Doctors told Pelosi of concern for Trump’s mental health, ex-speaker says in book
Exclusive: Pelosi calls Trump ‘unhinged’ and reveals exchange with doctors at 2019 memorial for top psychiatrist
In
early 2019, at a memorial service for a prominent psychiatrist, a
succession of “doctors and other mental health professionals” told Nancy
Pelosi they were “deeply concerned that there was something seriously
wrong” with Donald Trump, “and that his mental and psychological health was in decline”.
“I’m
not a doctor,” the former speaker writes in an eagerly awaited memoir,
“but I did find his behaviors difficult to understand.”
Pelosi’s book, The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Pelosi
was speaker between 2007 and 2011, and between 2019 and 2023, the
latter spell coinciding with Trump’s chaotic presidency. Her memoir
comes out amid a tumultuous 2024 presidential campaign, in which Trump
is the Republican nominee for a third successive election.
Questions
about Trump’s fitness for office form a thread through the book. At 78,
Trump is the oldest candidate ever, his campaign-trail utterances
studied for frequent mistakes, his speeches are often rambling and
marked by bizarre references.
Trump’s
volcanic behavior and disregard for societal norms also stoke such
questions, not least because he left office having been impeached twice,
the second time for inciting the deadly January 6 Capitol attack; has
been convicted on 34 criminal charges and faces 54 more; has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in civil cases including one concerning a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”; and has promised if re-elected to govern as “a dictator” on “day one”.
On the page, Pelosi says she did not solicit statements about Trump’s mental health from attendees at the memorial for Dr David Hamburg,
“a distinguished psychiatrist who … served as the president of the
Carnegie Corporation, where he had been a great voice for international
peace”, and who died in April 2019.
Elsewhere
in The Art of Power, however, the former speaker is not shy of stating
her views about Trump’s mental health, calling him “imbalanced” and
“unhinged”.
By 6 January 2021, Pelosi writes,
“I knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. I had seen it up close. His
denial and then delays when the Covid pandemic struck, his penchant for
repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on
tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots,
and his total separation from reality and actual events. His repeated,
ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time.”
I had seen … his foul mouth, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots, his total separation from reality
She
describes how subordinates including Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief
of staff, indulged improper behavior, allowing Trump to “surreptitiously
listen” to private meetings with congressional leaders, eventually
prompting Pelosi to ban all cellphones from her meeting rooms on Capitol
Hill.
Pelosi also describes getting calls
from Trump, often late at night, including one in which she says Trump
insisted missile strikes on Syria he had just ordered were Barack
Obama’s fault, eventually prompting Pelosi to tell him: “It’s midnight. I
think you should go to sleep.”
Pelosi devotes
attention to the events of 6 January 2021, when she and other
congressional leaders were hurried from a mob who meant them harm, then
spent hours trying to get Trump to call them off.
Much
of Pelosi’s account is familiar, thanks to the work of the House
January 6 committee, which she created, and of her own daughter,
Alexandra Pelosi, a documentarian who was filming her mother that day.
“People
still ask me how I remained so calm,” Pelosi writes, of the hours when
Congress was under attack, she and other leaders were evacuated to Fort
McNair, and Vice-President Mike Pence was in hiding as the mob chanted
about hanging him.
“My answer is that I was already deeply aware of how dangerous Donald Trump was.
“He
continues to be dangerous. If his family and staff truly understood his
disregard for both the fundamentals of the law and for basic rules, and
if they had reckoned with his personal instability over not winning the
[2020] election, they should have staged an intervention. Whether
because of willful blindness, money, prestige, or greed, they didn’t –
and America has paid a steep price.”
Saying
she had quickly realised she had “more respect for the office of
president of the United States than Trump”, Pelosi says “it was clear to
me from the start that he was an imposter – and that on some level, he
knew it”.
Still she is not done. After
describing how electoral college votes were eventually counted and Joe
Biden’s victory confirmed, she says she “and many others wanted a
consequence for the deranged, unhinged man who was still president of
the United States”.
That led to an impeachment
and a second failed Senate trial, after the Republican leader there,
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, made a historic miscalculation: that Trump
did not require conviction and barring from office, as he was
politically finished.
Pelosi describes another failed effort to remove Trump from office, on grounds of being unfit.
“Following
January 6,” she writes, “the Democratic leadership discussed asking the
vice-president to invoke the 25th amendment to the constitution, which
allows for the vice-president and a majority of cabinet members to
certify that a president is unable to discharge the duties of the
office.”
She and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, “placed a call to Vice-President Pence about this possibility”.
Elsewhere,
Pelosi writes that she admires Pence for his actions on January 6, when
he refused to be spirited from the Capitol despite having to hide from a
murderous mob sent by his own president, then ultimately presided over
certification of election results.
But when it came to the 25th amendment, Pence let Pelosi down.
“The
vice-president’s office kept us on hold for 20 minutes,” Pelosi writes,
adding that “thankfully” she was at home at the time, “so I could also
empty the dishwasher and put in a load of laundry.
“Ultimately, Vice-President Pence never got on the phone with us or returned our call.”