Opinion: How Nancy Pelosi Knifed Joe Biden—Without Backing Kamala Harris

We should have known it would be Nancy .

Not Senate Majority Leader Chuck “I'm with Joe” Schumer or House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. No, it was always going to be the 84-year old former House Speaker who would take down the President.

Reporting earlier this week on her role in unseating President Biden following his disastrous debate performance, Politico noted, “We’ve covered Pelosi for a long time now and can tell you her fingerprints are all over the knife.”

In January 2019, after the Democrats electoral surge in the 2018 midterms, her daughter was asked how Pelosi—the incoming House Speaker—would approach negotiations with then-President Trump. “She’ll cut your head off and you won’t even know you’re bleeding,” Alexandra Pelosi said.

It was meant as a compliment. Trump would live to learn how true it was. And so would Biden .

Over the last three weeks as Biden teetered, only to recover, and was beaten down, only to rally, it was Pelosi who kept coming back to the fight. As Politico reported, “Each time the Dump Biden movement seemed to stall, it was Pelosi who personally took pains to help revive it.”

In a July 10 interview on Morning Joe , Pelosi said of Biden that “it's up for the president to decide if he's going to run,” adding “we're all encouraging him to make that decision”—comments made just as the ‘oust Biden’ campaign had stalled. Speculation was immediately re-ignited, only to be quietened again by the attempted assassination of former president Trump.

Then, just as Biden seemed to have ridden out the latest threat, it was her fellow Californian Adam Schiff who revived the movement when he called on Biden to step aside last Wednesday. Not for nothing are Pelosi and Schiff known in Democratic circles as the California Mafia.

And in what looked like an all-too-coordinated plan on Friday, there was another batch of public pleas for Biden to go. Pelosi“s fingerprints were all over this too, with her close ally (and another fellow Californian) Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren among those calling for the President to step aside.

Simultaneously, there was a joint statement from four Democratic House reps which, as Politico pointed out, represent the progressive, Black and Hispanic caucuses where Biden had the strongest support. Pelosi knows exactly where to plunge the knife—and how to deliver the final, fatal blow.

On Thursday, the New York Times reported, “At a time when the top Democrats in Congress have stayed notably mum about Mr. Biden’s fate, it has fallen to Ms. Pelosi, the 84-year-old who has long been known for her political toughness and skill, to send critical signals that the president must at least consider abandoning his bid.”

Biden is known as a stubborn and grizzled veteran politico. He had pledged to tough it out. Repeatedly, both to Democratic insiders and in a series of TV appearances since the debate, he said he wasn't going anywhere. He told George Stephanopoulus that,“If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race. The Lord Almighty’s not coming down.”

No, but Nancy Pelosi was. There's a reason she survived and thrived as Leader of the House Democrats for 20 years—and she proved it again over the last three weeks. Kevin Igoe , former deputy chief of staff of the Republican National Committee, said of her earlier this week that, “Pelosi is the muscle, hired by rank-and-file Democrats to do what they do not have the courage to do. When Pelosi was Speaker, she ran the House with an iron hand. She seldom lost a vote on the floor.”

Staring at a possible landslide win for Trump that would sweep away Democrats in both the House and the Senate, Pelosi was not about to lose possibly her last, big fight. As Connecticut Congressman John B. Larson observed this week, “She is a fighter and is always thinking strategically. She knows the dance very well.”

Pelosi not only knifed Biden but also, late last week, made it clear that she favored an open nomination, as opposed to a coronation of Vice President Harris in the event of the President standing down. (Biden, pointedly, gave Harris a full-throated endorsement just after he announced that he was stepping down on Sunday.)

So when the history of Biden’s resignation is told, Pelosi’s role in the narrative should take center stage—even if she rarely did. Apart from that mischievous and damaging Morning Joe intervention, Pelosi was rarely seen. There were ‘fingerprints,’ but few public sightings.

Which is how she has always operated. Susan Page , DC Bureau Chief for the Washington Post and author of a 2021 biography about Pelosi, said, “She’s not so great with the public stuff. She's not great at giving a speech— she is a master of the inside game of politics.”

And what a game she played.

Jonathan Martin , Politico's senior political columnist and bureau chief disclosed earlier this week that, “The extent of Pelosi’s behind-the-scenes role hasn’t been fully revealed and may never be if the former speaker has her way... She’s stage-managed phone calls to Jeffries, plotted strategy with the biggest names in Democratic politics and told one former elected official bluntly that Biden’s legacy can’t be destroying their party.”

Biden is not the first President to lose out to Pelosi. She had a famously fractious relationship with former President Trump. In January 2019, she barred him from delivering a State of the Union speech in the House chamber until that year's government shutdown ended.

Pelosi, deploying a masterful Trump put-down, also said of the former President's behavior after he stormed out of a meeting with Democrats trying to resolve the shutdown, “I’m a mother of five, grandmother of nine. I know a temper tantrum when I see one.”

Author Patricia Murphy, writing at the time, described how the former Speaker leaned into her role as mother and grandmother during the shutdown process. “She made it clear during the shutdown standoff against Trump that raising five children before her career in politics may actually have made her uniquely prepared for the job she holds. That Pelosi used the language of child-rearing to do it made it downright delicious for more than a few women around the country.”

The standoff with Biden required something different. She was not out to humiliate an elder statesman, a fellow Democrat and a President. He had earned the right to depart without a fistfight at the Democratic convention.

Faced with a famously-stubborn and occasionally irate President who was increasingly bunkered with wife Jill, son Biden and his close political advisor Steve Richetti, the tactics required something altogether different.

But the outcome? Never in doubt.

Read more at The Daily Beast.