Two years removed from the Speaker’s gavel and a year into her so-called retirement, Nancy Pelosi has just reminded everyone that nothing about her has changed.
She still despises President Donald Trump. She still can’t stand the fact that he’s back in the White House. And judging by her latest remarks, she’s still itching for another impeachment — even as she pretends otherwise and wraps it in her usual layers of dishonesty.
Time may have moved on, but apparently, the very nasty Nancy Pelosi hasn’t.
During a sit-down interview on The Excerpt podcast with USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page, the San Francisco Democrat was asked point-blank whether Democrats should be plotting a third impeachment of President Trump if they regain control of the House in the 2026 midterms.
Pelosi’s response was a mangling of history so shameless it would have made a Soviet apparatchik proud — and it strongly suggested that, despite her coy denials, another Trump impeachment is very much on her wish list:
“The person most responsible for impeaching President Trump when I was speaker was President Trump,” Pelosi said with a Botox-straight face.
“He gave us no choice. He crossed the line in his telephone call with President Zelenskyy as one manifestation of his disrespect for the Constitution, his jeopardizing the sanctity of our own elections in our country, and the rest.”
Enjoying USA Journal’s conservative views and news? Tell your friends about us!
To be fair, Pelosi at least deserves a token point for remembering what Trump’s first impeachment was supposed to be about.
The official pretext was so vague and contrived — a handful of disgruntled National Security Council bureaucrats clutching their pearls over a 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — that it’s a safe bet nine out of ten Americans couldn’t explain it today even if you offered them a prize.
That circus was built entirely on exaggerations, innuendo, and outright fabrications pushed by political operators like then–Rep. Adam Schiff (now California’s junior senator, because of course he is) and Pelosi herself. It was impeachment by rumor, conducted for spite, not substance.
That first impeachment dragged on endlessly through the end of 2019 and into early 2020, before ending exactly as anyone with a pulse knew it would — with Trump’s acquittal in the Senate in February.
The second impeachment is easier to remember, if only because it was at least tethered to a real, televised event: the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol.
But it was no less cynical than the first. Democrats, channeling former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s infamous mantra about never letting a crisis “go to waste,” attempted to weaponize the violence of Jan. 6 into a permanent political solution — namely, barring Donald Trump from ever returning to the White House.
That gambit failed as well. The Senate fell short of the 67 votes required for conviction, mustering only 57 — a tally that included seven Republicans, regrettably.
And now here comes Nancy Pelosi, insisting that Democrats would only pursue impeachment again if they retake the House and are left with no other choice — portraying it as some grave, historic, last-ditch, hair-on-fire effort to “save the republic.”
“I mean, let’s see if he crosses the border again,” Pelosi told Page. “But that’s not an incidental thing you say, ‘We’re going to do that.’ No, there has to be cause. There has to be reason. We had review. This was a very serious, historic thing.”
She would have been wiser to emulate the honesty of Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who, just hours after being inaugurated into Congress in January 2019, declared openly that “we’re going to impeach the motherf***er.”
Impeachment was a “serious, historic thing” when Republicans unsuccessfully tried to remove Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson from office after the Civil War for obstructing the reconstruction of the Democratic South. (Yes, the same Southern Democrats who had started the war in the first place — though Johnson himself had been elected vice president on Abraham Lincoln’s National Union Party ticket.)
And impeachment was unquestionably a “serious, historic thing” in 1974, when President Richard Nixon chose to resign rather than face a Senate trial he knew he would lose.
Back then, impeachment was treated as a constitutional nuclear option — not a partisan impulse, not a talking point, and not a routine threat lobbed whenever Democrats don’t like the outcome of an election.
By the time the Clinton impeachment came along — though it was richly deserved — the word itself had already started to lose its gravity. Bill Clinton could lie under oath, betray his wife, and waste the nation’s time carrying on an affair with a White House intern, and Democrats would defend his “right” to do it as if it were some sacred constitutional principle.
The Trump impeachments during his first term? Two outright farces, dressed up in high-minded rhetoric, with endings as predictable as Democrats lining up to vote for a tax hike.
And now Nancy Pelosi wants us to believe Democrats wouldn’t make an agenda out of impeaching Trump again unless he absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt “deserves” it — unless he leaves them “no choice.”
Please.
Pelosi herself won’t even have a vote in the matter. No matter who controls the House, she won’t be there come January 2027. But the damage she and her party have done to the impeachment process — turning it from a constitutional safeguard into a partisan cudgel — will linger long after she’s gone.
And, if Democrats somehow manage to retake the House, it’s a safe bet that another Trump impeachment won’t be that far off.
