurists from which he’d fill a potential Supreme Court vacancy. And while the Trump White House was not known for running like a well-oiled machine, it successfully pulled off a surprise glitzy, prime-time reveal of his pick, Federal Appeals Court Judge Neil Gorsuch. He also used the GOP majorities to push through a significant tax cut, one that disproportionately benefited the wealthy.
Democrats looked for a strategy. There was an effort to reach across the aisle, but Trump wasn’t interested, forging forward in that first year as if he had been elected with a sweeping mandate, while happily playing the politics of divisiveness. He aimed his policies directly at his base—with moves such as rollbacks of environmental regulations and of civil rights protections—and blamed Democrats for any Washington failure. Always eager for a foe, Trump governed as he campaigned, and not just by incessantly reliving his win over Clinton. Trump frequently instigated fights and rarely let a slight go unanswered via his favorite weapon: any pre-inauguration talk of restraining his Twitter usage was soon forgotten. He used the 140-character—and later, up to 280—bursts to target foes, traffic in conspiracy theories, salute the programming on Fox News, rattle Congress, and unnerve world capitals.
He was denounced for dismissing African nations as “shithole countries” when he urged a limit on immigration from that continent. He dismissed Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, as “Pocahontas,” mocking her claims about being part Native American. When he visited Puerto Rico after a devastating hurricane, he tossed paper towels into a desperate crowd like they were basketballs—and later tried to stiff the island of federal aid.
Trump had made the calculation that his best move was to divide, to always be in political combat, to fire up his base and dominate news coverage. His instincts were to fight. More than once, he offered a glimpse into how he viewed the presidency—as catnip for cable. “I’m sure their ratings were fantastic. They always are,” he said during one cabinet meeting. Conflict sold—the drama was irresistible, he told aides.
And he did not hesitate to lie in an effort to try to score political points. He claimed that Democratic New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand “would do anything” for a donation, an unsavory insinuation made at the height of the #MeToo movement. The discussion about sexual harassment toppled many powerful men but, when Trump’s own accusers resurfaced, the White House never changed its story: it was the women, not the president, who were lying.
Trump’s commitment to lying, his dedication to never admitting even the smallest mistake, at times took a turn for the surreal and the bizarre.
It was 12:06 a.m. on May 31, 2017, when the following appeared on @RealDonaldTrump: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”
Typos were hardly foreign to Trump’s Twitter feeds, so those still awake expected that a correction would come soon and a follow-up tweet would soon be posted, likely correcting “covfefe” to “coverage” and then finishing with a rant against the media.
But minutes passed and then hours. No change. Only covfefe. The jokes began in earnest, with late-night social media ablaze with posts making fun of the president. But another thought took hold: Had something happened to Trump? The White House had gone silent, the vacuum filled by rampant speculation (and more jokes). His Twitter account was viewed as a place for official statements from the most powerful man on earth—it had been used before to announce policy and threaten North Korea—so there was concern about how an erroneous message, even a harmless one, could be left standing for so long.
Finally, at 6:09 a.m., the Twitter account sprang back to life with this: “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’??? Enjoy!” For once, it seemed like Trump was in on the joke. Perhaps he had fallen asleep and was now up for sharing in the fun. But when pressed at the White House news briefing later that day, the Trump administration again made clear that there was nothing too ridiculous to lie about.
Reporter: “Do you think people should be concerned that the president posted somewhat of an incoherent tweet last night, and that it then stayed up for hours?”
Sean Spicer: “Uh, no.”
Reporter: “Why did it stay up so long after? Is no one watching this?”
Spicer: “No, I think the president and a small group of people knew exactly what he meant.”
No one believed Spicer. But it didn’t matter. The White House would cede no ground, they would fight for this lie. Trump, in a later tweet, claimed that “covfefe” had a “deep meaning.”
Was it a small thing? Yes. But it was telling. It was around this time that New York senator Chuck Schumer started repeatedly telling people, “How can we work with this guy? How dishonest can one man be?”
Democrats, so badly on their heels for much of that year, began to find their footing. They started to lean into Trump’s lies and erratic behavior. They discovered that his ego, and his unwavering loyalty to his base, would become his weaknesses. And with the national party reeling after 2016, they needed someone to become the face of their opposition, someone who could galvanize their dispirited ranks.
They found her in Nancy Pelosi.
After the Democrats lost four straight special elections, there were whispers as to whether it was time for fresh blood, time to remove the then seventy-eight-year-old Pelosi as minority leader. She preached patience and defended her record, declaring, “I’m a master legislator. I am a strategic, politically astute leader. My leadership is recognized by many around the country, and that is why I’m able to attract the support that I do.”
