Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi did not do herself any favors Tuesday when she tried to attack former President Donald Trump for “cognitive disorders” then turned around and made the exact same kind of verbal gaffe she was attacking Trump over.
Pelosi’s failed attempt to blast Trump came during an appearance Tuesday night on the left-wing cable network MSNBC in the wake of former Trump’s win in the New Hampshire Republican primary.
At the start of the appearance, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow kicked off the segment by noting that Trump made several verbal gaffes while campaigning in New Hampshire.
As NBC has reported, Trump on Friday night mixed up rival GOP rival Nikki Haley’s name with Pelosi’s name while referring to the former speaker’s decisions around the Capitol incursion of Jan. 6, 2021.
“You have been invoked in this current discussion that we’re having, I’m sorry to say,” Maddow said as she introduced Pelosi to her audience, “because the former president in campaigning in New Hampshire did repeatedly try to attack you over the response to the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building.”
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Maddow then noted that Haley has also lambasted Trump for using her name when he meant to say Pelosi’s.
“We’ve heard what Nikki Haley thought about that, that confusion, that mistake by Donald Trump. But I don’t know what you thought about it, and I’m curious,” Maddow said, smirking.
“Well, let me just say, I’m not gonna spend too much time on Donald Trump’s cognitive disorders,” Pelosi said as she began her remarks attacking Donald Trump’s state of mind.
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“But what I am gonna say … [Trump] tried to say that Nikki Haley did not allow the National Guard to come, but it was Nancy Pelosi,” the California Democrat said.
What Pelosi was trying to say is that the former president was attempting to say that as speaker of the House in January 2021, Pelosi had declined have elements of the National Guard deployed to secure the Capitol as Congress met to certify the results of the November 2020 election and a huge crowd of pro-Trump protesters had gathered.
Instead of saying “Pelosi,” Trump said Haley’s name.
But then, seconds after Pelosi had snidely referred to Trump’s supposed “cognitive disorders” over the name mixup, she went on to do the same thing.
“It was neith … It was nobody,” Pelosi continued. “It was Joe,” she said before pausing for a split second, then added, “It was Donald Trump.”
In short, Pelosi made the exact same verbal blunder that she was mocking Trump for of making by blurting out President Joe Biden’s first name instead of Trump’s.
At issue was who was responsible for the security failures that plagued the Capitol that day and the delay in calling in the National Guard to control the crowd.
A report by House Republicans released in December 2022 concluded that concern about the “optics” of Americans seeing armed guardsmen in the Capitol outweighed security concerns, and that then-House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving “succumbed to political pressures from the Office of Speaker Pelosi and House Democrat leadership leading up to January 6, 2021.”
Those concerns and pressures led to a delay in the deployment of the National Guard, contributing to the chaos, the report found.
