This month, Simon & Schuster is releasing The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House, by Nancy Pelosi.
Over the memoir’s 352 pages, the Democratic Representative and former House Speaker discusses her five children, the 2022 attack on her husband in their home and, the publisher’s website adds: “moving moments with soldiers sent to the front lines, women who inspired her, and human rights activists who fought by her side.”
But as a politician with a front-row seat to Donald Trump’s rise to presidential power — she was House Minority leader from 2011 to 2019, and House Speaker from 2019 to 2023 — Pelosi could be expected to provide more than a few observations on the former president. And as Britain’s Guardian newspaper found out from an advance copy of the book, she does not disappoint.
By 2021, “I knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance,” the Guardian quotes her as saying. “I had seen it up close. His denial and then delays when the COIVD pandemic struck, his penchant for repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots, and his total separation from reality and actual events. His repeated, ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time.”
The Guardian also quotes Pelosi as saying that in 2019, at a memorial service for a prominent psychiatrist, a succession of “doctors and other mental health professionals” told her they were “deeply concerned that there was something seriously wrong (with Trump) and that his mental and psychological health was in decline.”
She makes it clear she did not solicit these statements about Trump’s mental health from attendees at the memorial for Dr. David Hamburg, “a distinguished psychiatrist who … served as the president of the Carnegie Corporation, where he had been a great voice for international peace.”
She adds: “I’m not a doctor, but I did find his behaviors difficult to understand.”
Elsewhere in the book, Pelosi describes how Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, allowed the president to “surreptitiously listen” to private meetings with congressional leaders, which led to her banning cellphones from all her meetings on Capitol Hill.
And in one of the more bizarre excerpts she describes getting a late-night call from Trump in which he said that missile strikes on Syria he had just ordered were Barack Obama’s fault. Her response: “It’s midnight. I think you should go to sleep.”
In another section of the book, the Guardian reports, Pelosi details a call she and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made to Trump’s vice-president after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. They planned to ask Mike Pence “to invoke the 25th amendment to the constitution, which allows for the vice-president and a majority of cabinet members to certify that a president is unable to discharge the duties of the office.”
She writes that they were put on hold for 20 minutes, adding that, since she was at home, she emptied the dishwasher and put in a load of laundry while waiting.
“Ultimately, Vice-President Pence never got on the phone with us or returned our call.”
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