Humble, it was not. But she was right that while she was a lightning rod for many Republican attacks, she had also proven adept at getting under Trump’s skin. She was famed as a relentless negotiator on Capitol Hill, with remarkable attention to detail and expert understanding of the back-and-forth dance needed to land a deal among the competing members of her own caucus. She was tough.
The Democrats hardened their opposition to the White House. They hit on immigration; they said the tax cut was a giveaway to the rich; they painted his efforts to repeal Obamacare as an attempt to take health care away from the people who needed it most. They embraced efforts by the porn star Stormy Daniels, who accused Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen of paying for her silence. Cohen eventually flipped on Trump. And Pelosi and Schumer, who was then Senate minority leader, placed the ongoing Russia probe at the center of their public messaging. They hammered Trump’s possible ties to Moscow and accused Republicans of impeding the special counsel investigation.
Representative Adam Schiff led the charge, with a chorus of lawmakers and MSNBC and CNN pundits quick to act as an echo chamber. They were so desperate to get Trump, so convinced that he had betrayed his country to work with a foreign power, that they celebrated the most incremental developments in the case, seizing on evidence—no matter how circumstantial—as proof of the president’s guilt. Democratic voters around the country tuned in religiously to watch Joe Scarborough or Nicolle Wallace or Anderson Cooper or Rachel Maddow or Don Lemon or Brian Williams deliver the latest updates in the probe, while also glued to their smartphones to watch for the latest push alerts from the New York Times or Washington Post or Associated Press to inform them of Trump’s newest surely treasonous development.
And as they put their faith in Robert Mueller, Democrats also moved to recruit a slate of candidates—and motivate voters—to try to win back the House in the 2018 midterms.
Fearful of being painted as too liberal, the Democrats recruited a series of more moderate candidates to win in the very districts that Trump had turned red two years before. They leaned into the suburban districts that either had gone soft for Trump in 2016 or had outright rejected him. They recognized that historical trends favored them: most of the time, the party that controls the White House tends to lose seats in the off-year election. Even popular presidents had taken defeats. And Trump, with scandals swirling around him, did not seem at all popular outside of his loyal base of supporters. His approval rating remained stubbornly stuck in the upper thirties and low forties. But even though Trump loomed over the election, Democrats had traditionally not fared as well in the midterms as Republicans. Many of their voters, including the young and people of color, had a far better record of turning out for presidential elections than midterms. But this year seemed different.
But Trump wasn’t going to admit it might be his fault. In a wide-ranging Oval Office interview with me and two of my Associated Press colleagues in October 2018, just weeks before the election, Trump said he wouldn’t accept the blame if his party lost control of the House, arguing that his campaigning and endorsements had, in fact, helped Republican candidates. He dismissed suggestions that he might take responsibility, as Obama famously did for the “shellacking” that Democrats took in 2010, for any midterm losses.
“No, I think I’m helping people,” said Trump, before he went on to claim that at his campaign rallies “many people … have said, ‘Sir, I will never ever go and vote in the midterms because you’re not running and I don’t think you like Congress.’
“Well, I do like Congress … and when I say ‘Congress,’” he continued, “I like the Republicans that support me in Congress.”
And he assessed the influence he thought he had on the GOP’s chances that November: “I don’t believe anybody’s ever had this kind of an impact.”
He had an impact all right. His presence led to record fundraising for an off-year election, allowing Democrats to utilize well-financed efforts to reach voters who don’t normally turn out for the midterms. And they painted Trump as a fundamental threat, one who stoked racial and gender divides and could roll back liberties for people of color and women. They won. Bigly.
Democrats picked up forty-one seats from where they were after the 2016 elections, their largest gain of House seats since the post-Watergate 1974 elections. Though the GOP maintained control of the Senate, the House had gone blue, and Pelosi now had the Speaker’s gavel. Moreover, she now had the power of the subpoena—and Democrats could open investigations into the Trump White House. It was open season.
The Democratic House launched a slew of probes in the first few weeks of taking control. The investigations included whether Trump had obstructed justice in the Russia probes, whether his businesses inflated their assets, how his daughter and son-in-law obtained their security clearances, how his actions might have slowed aid to Puerto Rico, and conflict-of-interest allegations involving cabinet members. The Trump White House’s strategy in response was basically three words: just say no. It refused to cooperate with nearly all the probes, defying requests for documents and testimony. And while the Democrats’ ability to enforce cooperation was limited, the steady drumbeat of bad headlines for Trump snarled his agenda and further dragged down his approval ratings.
And as Trump’s reelection campaign loomed, Democrats had learned how to best him at his own game, to exploit one of his biggest weaknesses: his insatiable need to show strength, especially on camera. And in two memorable and defining White House confrontations, they did just that.
