It only took one orbit of the moon for Nancy Pelosi to bring Donald Trump’s massive con to a tweeting halt.
In the six short hours between dawn and noon today we watched as FBI agents (working for free during the Trump shutdown, no less) hauled the genius behind Trump’s wall off to jail and then stared at the grim but intensely satisfying spectacle of a stupefied Trump voluntarily stripping himself naked in the Rose Garden and listlessly committing hari-kari with a dull blade supplied by Stephen Miller.
Trump’s not cooked yet. He won’t go quickly, quietly, or without a lot of ugly agony and last-minute arson. His legacy—Trumpism—will be much harder to destroy, given his daily effort to breathe new life into everything that is ugly in America and in Americans. But his orange blood—lots of it—is billowing in the water now, the great blue sharks and the Federal Barracudas of Investigation are moving in for the kill, and the confounding, secret power he possessed that enabled him to sidestep countless self-inflicted missile strikes that would have destroyed anyone else seems to have finally melted away.
After viciously assaulting, for three years now, every institution designed to keep this country from devolving into a vicious, collective cage match refereed by flying monkeys, Trump turns out to be not a brilliant businessman, political genius, or supreme global strategist but, instead, a thoroughly mediocre schoolyard bully whose specialty was the oldest nastiness in the world—spinning up racial hatred.
Nancy Pelosi has certainly benefited from Trump’s cosmic stupidity and incompetence and from the power granted her by the voters and her party in November. But it was Pelosi, the mother of five children, who knew without a doubt that if you knuckled the Terror of Trumpland square in the face, the walking national nightmare would be quickly transformed into a meek puddle of urine-scented weakness with a red tie floating in the middle of it.
Nancy Pelosi had already made history. She was the first woman Speaker of the House. She passed the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street and Consumer Protection Act, the appeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and the economic stimulus bills that saved the U.S. economy from cratering after Obama took over. But these notable achievements will be eclipsed by the history she will make over the next two years. She doesn’t want to be President. She has the job she wants and for which she is uniquely qualified—chief architect of Donald Trump’s political destruction—and she has already delivered in ways that would have seemed impossible only a month ago.
There was quite a bit of talk in the media and in progressive political circles after the midterms about what a mistake it would be if Pelosi were again elected Speaker. She was daughter of an old-school political boss, a creature from the Clintonian past, a thirty-two year Congressional barnacle, a filthy-rich corporate Democrat—the antithesis, or at least the enemy, of the bright progressive future for the Democratic Party that Bernie Sanders launched in 2016.
This was both a gross distortion of Nancy Pelosi’s record and a smug dismissal of her considerable talents and her lifelong commitment to an activist government. Not surprisingly, there was no revolt in the House Democratic ranks after the midterms. Pelosi negotiated with the freshmen progressives about committee assignments and promised a changing of the leadership in two to four years, and in the end no one even dared enter the ring against her for the Speakership. Pelosi understands that real political power flows not from wall metaphors or racist fearmongering but from consistency, aggressiveness, relentlessness, and staying true to a position once you’ve staked it out. Not since the days of Roosevelt has the Democratic Party—it’s her party until the 2020 candidate is chosen—so uniformly reflected its leader’s image and positions. With each passing day in which Trump is President and Pelosi is Speaker, the contrast between cluelessness, stupidity, lack of core beliefs, mendacity, and cruelty on the one hand and true leadership on the other will become more stark, to the point where that profound dichotomy will be the defining aspect of this period in American history.
Trump’s relentless and nauseating public misogyny was the match that torched off the #MeToo movement and the Year of the Woman in politics, so it’s doubly sweet that the burdizzo used in Trump’s neutering today was wielded by a strong, smart woman. Nancy Pelosi is the ideal opposition party leader in these dark days. Thanks to her, today we saw the first glimpse of light at the end of what has too often seemed to be an endless Trumpian tunnel.