Nancy Pelosi appeared unconvincing as she chanted “Thank you, Joe” during President Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.
The former House speaker faced questions as recently as Monday night about her role in forcing Biden out of the 2024 election.
Eagle-eyed viewers watched his reaction to his fellow Democrats’ chants in tribute to the president’s work.
One conservative joked: “My goodness! Pelosi looks so guilty singing ‘we love Joe’ after leading the coup against him.”
“Nancy Pelosi is honestly hilarious for standing there with her We Love Joe sign as if she isn’t effectively done with her political career,” wrote another.
Nancy Pelosi didn’t look very convincing when she chanted “Thank you, Joe” during President Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention
On Monday, Pelosi ignored questions about her low-key feud with former Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn.
The former House speaker was instrumental in getting Biden to drop his 2024 bid, frustrating some of the president’s top allies.
“Nobody wants to fight with Nancy Pelosi right now because we are a united party,” former Biden adviser Dunn, who now works at a pro-Kamala Harris super PAC, told CNN.
Pelosi responded on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, saying she “just wanted to win.”
“I have a relationship with the president and I just wanted to win this election. So if they are upset, I feel sorry for them, but the country is very happy,” he explained. “I don’t know who they are, but you know that’s their problem, not mine.”
When pressed by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash about her own involvement in Biden’s decision, she said her concern was “not about the president, it was about his campaign” and that “he did the right thing.”‘The decision for the country.’
But when Tapper specifically asked Pelosi about Dunn’s comments about not wanting to fight her “right now,” Pelosi bemusedly replied, “Sometimes you just have to take a hit for the kids.”
Biden, in his own speech Monday night, said it was “not true” that he held a grudge.
Eagle-eyed viewers watched his reaction to his fellow Democrats’ chants in tribute to the president’s work.
The president admitted earlier this month that Pelosi’s concerns about other Democratic races contributed to his decision to drop out of the race.
“A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought it was going to hurt them in the election,” Biden said in his first interview since ending his re-election campaign.
“And I was worried that if I stayed in the race that would be the topic… I would be interviewed about why Nancy Pelosi said (something)… and I thought that would be a real distraction,” she said in the interview with CBS News Sunday Morning anchor Robert Costa.
A growing list of Democrats has called for Biden to drop out of the race following his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in June.
The long-time Democratic leader admitted more than a week ago that she pressured Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race because she feared he would no longer make his own decisions.
Pelosi, in an interview with the New York Times on Friday, said she intervened after a July 8 letter purportedly from Biden to Congress in which he reaffirmed his commitment to staying in the race.
“I didn’t accept the letter as anything more than a letter,” he said. “It didn’t sound like Joe Biden to me. It really didn’t.”
In the letter, Biden said he was “firmly committed” to staying in the race against Donald Trump as he sought to fend off calls for him to step aside following his disastrous debate performance and increasingly discouraging poll numbers.
The former House speaker faced questions as recently as Monday night about her role in forcing Biden out of the 2024 election.
Biden, 81, and Pelosi, 84, both veterans of the Washington scene, have known each other since the 1970s.but has not spoken since dropping out of the race.
Pelosi said the timing of the letter bothered her because the president was preparing to host the NATO summit in Washington DC.
Two days after the letter was published, he appeared on Morning Joe and said, “It’s up to the president to decide whether he’s going to run or not. We all encourage him to make that decision because time is running out.”
His suggestion that Biden had not made up his mind, despite the letter received two days earlier, was seen as a clear indication that he wanted the president to step down.
In her interview with the New York Times, Pelosi suggested that Biden had nothing to do with the letter, but that it was his staff who were trying to drum up support.
Last week, DailyMail.com exclusively revealed that as Biden recovered from his COVID infection in late July, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent an urgent message to the president: she was prepared to go public with her concerns that he would not be able to defeat Donald Trump in November.
The ultimatum was clear: abandon him now or Pelosi will destroy her political ally and friend of more than 50 years on the global stage.
Four sources with intimate knowledge of the situation independently claimed that such a message was conveyed, and one particularly well-placed source said a phone call took place in which Pelosi told Biden she would release brutal poll numbers to back up her attack.
Biden, 81, and Pelosi, 84, both veterans of the Washington scene, have known each other since the 1970s but have not spoken since he dropped out of the race.
The president, who had recently tested positive for COVID, was holed up in isolation with his wife Jill and a handful of trusted aides at the Biden family home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, when Pelosi issued an ultimatum.
In any case, her demand was said to have been so forceful that it triggered a “moment of supplication” in the president, who only then began drafting the letter announcing his withdrawal.
Both Pelosi’s office and the White House have officially denied that the two spoke on the phone.
With her new memoir out, Pelosi has been giving interviews, struggling to dodge questions about her strained relationship with the president.
On Sunday, August 4, CBS anchor Lesley Stahl put pressure on the former House Speaker.
“It’s been widely reported that you were the leader of a pressure campaign (to convince Biden to step aside),” Stahl asked.
“No, I was not the leader of any pressure campaign,” Pelosi responded. “Let me say things I did not do: I did not call any person.”
Then, in an interview with the New Yorker magazine last week, Pelosi admitted she was losing sleep over her breakup with the president and was “praying” that their friendship could survive.
“He knows I love him,” she told CNN last Thursday.
Joe Biden spoke about dropping out of the race in his first interview since ending his re-election bid with CBS Sunday Morning
The Bidens will leave Chicago and the DNC before Kamala Harris accepts the nomination on Thursday
For his part, Biden remains angry about how things turned out.
“He wasn’t happy with how things went and there were calls for him to leave, but he doesn’t waste time dwelling on it,” a source said.
In fact, it was not just Pelosi who pressured Biden to withdraw in the days and weeks following his disastrous televised debate with Trump.
Other party bigwigs, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, told Biden they no longer believed his candidacy was viable.
Next week the party will officially leave the president behind.
Kamala Harris will be crowned the nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but Biden won’t be there to pass the torch.
Instead, he will briefly address the crowd on Monday night, when many of the game’s big players will not have arrived yet, before quickly leaving town and allowing Harris to hold court for the rest of the week.
Biden’s focus now is on “consolidating his legacy,” one source said.