Pelosi says she still hasn’t spoken to Biden since pressuring him to drop out

Nancy Pelosi has admitted she still has not spoken to Joe Biden since her crucial intervention in July led to his decision to drop out of the presidential race, following a disastrously frail performance in a debate against Donald Trump.

The former speaker of the House told the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland on the Politics Weekly America podcast that although she continues to regard the US president as a great friend and longtime political ally, she felt a cold political calculation was necessary after the evidence of Biden’s failing mental acuity.

“Not since then, no,” she said when asked if she had spoken to Biden since. “But I’m prayerful about it.”

Related: Nancy Pelosi on her rift with Joe Biden, and fears of a Trump win – podcast

She added: “ I have the greatest respect for him. I think he’s one of the great consequential presidents of our country,” she said. “I think his legacy had to be protected. I didn’t see that happening in the course that it was on, the election was on. My call was just to: ‘Let’s get on a better course.’ He will make the decision as to what that is. And he made that decision. But I think he has some unease because we’ve been friends for decades.

“Elections are decisions,” she added. “You decide to win. I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity … So when you make a decision, you have to make every decision in favor of winning … and the most important decision of all is the candidate.”

Pelosi admitted that some in Biden’s campaign may not have forgiven her for her role in limiting Biden’s legacy to one term, but that a Trump victory would have equally reflected terribly on his legacy.

Known as a uniquely influential House speaker, particularly during a Biden administration that passed major legislation on infrastructure and climate, Pelosi was widely seen as a senior Democrat willing to indicate that Biden should reconsider his bid for re-election when the polls showed Trump beating him badly.

After Biden did step aside, Pelosi then encouraged the party to endorse Kamala Harris – and scored yet another victory when the vice-president named former congressman Tim Walz as her running mate.

Pelosi has also been a longtime thorn in Trump’s side, frequently antagonizing him into posting long rants about her on social media, and publicly ripping up his State of the Union speech in 2020 on the podium of the House of Representatives, calling it a “manifesto of mistruths”.

Explaining her unique ability to hold together a fragile coalition of centrist and progressive Democrats, Pelosi explained that she thought “leadership is about respect, about consensus building”, while deriding Trump’s ability to do anything of the sort, particularly with his hateful rhetoric towards immigrants, who he has described as “poisoning the blood of this country”.

“I hardly ever say his name,” she says of Trump, instead describing him as “what’s-his-name”.

“I think [Trump is] a grotesque word … You just don’t like the word passing your lips. I just don’t. I’m afraid, you know, when I grew up Catholic, as I am now, if you said a bad word, you could burn in hell if you didn’t have a chance to confess. So I don’t want to take any chances.

“It’s up there with, like, swearing.”

In her new book, The Art of Power, Pelosi describes being the first female speaker of the House, and her disappointment at the failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president in 2016, but says she remains optimistic that Harris will make history where Clinton could not.

“I always thought America was more ready for a woman president than a woman speaker of the House,” she told the Guardian. “The Congress of the United States is not a glass ceiling there. It’s a marble ceiling. And it was very hard to rise up there. But the public, I think, is better disposed … In Congress, they would say to me: “Understand this, there’s been a pecking order here for a long time of men who’ve been waiting for openings to happen and take their turn.” And I said: “That’s interesting. We’ve been waiting over 200 years.”

She praised Harris, however, for not running as “the first woman or first woman of color. She’s running on her strength, her knowledge of policy and strategy and presentation and the rest. And I think that’s a different race than Hillary Clinton ran.”

Noting that more women support Harris and more men support Trump by considerable margins, Pelosi said: “The reason that there’s such a gender gulf is because there’s such a gulf in terms of policies that affect women.

“A woman’s right to choose is a personal issue. It’s an economic issue, but it’s also a democracy issue. This is an issue about freedom, freedom to manage your own life.”

“What is a democracy? It is free and fair elections. It’s a peaceful transfer of power. It’s independent judiciary and is the personal freedoms in the bill of rights of our constitution. And he is assaulting those by particularly harshly on women, harshly on women. Did you see the other day? He said Kamala Harris was retarded. This is a person running for president of the United States.

“Has he no respect for the office? Has he no decency about how to communicate?”

Pelosi spoke about her fear of political violence, noting that misinformation spread by Trump had caused an atmosphere in which the US disaster response agency, Fema, had to withdraw rescue workers from parts of North Caroline hit by a hurricane after reports of trucks of militia saying they were hunting Fema workers.

“This is springing from the top,” she said of Trump’s role in fomenting political violence. “He’s taking pride in doing it. Don’t take it from me, take it from him.”

After an armed assailant attacked her husband , Paul Pelosi, in their home after breaking in with an intent to harm her, many Republicans made jokes – including Trump’s son Donald Jr, who suggested he would dress as Paul Pelosi for Halloween.

“When it happened, what was so sad for my children and grandchildren was that [some Republicans] thought it was a riot – they were laughing and making jokes … his son, all those people making jokes about it, right away. We didn’t even know if he was going to live or die.”

Asked if she agreed with the recent remarks of the former chairperson of the joint chiefs, Mark Milley, a Trump appointee, that Trump was “a fascist to the core”, Pelosi said:

“Yes, I do. I do. And I know it’s interesting because Kamala Harris says, I’ve prosecuted people like Trump. I know men like that. No, I know him ,” she said, stressing Trump.

Related: Pelosi criticises McConnell for failing to hold Trump accountable over January 6

“There’s one picture of me leaving the Roosevelt Room at the cabinet meeting. And I’m pointing to him and I’m saying, I’m leaving this meeting because with you, Mr President, all roads lead to Putin. [Milley’s] comment, ‘fascist to the core’, speaks to the actions that he has taken. Trivialize the press, fake news – that is a tactic of fascist governments.”

She added that a possible repeat of January 6 was a key reason for the importance of Democrats at least winning the House in 2024. “Hakeem Jeffries must have the gavel, which means that we have the majority of the votes to accept the results of the electoral college for the peaceful transfer of power.”

‘“Nobody could have ever seen an insurrection incited by the president of the United States. But an outsider, as a loser in this election, once again, he might try that.”

Later in the interview, Pelosi said Trump’s name, then caught herself. “I said his name. Oh my gosh. I hope I don’t burn in hell.”