“Donald Trump is the puppeteer and what does he do all of the time but shine the light on the strings,” Pelosi said
Donald Trump has reportedly extracted a promise from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that the House will vote to expunge the former president’s impeachments, a deal former speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi said makes him “look pathetic.”
McCarthy allegedly made the promise to Trump after enraging him by saying on national television in June that Trump might not be the “strongest” candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, and Pelosi says the deal makes clear exactly who is pulling the strings in the Republican party.
“The president was impeached because we had no choice,” Pelosi said on CNN’s State of the Union. “He had undermined our national security, jeopardized our well-being of our country. I was very careful about bringing any impeachment forward. But when the president made that phone call in terms of Ukraine, there was no choice. We had no choice. He must be impeached.”
She continued, “Kevin is, you know, playing politics. It’s not even clear if he constitutionally can expunge those things. If he wants to put his members on the spot, his members in difficult races on the spot, that’s a decision he has to make… As I have said before, Donald Trump is the puppeteer, and what does he do all the time but shine the light on the strings. These people look pathetic.”
Bringing the matter to a vote may burn McCarthy with the more moderate members of the party who are not eager to relitigate the impeachments, Politico reported, especially the impeachment related to Jan. 6. According to Politico, McCarthy’s understanding of his conversation with Trump was that he only said he would discuss the possibility with members of his caucus.
“I’m for Trump,” a senior Republican representative told Politico. “The problem is: If you have an expungement, and it goes to the floor and fails — which it probably will — then the media will treat it like it’s a third impeachment, and it will show disunity among Republican ranks. It’s a huge strategic risk.”
But it’s not beyond Trump to take a strategic risk in service of a larger cause: his ego. Now it’s just a matter of whether McCarthy will follow through with it — and how the party will react if he does.
