Nancy Pelosi Exposes Bittersweet Process to Replace Biden With Kamala

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted President Joe Biden to drop out because she was startled by his poor debate performance and, apparently, not that impressed by his political machinations.

In an interview with David Remnick for The New Yorker published Thursday, Pelosi discussed the debate, her appearance on Morning Joe, and her influence over Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race.

To hear Pelosi tell it, she was always one step ahead of Biden and his campaign.

Despite what Pelosi described as a pervasive confidence among her people that Biden would outperform Donald Trump in the debate, she claimed to have advised Biden against participating. “I said, [Trump’s] doggy doo-doo. You’re going to get doggy doo-doo on your shoe. It’s not a good thing,” Pelosi said.

Like many Americans, Pelosi was “startled” and “stunned” by Biden’s poor performance in June’s presidential debate.

Pelosi appeared on Morning Joe in July, where she signaled that she was no longer aligned with the messaging of the Biden campaign. While the campaign continuously asserted the incumbent’s unwavering intention to seek reelection, Pelosi spoke with a less definitive tone.

“It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run,” Pelosi said, an implicit rejection of the decision stated by the campaign. “I want him to do whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is.”

Although Pelosi did not cop to her status as a highly influential political operator, Remnick wrote that Pelosi’s appearance on Morning Joe signaled a “permission structure” to others to call on Biden to end his campaign.

It was previously reported that Pelosi, along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, made direct appeals to Biden urging him to drop out.

“I really wanted him to make a decision for a better campaign, because they were not facing the fact of what was happening.… We couldn’t see it go down the drain because Trump was going to be president and then he was going to take the House. Imagine! Imagine how that would be! Well, we don’t have to imagine. We saw,” Pelosi said.

“I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she admitted of Biden. “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: This ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The president has to make the decision for that to happen.”

Unprompted, Pelosi denied rumors that she was in any way the mastermind behind Biden’s decision. “People were calling. I never called one person. I kept true to my word. Any conversation I had, it was just going to be with him. I never made one call. They said I was burning up the lines; I was talking to Chuck [Schumer]. I didn’t talk to Chuck at all,” she said.

“I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next?”

Her goal, she added, was simple: “That Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”

After President Biden backed out of the 2024 presidential election and was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump attempted to weasel out of a previously agreed on debate on ABC News scheduled for September 10. Now Trump wants back in. 

The Washington Post reports that Trump is expected to propose a new debate in the next few days to Harris moderated by ABC News or NBC News with Univision, citing anonymous sources. The move comes after Trump had proposed a September 4 debate moderated by Fox News but was rebuffed by the Harris campaign and criticized by his own supporters. 

Only on Wednesday, the Trump campaign was dodging questions about how the former president and convicted felon ducked out of the previously scheduled debate. This followed a litany of excuses Trump has made since Harris entered the race. He claimed that he couldn’t go on ABC because of ongoing litigation against the network and that he didn’t need to debate because he was already leading in the polls (he wasn’t). His team said that he couldn’t debate someone who wasn’t officially the Democratic nominee and didn’t have former President Barack Obama’s endorsement. Hours later, Obama endorsed Harris. 

The real reason Trump has been hesitant to debate Harris is probably because he’s worried. Trump reportedly thinks it’s unfair that he has to run against Harris, complaining to confidants about the media coverage Harris is getting and about being overtaken in polls. He and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have been struggling to come up with any effective attacks against Harris and Tim Walz, trying out accusations of antisemitism and attacks on Walz’s military record that so far haven’t picked up any traction. 

But in a debate, Trump will have the opportunity to come up with new soundbites and insults, albeit against an opponent sharper than Biden, and he probably wants to do it on a bigger stage than Fox News, even though they would give him a home-field advantage. As Trump would say, the ratings will probably be sky-high.  

Donald Trump is losing in more ways than one. According to a Marquette Law School Poll national survey published Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee is trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by four percentage points.

Americans have identified Trump as the old man in the race since President Joe Biden dropped out last month, and key swing states that had previously identified as red are now considered toss-ups, according to the Cook Political Report.

Yet one issue above everything else is really gnawing at the bloviating populist: his dwindling crowd size.

“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was—And she pays for her ‘Crowd,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”

Photographic evidence proves otherwise. Pictures of Trump’s Philadelphia rally in late June—which was held at the same arena as Harris’s event on Tuesday—stand in stark contrast to images of the Democrat’s packed crowds. Photos of Trump onstage include backgrounds loaded with empty seats and even entirely empty sections.

Meanwhile, Harris’s explosion onto the campaign trail just a handful of weeks ago has brought scores of crowds lining up to see her speak, with some queues (like the one in Eau Claire, Wisconsin) trailing for more than half a mile to enter the arena, reported AFP.

