Since breaking her hip in Europe last month, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi has been deluged with messages, flowers and calls of concern from heads of state, colleagues in both parties and even royalty, most notably Luxembourg’s Grand Duke Henri, who was hosting her when she fell and has been solicitous through her recovery.
Yet it’s who she has not heard from that’s most remarkable, and that has infuriated Pelosi’s friends and family: Joe and Jill Biden.
Fueling that anger is Jill Biden’s continued, and now public, nursing of a grudge toward Pelosi for pushing the president to withdraw from last year’s campaign.
“If I was Lady McBiden, I’d put on my big girl pants, play the long game and think about my husband’s legacy,” Alexandra Pelosi, the former speaker’s daughter, told me Saturday. “There aren’t that many people left in America who have something nice to say about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is one of them.” The younger Pelosi made clear she was speaking only for herself.
The deafening silence from the White House in response to a request for comment marks the culmination of the bitter feud between the president and onetime speaker, two of the age’s most prominent Democrats and the bookends of the party’s Obama-era high and Trump restoration low.
Since Pelosi helped engineer the parliamentary coup on Biden last summer, the president has refused to speak to her in any significant way, effectively ending his relationship with his pre-Baby Boom contemporary, the woman he once called “my Catholic sister.”
Biden has in recent weeks claimed he could have defeated Trump. More startling, the president has acknowledged he’s not sure he could have served a full second term, the vow he made as he insisted upon seeking reelection in the year he’d turn 82.
Yet when the history of this period is written, I have no doubt that Pelosi’s intervention will be seen as vital for her party. Had she, and other leading Democrats, not insisted Biden drop out of the race, Republicans would have harnessed his abysmal debate performance to claim even more congressional seats, doing even greater damage to Biden’s legacy.
I’ve yet to find anybody in either party, except Biden’s last defenders, who believe otherwise.
Pelosi has tried multiple times, I’m told, to have a conversation with Biden. But she and intermediaries who’ve also attempted a rapprochement have repeatedly been met with the same response from the president’s top advisers: The answer is no.
“She’s been told they’re not over it, don’t make more overtures because he’s blaming her,” said a person who has spoken to Pelosi about the conversations between the former speaker and Biden’s aides.
Pelosi told people last week she’s struck that the Bidens would leave on such a low note, asking rhetorically why they’d convey such bitterness.
A Biden spokesperson declined to speak on the record but did not deny the silence.
Steve Ricchetti, the Biden aide Pelosi knows best, did not respond to a text message.
Biden did briefly chat with Pelosi, her husband, Paul, and daughter Christine at a White House holiday party last month. But that encounter only served to remind them of the rupture.
The Pelosi family had not planned on entering the party’s receiving line. When they walked to the front, though, they were warmly greeted by the president, vice president and first gentleman. But Jill Biden was missing.
Any possibility that the first lady’s absence that night was coincidental was, in the mind of the Pelosi family, erased last week when Jill Biden used a Washington Post interview to go public with her anger toward the former speaker.
“We were friends for 50 years,” said the first lady. “It was disappointing.”
What’s disappointing to her intimates is that Biden seems to blame Pelosi alone for an intercession that most Democratic leaders, then and now, believe was imperative. And that’s after all Pelosi did as speaker to deliver the votes for Biden’s most significant accomplishments, first as vice president and then as president.
When I asked a longtime Biden adviser this week why he was so consumed with anger toward Pelosi and not, say, Barack Obama, the adviser said the president took it personally with Pelosi because they had a kinship whereas he had long recognized his Obama relationship was but a political arrangement.
It’s also common for family members of officeholders to take grudges more personally — and hold them longer. But the political converged with the personal after Pelosi slipped in Luxembourg.
Desperate to get her the best possible care in the initial hours after the accident, the Pelosis grappled with whether she should go to a U.S. military hospital, which she did, or immediately fly back home for care. And part of that trepidation, I’m told, owed to uncertainty about whether Biden would quickly get her a plane “because we have this wall at the White House,” as as one person familiar with the situation put it. (Another source said any concerns abated when White House staff heard the news and were swiftly responsive.)
There is also something else, which has never been reported, that also angers Pelosi friends and family about Biden’s treatment: how she privately went about urging the president to withdraw.
On July 10 of last year, less than two weeks after the now-infamous debate, Pelosi slipped into the White House residence early in the morning. Initially speaking to Biden alone, Pelosi expressed her concerns about polls that showed his standing was plummeting and the president pushed back, insisting he could still win.
But the point, Pelosi allies say, is that her initial efforts to persuade Biden were done with dignity not a dagger.
“There were no threats,” one person familiar with the conversation told me. “She just told him the truth — he was losing in every poll, and people had lost confidence.”
This is not to understate Pelosi’s role in driving Biden from the race. She was the most critical player in last summer’s backstage political drama.
It’s entirely possible the president would have weathered the crisis were it not for Pelosi’s Morning Joe interview, which took place immediately before her meeting with Biden in the White House residence.
Appearing the week Congress returned from July 4, a moment many Democratic lawmakers were drifting back to Biden and the president was emphatic about staying in , the former speaker repeatedly insisted his decision remained an open question. That pivotal moment effectively ensured it was — and less than two weeks later Biden dropped out.
The chill between the two since has saddened their longtime friends and muted even some of the most forthcoming figures in politics, at least for public consumption, which I was reminded of last week in a series of terse conversations.
“I’ve been around long enough to know that when the hour turns things can change,” said former Sen. Christopher Dodd, holding out hope the breach can be repaired. Dodd — who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Biden this month and once bestowed the Profile in Courage award on Pelosi, who was close friends with his late sister — declined to say much more. But he has told people he’d like to help reunite his former colleagues once Biden is out of office.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) — one of Pelosi’s most dedicated legislative allies and the person Biden credits for taking his son, Hunter, under her wing in New Haven when he was at Yale law school — was as restrained as Dodd.
“Time has a way of working things out,” DeLauro told me, conceding that Pelosi and Biden are both “very strong personalities.”
Those who know Biden well, though, wonder if he can ever truly reconcile with Pelosi.
“I don’t think he’ll ever get over that,” said Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.).
Biden and Pelosi became friends when the future speaker was a volunteer fundraiser, raising five children, and the future president was a 30-something senator with big aspirations but so few resources he borrowed her car when he’d visit San Francisco.
Though their families were never personally close — that part about Jill Biden’s lament puzzled Pelosi’s family — the two Democrats had a similar silent generation sensibility about politics, faith and public comportment. Both were politically liberal but personally conservative, Cold War Catholics who were raised in the church and still regular Mass communicants.
They are also thoroughgoing institutionalists, committed to working within the system and uncomfortable with the politics, and tactics, of younger progressives and appalled by just about every inch of the once and future president.
Each is more gifted with retail than wholesale politics and each knows the value of grace notes and humanity.
That’s why Pelosi so appreciated Biden’s kindness when her husband was nearly murdered in 2022, calling her immediately after hearing the news of the late-night attack in the Pelosi home.
“He was so prayerful, kind and thoughtful in his comments about Paul,” she wrote in “The Art of Power,” the book she published last year.
Everything he’s not been since Pelosi’s accident.
