He has come up with “Crooked Hillary”, “Little Marco”, “Lyin’ Ted”, “Crazy Bernie”, “Sloppy Steve” and “Cryin’ Chuck”. Donald Trump is the master of branding his opponents with crude names that somehow paint them into a corner. But so far one has eluded him: the woman he calls only “Nancy”.
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has emerged as his nemesis, the face of opposition to the president. As a partial government shutdown enters a record fifth week, the Democrat has been implacable in denying him $5.7bn to help build a border wall. This week she out-Trumped Trump, by effectively rescinding his invitation to deliver the State of the Union address.
Then, on Saturday, she released a sharply worded statement rejecting Trump’s proposed deal to end the closure – shortly before the president announced it from the Diplomatic Room of the White House.
“She’s not only outmanoeuvring him, she’s outraging him,” said Michael Cornfield, associate professor of political management at George Washington University in Washington. “She’s taunting him. She’s the matador, he’s the bull. He has no idea what he’s doing. He’s a genius of the publicity arts, not the political arts. In this he’s an absolute novice.”
Now 78, Pelosi’s life and career have prepared her for this battle of wills. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the youngest of six children and the only girl. Her father was a US congressman turned city mayor, a political education she has never forgotten. Her own daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, said recently: “She’ll cut your head off and you won’t even know you’re bleeding.”
Pelosi became a California fundraiser and party activist and was elected to Congress in 1987, the year New York wheeler-dealer Trump published The Art of the Deal. She was the first woman to become House speaker, from 2007 to 2011, and recently regained that position, putting her second in line to the presidency.
Thrice-married Trump, who once boasted about grabbing women by the private parts, relished the chance to run against a female rival, Hillary Clinton, in 2016. Then he had a two-year honeymoon in the White House as Republicans controlled the House and Senate. But now the House is in Democratic hands and Pelosi – disciplined, shrewd, unflappable and steel-spined – threatens to expose his lack of political experience.
The new balance of power became evident on 11 December when Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, met Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence in the Oval Office.
“We should not have a Trump shutdown,” said Pelosi, leaning forward on the sofa’s edge.
Trump looked up. “A what? Did you say a Trump – ?”
Had he been drinking a glass of water, it was the moment Trump would have done a spit-take. The tables had been turned, the master brander outbranded. More than a month later, the label “Trump shutdown” has clung more than any other. The president did not help himself by telling Schumer he would be “proud to shut down the government” in the name of border security.
When he claimed that “Nancy’s in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now,” she put him in his place: “Mr President, please don’t characterise the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory.”
After the meeting, Pelosi reportedly told House Democrats it was like “a tinkle contest with a skunk” and that Trump’s insistence on building a wall was “like a manhood thing for him”.
It must have come as a shock to a man who has spent the past two years being surrounded by yes men and yes women, the latter including Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Sanders. Cornfield said: “We will look back on 11 December as the day he met his match. She has mastered two political skills he doesn’t even know he’s deficient in.
“One is she knows how to count votes. That’s how she got healthcare through, that’s how she got the speakership back and that’s how she’ll get impeachment through. She stays in touch with every one of the Democrats and most of the Republicans. She knows when she has to compromise and when to hold the line.
“Second, she knows how to take advantage of the process. She knows that every day the shutdown goes on, she and the Democrats gain and Trump and the Republicans lose. She’s going to deny him TV time: she really knows how to jab him with a needle.”
‘I know a temper tantrum when I see one’
Over Christmas and into the new year Trump’s Twitter account and his allies in conservative media have blamed Democrats for the shutdown, falsely claiming they favour open borders that allow drugs and violent criminals to flood into the country.
Pelosi has opted for precision strikes that prove more deadly. In one exchange with reporters, she suggested Trump lacks empathy for furloughed workers and “thinks maybe they could just ask their father for more money”, a reference to the president’s inherited wealth.
After Trump walked out of a meeting, Pelosi mused: “It’s a temper tantrum. I’m the mother of five, grandmother of nine. I know a temper tantrum when I see one.”
This week, as Trump continued to tweet back in anger, Pelosi suggested he delay his State of the Union address – the ultimate showcase for any president – until the government reopens. In a surprise letter, Pelosi said the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security had been “hamstrung” by furloughs so should not bear the burden of securing the event on 29 January on Capitol Hill.
In an interview with the Washington Post, the Democratic congressman Steve Cohen called Pelosi’s letter her “Gene Hackman moment”, comparing it to an inspirational speech the actor delivers to a basketball team in the film Hoosiers.
“It’s smart for two reasons,” he said. “Number one, Pelosi would be right behind him, and she’d have to sit there as he put the onus on her for the shutdown. Number two, it gives him a reason to end the shutdown, because he loves the TV audience and the attention.”
The president tried to strike back on Thursday with a letter deriding a planned visit by Pelosi and other Democrats to Afghanistan as a “public relations event” and saying it would be better if she remained in Washington to negotiate reopening the government.
“Obviously, if you would like to make your journey by flying commercial, that would certainly be your prerogative,” Trump wrote in a letter addressed to “Madame Speaker” – a peculiar detour into French.
The ball was back in Pelosi’s court. She countered by accusing Trump of putting troops and civilians working in Afghanistan in danger by publicising the planned trip. When a reporter asked if she considered it retaliation for her letter, she replied with no little irony: “I would hope not. I don’t think the president would be that petty, do you?”
As the stalemate continues, Pelosi seems to be winning in the court of public opinion. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found Trump’s approval rating stands at 39% approve, 53% disapprove, a seven-point net change from December. Pelosi’s favorability rating, meanwhile, is up 13% among Democrats since the midterms (59% to 72%) in Civiqs polls, with virtually no shift among Republicans.
It is tempting to see the duel through the prisms of age, gender, party or personal wealth – both Pelosi and Trump are rich. But for the speaker, it is not necessarily personal so much as devotion to the institution she has served for more than three decades.
Cindy Simon Rosenthal, author of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the New American Politics, published in 2007, says: “There are people who see it as power politics, a back and forth between a Republican president and Democratic speaker, but you can also see it as the re-emergence of one half of the legislative branch showing it’s not going to be rolled in deference to the White House.
“Nancy Pelosi is trying to send a clear message that they’re going to reassert themselves. And he’s not sure how to handle that.”