“Nancy Pelosi didn’t want President Joe Biden to step down, the former speaker told ABC News Monday morning. What she wanted, she explained, was “a campaign that would win.”
The California Democrat was instrumental in the behind-the-scenes pressure campaign within her party pushing Biden to end his campaign last month, though she has denied in recent days calling members as the list of Democratic defectors grew.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/05/pelosi-campaign-biden-gma-00172648
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who announced she’d step down from leading the House Democrats on Thursday, made history as the first woman to ever hold the position and was a political target — and thorn in the side — of Republicans for the better part of two decades. All that frequently obscured her mastery of her job and her singular skills as a legislator, according to Molly Ball, a Time political correspondent and author of the biography Pelosi.
Pelosi has been central to many of Democrats’ biggest policy wins in recent years. She kept a divided caucus unified to pass landmark bills, including the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank banking reforms, and the American Rescue Plan. She won so many concessions from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Covid-19 relief that he had to be pulled from the talks, according to Ball. And she’s corralled members time and again when the party seemed on the verge of fracturing over their differences.
“Here’s someone who had a 30-year career being the force behind all kinds of major legislation and liberal accomplishments in the House, chief among them the ACA. But when people talked about her, the only thing they seemed to talk about was just how disliked she was,” says Ball of the misconceptions people held of Pelosi when she first began reporting on the speaker.”
“It’s now clear the speaker was the target of Friday’s attack. The assailant broke into the home looking for her, reportedly shouting, “Where is Nancy?” — echoing what insurrectionists called out when they breached the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 — and saying that he would wait “until Nancy got home” as he confronted Paul Pelosi. The speaker’s husband suffered a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands that required surgery after the assailant bludgeoned him with a hammer. The attacker faces federal assault and attempted kidnapping charges. (A spokesperson for the speaker said in a statement that Paul Pelosi is expected to make a full recovery.)
Republicans have dismissed any connection between their rhetoric and the attack. Instead, they’ve blamed Democratic policies on crime and suggested that growing political violence may be the result of general anxiety around election legitimacy. Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO who was cheered by Republicans when he bought Twitter last week, has advanced a right-wing anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory around the circumstances of the attack. Though he deleted his post, it remained on Twitter long enough to be amplified and repeated by many on the right.
Even before Pelosi became speaker, Republicans in the party and those adjacent to it have demonized her regularly, featuring her in attack ads and lambasting her on Fox News. At least one of her colleagues in the House, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), has directly indicated support for violence against her. And members of right-wing militia groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters have sought her assassination.
Police haven’t gone into further detail about the attacker’s motivations, but his Facebook posts on conspiracy theories around Covid-19 vaccines, the 2020 election, and the January 6 attack provide a window into his radicalization. Other blog posts under his name contained screeds against minorities, politicians, women, and global elites, and content related to QAnon — the false pro-Trump conspiracy theory that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, including prominent Democrats like Pelosi, are running the world.
None of those posts reference Pelosi specifically, but all of them intersect with the ways she has been a familiar target of the right — and not just on the political fringes.”
“In conversations with voters at an early-voting location in Virginia Beach, the economy weighed far more heavily than the attack on the Capitol. While jets from a nearby Naval Air Station roared overhead, those coming and going from casting their ballots didn’t view January 6 as a factor. Mike Malbon told Vox that he had voted for Kiggans. Although he had never voted for Luria, he described himself as a swing voter who had voted for Trump, Obama, and George W. Bush. Malbon said his vote was based on the fact that he was “just not really happy with what the Democrats were doing.” When asked if he’d thought about January 6 while voting, Malbon said, “I’ve thought about it for sure. I probably would never vote for Trump again, I would have otherwise.”
Melinda Salmons, who said she was voting for Kiggans because she thought Luria was in Nancy Pelosi’s pocket, echoed this. When asked about Trump, she told Vox, “Donald Trump doesn’t affect me one way or another. The man is not running. I’m like a lot of people, I like what my pocketbook says. I do not like what he says.””
“The perpetrator’s shouts of “Where’s Nancy?” during the home invasion early Friday morning echoed the chants of pro-Trump rioters who searched the Capitol’s halls for the speaker in a bid to stop the certification of Biden’s 2020 victory.
“This is despicable. There’s no place in America. There’s too much violence — political violence — too much hatred, too much vitriol,” Biden said. “And what makes us think one party can talk about stolen elections, Covid being a hoax, [that it’s] all a bunch of lies, and it not affect people who may not be so well balanced? What makes us think that it’s not going to alter the political climate? Enough is enough is enough.””