House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi is telling her rank-and-file members that she is confident a good portion of President Donald Trump’s voters will eventually turn on him — and Democrats just have to wait it out.
She’s using a colorful analogy to make her point — comparing Trump to a friend’s boyfriend who is a “jerk.”
“The way I told my members: It’s like telling your friend the guy she’s dating is a jerk. You can’t tell her that. She has to find out for herself. You can give her clues and then eventually one thing will lead to another, she’ll come to her conclusion. But if you tell her right up front, you’ll lose a friend. So we’re not interested in losing any friends. Let them find out,” Pelosi recounted during a small briefing for reporters in her Capitol suite Tuesday.
“They made a judgment and they’re not willing to walk away from their own judgment,” she said.
Pelosi did, however, make a sweeping judgment about educated women who voted for Trump rather than Hillary Clinton.
“White educated women who voted against Hillary? They voted with their husbands on taxes and they always have,” declared Pelosi.
Clinton got 51% of white educated women. Trump got 44%.
Matt Gorman, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, blasted Pelosi’s comments Tuesday evening,
“Leave it to a San Francisco liberal to belittle and condescend to the 63 million voters who called for real change last November,” Gorman said. “Pelosi’s comments underscore just how hard it’ll be for this out-of-touch party to compete across the country in 2018.”
Pelosi also discussed the first White House meeting that she and other lawmakers had with the President after he was inaugurated, when he insisted that millions of votes were fraudulent and Pelosi told him he was wrong.
Beyond that widely reported incident, Pelosi said Trump worked very hard in the meeting to charm lawmakers, especially Democrats, though she conceded Trump worked harder on Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer because he probably knows she is a “lost cause.”
“He uses the charm offensive — which is offensive, very offensive,” said Pelosi.
She also described the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a top White House aide, as starry-eyed to the point that he missed the mark with Democrats.
“We went to the meeting when Jared was there — and he said, ‘Is everyone so excited about the change?’ And we’re like ‘What?’ I said, ‘No, we’re so excited about the women’s march,'” recalled Pelosi.
House Democrats are also planning to push for a vote once a week on a resolution demanding that Trump release his tax returns, which they hope to use to pressure Republicans.
Pelosi insisted that as time goes on, Republicans will start to break with the President and vote with Democrats.
She also made note of a congressional rule that allows House and Senate chairmen of tax writing committees (Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means) to acquire tax returns from the IRS.
Democrats plan to pressure the GOP chairmen of both committees to invoke that rule, created after the so-called Teapot Dome scandal during Warren Harding’s administration in the 1920s, to get Trump’s tax returns. The rule says the tax returns would be kept private within the committee unless a majority votes to make them public.