It’s always a good idea to pay attention to Nancy Pelosi and to judge where things are going by which direction she’s nudging them in, but that was especially true over the past few weeks. When she started sending President Biden signals that he should reconsider his candidacy, I felt almost certain that he’d eventually do so, because she was both giving other Democrats permission to break ranks with him and letting him and his allies know the extent and inevitability of the rebellion.
And I realized that Vice President Kamala Harris wouldn’t face any competition for the Democratic nomination when Pelosi endorsed her. That was the sign.
In other words, Pelosi, a woman who so ably foiled Donald Trump when he was president and she was House speaker, helped make it possible — and then confirmed — that another woman, Harris, would lead the charge to foil him from becoming president again.
It’s a veritable Hollywood movie. Women are scripting what will happen to Trump, who has treated women with such cruelty and contempt.
They still don’t enjoy full equality with men in America, but we sure have been leaning on them lately to save American democracy. The appallingly stymied attempts to hold Trump responsible for his crimes have rested largely on the efforts of women, a few of whom did vanquish him in court, as my Times Opinion colleague Jessica Bennett noted in an essay in April. She did a roll call of his pursuers: “Letitia James. Fani Willis. E. Jean Carroll, and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan. And, of course, Stormy Daniels. The five women who are living rent-free in Mr. Trump’s mind these days.”
I’d add “crazy Nancy Pelosi” — Trump is still regularly calling her that, unable to purge her from his thoughts — to the list. (Jessica wrote about Pelosi in an essay this week.) Also former Representative Liz Cheney: Nobody on the House panel investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, was more forceful or impassioned than she was in exposing Trump’s actions and inaction on that day. She, too, squats somewhere in Trump’s gray matter, so much so that he recently amplified social media posts that accused her of treason and urged that she be subjected to a televised military tribunal.
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