The first was in December 2018, when the GOP-controlled Senate unanimously passed a routine appropriations bill, one that looked certain to get the support of their Republican colleagues in the House and Trump. The bill did not include the $5.7 billion in federal funds Trump wanted to build his signature border wall, but his aides had said that the risks of not signing the bill—which would trigger a partial federal government shutdown—were too great, and counseled the president to vie for more border security funds down the road. Trump begrudgingly agreed.
But then the howls began in the conservative media. Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and others accused Trump of going back on his word and being soft on illegal immigration. Trump stewed. “Build the wall” was one of the loudest nightly chants at his rallies, he told allies. He couldn’t back down.
To the horror of some of his aides and many Republicans on Capitol Hill, Trump abruptly announced that he would not sign any appropriations bill that did not fund construction of the wall. The House went ahead and passed a stopgap bill with funding for the wall, but it was blocked in the Senate by the threat of a Democratic filibuster. For the third time in two years under unified Republican rule, the federal government shut down. About 380,000 workers were sent home and not paid, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee. Another 420,000 considered too essential to be furloughed—among them Border Patrol officers—would be forced to work without pay.
But for Republicans, it was worse than that: the president had been outmaneuvered and the Democrats had finally found their footing in Trump’s chaotic Washington.
Schumer and Pelosi met in the Speaker’s ornate Capitol office the night of December 10, 2018, to discuss who would say what when they met with Trump in the Oval Office the next day. They had a feeling they knew what to expect.
Trump, a man who preferred one-page memos to briefing books, would likely be out of his depth when it came to details of the negotiations, and would aim to get by with bluster and sheer force of personality. Both Pelosi and Schumer had complained to their own aides about how difficult it was to negotiate with Trump, who changed his mind on a whim, switching sides multiple times within minutes and then seemingly agreeing to something during a meeting only to walk it back on Twitter a short time later. The lawmakers knew that the shutdown was an opening, a chance to further wound Trump just weeks before their party officially claimed control of the House when the calendar flipped to 2019.
They then got word that Trump also was planning to use the meeting to seize control of the narrative surrounding the shutdown. Late that night, the White House sent along word that Vice President Mike Pence would be joining the meeting as well. And the next day, as Pelosi and Schumer entered the West Wing, they were alerted that Trump had changed plans and invited the press pool into the Oval Office to watch. The president couldn’t resist: he wanted to play for the cameras. Trump and Pence sat in the chairs near the center of the room, flanked by Pelosi on one couch, Schumer on another.
The next seventeen minutes captivated Washington.
Trump had been handed talking points that matched language GOP House leaders were using. Trump’s top congressional liaison, Shahira Knight, met with the president right before the meeting for a “legislative pre-brief.” But he ignored all that, focusing instead on trying to make Pelosi and Schumer look weak on what he felt was his base’s top issue, border security. But instead of letting Trump perform a monologue in his own house, the Democrats spoke back, changing tactics and showing a more aggressive posture that reflected a renewed confidence in their ability to help shape media coverage.
Pelosi and Schumer shot him down again and again.
“It’s called funding the government, Mr. President,” Schumer hit at the top of the meeting when Trump began to riff about the border wall. And Pelosi calmly repeated over and over that Trump didn’t have enough votes among House Republicans to pay for the border wall. Growing visibly irritated, Trump insisted that they did have the votes—nope, he did not—and challenged Pelosi’s hold on her own caucus, to which Schumer responded by alluding to the new power dynamics in Washington that would come with the arrival of a House Democratic majority in a few weeks.
“Elections have consequences, Mr. President,” Schumer chided.
All three leaders—Trump, Pelosi, and Schumer—looked uncomfortable at times during the excruciating exchanges. Schumer and Pelosi frequently stared straight ahead, not making eye contact with the president as they disputed him, and then urging him to dismiss the cameras so they could negotiate in private. Pence didn’t speak at all.
And when Trump made questionable claims about the wall, Pelosi called out his lies: “We have to have an evidence-based conversation. Let us have a conversation where we don’t have to contradict in public the statistics that you put forth.” In short: you’re lying and we’re done with it.
The goading worked. Just before the cameras left the room, Trump turned to Schumer and gave the Democrats a gift bigger than they could have imagined.
“I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck. Because the people in this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country,” Trump said. “So I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not gonna blame you for it. The last time, you shut it down. It didn’t work. I will take the mantle of shutting it down. I’m going to shut it down for border security.”
