First lady Jill Biden shared her disappointment with Nancy Pelosi amid the former speaker’s role in President Joe Biden’s decision to exit the presidential race last year, in an interview with the Washington Post published Wednesday.
“We were friends for 50 years,” Jill Biden told the Post, in what appear to be her first public comments about Pelosi since the president dropped his reelection bid. “It was disappointing.”
Following the president’s shaky debate performance and growing questions from Democratic lawmakers about his capability to beat former President Donald Trump, Pelosi privately shared her concerns with Biden that he was dragging down the party and urged the president to make a decision about stepping down, POLITICO reported in July.
In a now-infamous interview with “Morning Joe” on MSNBC last July, Pelosi questioned if Biden would stay in the race, after the president had already publicly said he intended to continue his reelection bid.
“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” Pelosi told MSNBC. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short.”
Biden dropped his bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee less than two weeks later, and POLITICO reported in August that Biden harbored frustrations at the former speaker for helping show him the door.
Pelosi told The New York Times in an interview days after Trump won the presidency that she believed the outcome could have been different had Biden stepped aside sooner.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” she told the Times, adding, “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”
