Over the next year, Pelosi firmly established herself as the president’s most powerful political adversary, winning a showdown with him in January on the budget and regularly winning other one-on-one confrontations. A caucus filled with younger Democrats who questioned the 79-year-old’s liberal bona fides now stands firmly behind her.
All that culminated Wednesday night when, for only the third time in history, the House impeached a president. Pelosi presided over the chamber, wielding the gavel that Trump once doubted she could reclaim.
“Our founders’ vision of a republic is under threat from actions from the White House. That is why today, as speaker of the House, I solemnly and sadly open the debate on the impeachment of the president of the United States,” Pelosi said early Wednesday afternoon, formally launching the impeachment debate.
In a dark suit to reflect what she has called a “somber” time, Pelosi wore a brooch that was a replica of the Mace of the Republic, the symbol for the power of the House.
That power dynamic left the president fuming, watching the proceedings from the White House and sending out angry tweets, sometimes focused on Pelosi.
“Will go down in history as worst Speaker,” he tweeted. “Already thrown out once!”
Even the architect of the anti-Pelosi campaign in 2018 recognized Wednesday that the speaker had more than overcome the tens of millions of GOP dollars spent against her, winning 40 seats and boosting her image in the first year back in charge of the House.
“I admit she has rehabilitated her image from 2006, 2008, 2010,” said Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee last year.
But Stivers, like other Republicans, suggested that Pelosi’s decision to move forward with a partisan impeachment, after months of resisting such an approach, has exposed her to great risk in the 2020 elections, with several dozen Democrats sitting in districts that Trump won or narrowly lost in 2016.
The impeachment bet places Pelosi back at the center of the political stage, serving for now as the stand-in for whomever the Democrats eventually nominate to challenge Trump in November.
“I don’t know that I know exactly where all this goes,” Stivers said, “but I know that the bright spotlight is on her again. And sometimes that melts Icarus’s wings.”
Pelosi’s first stint as speaker, from 2007 through 2011, ended with a disastrous 63-seat loss in those midterm elections. She became the symbol Republicans used to paint Democrats as careless with federal dollars and forcing an unpopular new health law through Congress on party-line votes.
Republicans spent the next eight years pillorying any Democratic candidate as a Pelosi clone, believing they had a silver bullet to maintain the majority. Failures in 2012, 2014 and 2016 left the Democratic caucus anxious, wondering whether it was time to turn the page to a new generation of leadership.
Pelosi understood the stakes and helped recruit a new generation of candidates, including many first-time candidates and many former national security officials who saw Trump’s presidency as an existential threat.
Many of these 2018 candidates ran campaigns promising to vote for other, younger Democrats as speaker, and, for a moment, after the Democratic wave gave the party a 40-seat pickup and the majority, Pelosi spent weeks rounding up enough votes to win the race.
Many of those doubts have faded over the course of the year, particularly every time she challenged Trump, especially on impeachment.
“I thought it was time for new leadership, and I’ve got to tell you: Thank goodness, thank goodness, that we have Nancy Pelosi speaking for the House of Representatives,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who won a suburban GOP seat. “Because I do not think there is a better, more qualified, more principled and more effective person for these times and these circumstances than her.”
There were plenty of ups and downs over the past year, including a generational clash over the summer with a quartet of young first-term congresswomen who wanted more direct confrontations with Trump on border issues. Younger members questioned her reluctance to push for impeachment over the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference designed to benefit the Trump campaign in 2016.
Even when she did shift to support impeachment, it left some anti-Trump Democrats wanting. She limited the inquiry to Trump’s withholding military aid to Ukraine as he pushed the country’s new president to investigate his political rivals.
She also charted a fast-break impeachment strategy that held the vote before court challenges might have forced Trump advisers to testify.
But, once she shifted gears, Pelosi placed herself at the center of the case. On Sept. 24, Pelosi stood alone to announce the formal inquiry’s launch — a move she informed the president of when he called her earlier that day and defended his actions.
“I was going to call you to tell you what I was thinking about this. But since you called me and made this assertion, you have to know that this is wrong,” Pelosi told Trump, according to her recollection in an interview with The Washington Post’s Rachael Bade and Mike DeBonis.
Earlier this month, with little warning, she again stood alone to announce that impeachment articles would be voted on. And when preliminary procedural matters were settled, Pelosi kicked off Wednesday’s formal impeachment by declaring Trump an “ongoing threat to our national security.”
Pelosi eschewed the comfortable confines of her Capitol office and set up shop in a seat three rows from the backbench of the House.
Sometimes she sat by herself listening to the debate, other times senior aides huddled with her and occasionally close allies like Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) sat with her reviewing pieces of paper.
An occasional cough was her most audible sound, the result of a breakneck pace that has included two trans-Atlantic trips just this month to reassure global allies in Spain and France.
Almost exactly a year ago, when Trump mocked her and offered to push GOP votes her way, Pelosi stood firm in the Oval Office. When she got back to the Capitol, she recounted the conversation to her colleagues, according to a Democratic aide.
“We can go two routes with this meeting — with a knife or a candy,” Trump told her.