In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But Harris’s ability to meet and exceed Trump’s numbers has really rattled him, along with the conservative establishment. On Thursday, news of Harris’s massive crowds reached the top of the Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, paired with the headline: “HARRIS CROWDS ROIL MAGA.”

Other top stories on the site hinted at more chaos inside Team Trump, including concerns that Trump is “panicking” and that a short-notice afternoon press conference at Mar-a-Lago, which is reportedly only permitting the attendance of reporters hand-selected by Trump’s team, is evidence of Trump losing faith with his campaign.

“Re: Trump’s self-announced press conference today at 2 pm: He’s panicking,” wrote former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham on X (formerly Twitter.) “I’ve seen this play many times. He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/’save’ his campaign/defend him but him. He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.”

Ready or not, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has more dead animal stories up his sleeve.

The independent presidential candidate has doubled down on his side-of-the-road hunting strategies, telling reporters outside an Albany courthouse on Wednesday that he had picked up roadkill his “whole life” and has a “freezer full of it.”

Journalists reportedly took the anecdote for a joke until Kennedy’s campaign spokesperson Stefanie Spear clarified that he had been serious and that Kennedy uses the meat to feed his ravens, according to the Associated Press. Spear also added that the presumptive Kennedy heir no longer had the “21 cubic foot (0.59 cubic meter) refrigerator” used for storing the meat at his Westchester County residence.

While salvaging roadkill for meat isn’t unheard of in more rural areas of the country, it’s also a strange topic for any presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. Kennedy’s bizarre story of picking a dead bear cub off the road, posing with its slashed carcass, driving it down to Manhattan, and staging it in Central Park a decade ago has been met with national shock, with some critics accusing Kennedy of animal abuse.

The disturbing tale—which was originally reported on by Kennedy’s relative for The New York Times in 2014—was tied to Kennedy in a New Yorker exposé on Monday. In response, Kennedy quipped that “maybe that’s where [he] got [his] brain worm,” referring to a 2010 incident in which he suffered from “brain frog” and short-term memory loss that he chalked up to a parasitic worm in his head.

Kennedy had hoped to stave off any buzz created by the New Yorker article. Before the story was published, Kennedy posted a video to his X account in which he made light of the whole event, bizarrely telling actress Roseanne Barr (of all people) that he had originally thought to skin the cub before telling friends at a dinner that it would instead be funnier to leave it in the heavily trafficked park.

“I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of, and I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,’” Kennedy said in the video. “Everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea.’ So we did that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”

Donald Trump has been throwing a prolonged tantrum, as he struggles to accept that he is no longer running against President Joe Biden.

The former president and convicted felon has become increasingly distressed at the state of his campaign, according to a Washington Post report published Thursday.

As Vice President Kamala Harris has relaunched the Democratic Party’s campaign, Trump saw his fundraising edge dissipate under the shadow of her $310 million influx in July. At the same time, his campaign has struggled to find its footing in the new matchup, leaving some close to the campaign wondering how it was possible they were so ill prepared, according to the Post.

After flying so high at the Republican National Convention in July, it seems that Trump has had a hard time adjusting to the fact that his fight is not over.

“It’s unfair that I beat him and now I have to beat her too,” Trump told an ally in a phone call last weekend, according to the Post.

Trump has reportedly been complaining nonstop about Harris’s surging media coverage and positive polling, which has since seen her rise above Trump in crucial national polls. Trump has also been anxiously asking his friends how they feel about his campaign, according to five people close to the campaign who spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity.

The Republican nominee has also reportedly been getting flack from friends and allies over his performance at recent events. Last month, Trump made a disastrous appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, which quickly devolved into a hostile performance rife with racist responses and caused his team to pull him offstage early, sending Republicans spiraling over what to do next.

People familiar with the inner workings of the campaign have said there has, surprisingly, been little chaos as a result of the other team’s sudden upheaval. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told the Post that any allies or advisers who were questioning the campaign were “unnamed sources who have no idea what they are talking about and are doing nothing but helping Democrats.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s nostalgia for his low-energy run against Biden is tangible. The former president took to Truth Social Tuesday night to fantasize about the Democratic National Convention, inventing a version in which Biden swoops in and steals the nomination back from Harris.

Now Trump’s race is very different. It requires a much more sophisticated ground game, which his campaign has yet to put together—and even his allies are noticing.

Conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X Thursday, “Forget the money and ads, the Democrats’ ground game is far surpassing the GOP ground game. They’ve been registering new voters and farming for absentee ballots with paid operatives, some of whom are making up to $40 an hour. The GOP has nothing at that level.”

Trump is much more used to doing one major event a week. This week, as his running mate J.D. Vance hit the road, Trump stayed home in Florida to fundraise and do interviews. After months of campaigning, it’s unclear whether Trump has the stamina to carry his campaign to November.