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NANCY PELOSI LIKES TO SAY that her parents didn’t
raise her to be the first female speaker of the House and
the most powerful woman in the country. They raised her
to be holy. Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., the Italian-American
Catholic Democratic boss of Baltimore, and his politically
savvy wife, “Big Nancy,” brought up their youngest child
to always help those with less. But Washington is a hard
place to be holy these days. Compassion is out of fashion.
The speaker spends her time fighting for social justice, as
her parents and the nuns taught her to do, in a capital
bristling with lies, corruption, and racism. She’s deftly
tangling with an unruly president who did not rise to the
top by observing the Ten Commandments.
“I pray for him all the time,’’ Pelosi says of Donald
Trump, as we stand surrounded by shimmering stained
glass in the chapel of Trinity College, her alma mater, in
Northeast Washington. Looking chic in a bright turquoise
pantsuit and matching heels, she dips her fingers in holy
water and makes the sign of the cross. Since I am a grad-
uate of Catholic University, just down the road, I join her.
“At night and in church on Sunday, I pray for him,’’ she
continues. “The prayer is that God will open his heart to
meet the needs of the American people. I said to my
pastor, ‘These prayers are not working.’ He replied, ‘Maybe
you’re not praying hard enough.’”
I point out that Trump used to be a Democrat, con-
tributing to Pelosi’s party coffers and to Chuck Schumer
and Hillary Clinton. Could the Republican president ever
have a St. Paul–on-the-road-to-Damascus conversion on
any of the issues Pelosi feels so passionately about, frompreventing mass shootings to halting the practice of put-
ting children in cages at the border and separating them
from their parents to protecting the 2020 election from
Russian meddling? “The damage is done,’’ she replies
firmly. “A conversion now would be too late. That’s why
he cannot be reelected.” She murmurs, as though in
supplication to the heavens, “15 months.”
Pelosi looks fresh even though she returned in the wee
hours that morning from leading a congressional delega-
tion to Ghana on the occasion of the 400 th anniversary
of enslaved Africans arriving in America. She had closed
the door on her clash with the Squad, as Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez and three other outspoken progressive
members of color are known, first by pushing through a
House resolution denouncing Trump’s racist comments
telling the congresswomen to “go back” where they came
from, and then by posing with a member of the Squad—
Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who was born in Somalia
and emigrated as a child—at the Door of No Return, which
slaves passed through on their way to the New World.
Omar wanted to do the picture to show that while Trump
told her to go back, the two women went back together.
Pelosi spent her first day back taking aim at Trump’s
tweet attacking Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings
and denigrating Pelosi’s hometown of Baltimore as “a
disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess.” “If he wants
to know about vermin, he should ask his slumlord son-
in-law,” Pelosi tells me with relish, referring to Jared
Kushner’s Baltimore apartment complexes, some of which
are infested with mice and maggots. ➤WHY IS NANCY PELOSI
FOR TRUMP?
The House speaker and highest-ranking female politician in the U.S. government sounds off
on her hope for the future, her personal style, and what she has in common with CherBy Maureen Dowd
Photographs by Jason Bell
PR AYING
On fire. Coat, sunglasses, and shoes, Max Mara. Earrings (worn throughout), Pelosi’s own. Bracelet, David Yurman.
FASHION EDITOR: Miguel Enamorado