Schumer couldn’t resist a little fist pump. Trump had taken ownership of a government shutdown; he had provided a sound bite that could be played over and over. He would be the face of a moment that would cost workers’ paychecks and hinder Americans’ ability to get vital services. Some White House aides tried to spin that the Republican base would value the strong stance on the border, but Trump’s poll numbers fell. And the defining image that day would be Pelosi, in an orange coat and oversize sunglasses, strutting out of the White House. The Democrats had more than just a meme—they had some swagger back.
The battle, at times petty, continued for a few more weeks as the government remained shut. In one negotiating session in early January, Trump warned that he might keep the government closed for “months or years.” In another, he bluntly asked Pelosi: “Will you agree to my wall?” When she said she would not, he stormed out. The House Democrats rescinded Trump’s invitation to deliver the State of the Union address; Trump revoked military transportation for overseas congressional trips. And so on.
Eventually, Trump blinked. On February 15, he announced he’d sign a spending bill to open the government. The border wall remained mostly unbuilt. The Democrats had bested his lies.
And when Trump finally delivered his delayed State of the Union later that month, a moment from the night was immortalized in a famed photograph: Pelosi, in her position behind Trump, standing and smirking as she gave the weakened president a sarcastic, sideways clap.
Another moment of defying Trump had become another indelible image—with Pelosi, again, becoming the face of the Democrats while her party began the race to replace Trump.
As Trump’s first term drew to a close, Democrats were finally seizing on the momentum of discrediting him. Investigations swirled. Trump was undermining the United States’ global position. And the Democrats were able to rally around their interim leader yet again, in a second White House confrontation.
A bipartisan delegation of House members and senators had visited the executive mansion on October 17, 2019, to talk about Trump’s widely opposed pullout of US forces from northern Syria, which cleared the way for Turkey’s bloody attack on the region. The House had already delivered a rebuke to the president’s plans, and Pelosi, in the meeting, pressed the president as to why, by pulling out the troops, he was supporting the interests of Vladimir Putin, who wanted more Russian control for that region.
Pelosi stood up. Most of the heads in the room were bowed, eyes lowered.
Most of the men around the table—and to be clear, most of them were men—seemingly couldn’t bring themselves to look at Pelosi. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley and House Republican Whip Steve Scalise stared straight down. House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s eyes were closed. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell gazed off into space.
But Trump looked right at her, his mouth open, ready to respond.
The photo released by the official White House photographer quickly became iconic. Pelosi had risen from her seat around the conference table in the White House Cabinet Room. Democrats, including Schumer and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, were on her side of the table. Trump, the Republican leader, and military officials were seated on the other.
Pelosi was the only one standing. And she was pointing at the president.
Trump blustered that he was simply trying to keep Americans safe. Pelosi swatted that away, declaring it a goal, not a plan. The Turks were moving in and slaughtering the United States’ Kurdish allies; European leaders were aghast that America was not honoring its commitments. The nation’s global standing was once more taking a hit. Again, Pelosi asked, why is it that so many of your decisions seem to be ordered from Moscow?
Trump snarled at her. Pelosi stood, saying she’d had enough and was leaving. And, leveling her finger at the president, she coldly declared, “All roads lead to Putin.”
The moment quickly became a Rorschach test for politics. McCarthy said Pelosi had been rude to Trump; Schumer said the president had insulted the Speaker. Trump then tweeted out the photo, declaring “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!” But Pelosi simply took the image and made it her Twitter banner photo, embracing the confrontation with the president. Even on Trump’s favorite medium, the Democrats were now able to hold their own.
Wielding the threat of impeachment, Pelosi had become the face of the Democratic opposition to Trump. After a slow start, her party had found ways to slow him down; Pelosi had bridged the gap between the Obama/Clinton era of the Democratic Party and what was to come next. The party needed to find someone to take on Trump in 2020. There seemed to be no shortage of candidates.
Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed Vermont socialist who had finished a surprising second in the 2016 primary, said he would run again, bringing with him a sizable base of supporters, including young voters, to this campaign. Another liberal lion of the Senate, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, also said she would run. Others from the Capitol’s upper chamber did so as well: Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Michael Bennet of Colorado, and Kamala Harris of California all jumped in. So did some unexpected names: Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of the small Indiana city of South Bend, as well as tech executive Andrew Yang and new age author Marianne Williamson.
In their desperation to beat Trump, the Democrats cast about for anyone to take on the president. Would Michelle Obama take a shot at claiming her husband’s former seat? What about a billionaire, like Michael Bloomberg? Some even considered Hillary Clinton, but the party’s most recent nominee, though eager to stay involved in politics, signaled that she would not run again. There would be no rematch with Trump.
Few wondered about a former vice president who had quietly returned home to Delaware.