(Headline USA) Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said she was angry with many of her fellow top Democrats for not being more vocal about the need for President Joe Biden to leave the 2024 race, according to a new book being released this month.
Pelosi was the key figure in coercing Biden to drop his reelection bid this summer after his disastrous debate against former President Donald Trump. The two octogenarian lawmakers have reportedly not spoken since then, with their decades-old relationship seemingly fractured for life.
However, Pelosi insisted she was frustrated that her colleagues left the job of bullying Biden out of the race up to her.
“The men were MIA,” one insider told author Jonathan Alter in his new book, American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial—and My Own.
The source added, “She wasn’t happy that the only bloody fingerprints on the knife were hers.”
After Biden’s debate against Trump, Pelosi expected former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—along with Capitol Hill leadership, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.—to immediately schedule meetings with Biden to advise him to drop out.
But the men were hesitant to broach the subject with Biden, leading Pelosi to take matters into her own hands, Alter said.
She started by speaking to Biden about the state of the race in an “I’m-here-for-you tone, followed by several phone chats,” according to Alter’s book. But as the polls began to worsen for Biden, the former speaker became more aggressive in her efforts “to ease the president of the United States out of power.”
The culmination was a MSNBC Morning Joe interview in which Pelosi issued a thinly veiled threat to Biden that Democrats down-ballot were beginning to worry he would drag them down.
Pelosi confirmed this week that she still has not talked to the lame-duck president since earlier this summer.
“I have the greatest respect for him. I think he’s one of the great consequential presidents of our country,” the former speaker claimed.
“I think his legacy had to be protected,” she continued. “I didn’t see that happening in the course that it was on, [that] the election was on. … But I think he has some unease because we’ve been friends for decades.”
