Nancy Pelosi on Monday brushed aside questions about her secret feud with former top Biden adviser Anita Dunn.
The former House speaker played a key role in Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, much to the frustration of some of the president’s key allies.
“Nobody wants to mess with Nancy Pelosi right now because we are a united party,” Biden’s former adviser Dunn, who now works at a pro-Kamala Harris super PAC, said on CNN.
Pelosi responded on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago by saying she “just wanted to win.”
“I have my relationship with the president and I just wanted to win this election. So if they’re angry, I feel sorry for them. But the country is very happy,” she 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’s about his campaign” and that he had “forced the president” to accept Biden’s decision.‘The decision for the country.’
But when Tapper asked Pelosi specifically about Dunn’s comments that he didn’t want to get into a fight with her “right now,” Pelosi responded enigmatically: “Sometimes you just have to take a hit for the kids.”
Nancy Pelosi brushed aside questions about her secret feud with former top Biden adviser Anita Dunn
Tapper replied, “So that’s what you’re doing now? You’re just going to take the beating for the kids?”
As Bash confusedly joined in the conversation, he asked Pelosi directly, “Who’s hitting?”
Pelosi reversed his position, speaking of the tremendous momentum for Harris compared to Biden.
“Why are we even talking about this?” she continued, laughing.
Her comments came on day one of the four-day DNC, where Democrats will formally anoint Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz to lead the top of their ticket.
It was known that Pelosi was quietly working behind the scenes to replace Biden as the presidential candidate.
While Biden continued to insist he would not step aside, Pelosi ignored his urgings, saying the door was still open and he had to make a decision.
Nearly a month ago, on July 21, Biden buckled under immense pressure and dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. Democrats quickly rallied behind Vice President Kamala Harris to top their ticket.
Earlier this month, Dunn slammed Pelosi after she blamed “certain leaders” for Democrats losing their House seats in 2022.
“Nobody wants to mess with Nancy Pelosi right now because we are a united party,” Dunn said Monday on CNN
“The task before us is to win this election and prevent Donald Trump from becoming president again. And to win the House of Representatives. If certain leaders had done a little better in 2022, we might have power there now, but we don’t,” she said.
“That’s the task before us,” Dunn added. “And it’s critical, because as the president has said, this country is at a turning point.”
Dunn, a longtime Biden adviser who left to join a pro-Harris super PAC, said Biden’s decision to step back and throw his full support behind Vice Harris was the greatest part of his legacy.
“You know, it was tough. And no reflection on the vice president, because I think one of the best things about Joe Biden’s legacy will be that he made sure that there was a pipeline where Kamala Harris would be the natural person that everyone would turn to if something happened to him,” she told Politico in an interview.
Dunn also joked about the characterization of his debate debacle as catastrophic, even though it meant the end of his campaign.
“Voters didn’t like Biden’s performance in the first half hour. He didn’t score well at all. But it’s not like they walked out,” she said. “They thought a lot of the second half of the debate was very good for Joe Biden. They hated Donald Trump.”
She recalled “24 days of relentless negative, horrible attacks on Joe Biden.”
Among her most pointed comments was a dig at former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who kept up a series of comments about Biden while taking a victory lap. Harris’ numbers have skyrocketed, injecting “joy” into the campaign by her running mate Tim Walz and convincing Democrats she has a shot.
“You know, there were clearly leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public. And that gave other people permission to go public,” she said.
During the heated post-debate reflection, some Democrats criticized Biden’s team for agreeing to an earlier-than-usual fight with Donald Trump and for not sharing its weaknesses, resulting in what the White House called at the time a “bad night.”
So [former President] “Trump didn’t gain any ground at all in the debate. And we actually gained a few votes in the group. So it was a bad debate, but it didn’t feel catastrophic at all, certainly not in terms of voters,” Dunn said.
“And I think other people who did independent research saw much the same thing. If you go back and look at the polls, you see that there wasn’t a lot of movement from the debate, because the structure of this campaign had been pretty static for a long time, and the debate didn’t change that.”
Pelosi also described Biden’s decision as an important part of his legacy during a recent media tour. But she also told the New Yorker that she knew after the debate that he wasn’t going to win.