Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday claimed that former President Trump has “cognitive disorders” in response to his apparent mix-up of her name with his GOP presidential primary opponent’s name, Nikki Haley.
In an interview on MSNBC during election coverage of the New Hampshire primary, Pelosi responded to a question about the apparent mix-up, saying, “Well, let me just say, I’m not going to spend too much time on Donald Trump’s cognitive disorders.”
At a rally this past weekend, Trump repeated a false theory, embraced by some of Trump’s supporters, that blames then-Speaker Pelosi for security failures at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Instead of targeting Pelosi, however, he incorrectly levied the accusation against Haley, apparently suggesting that Haley was the Speaker of the House on Jan. 6, 2021.
The moment has given fuel to some Democrats who have tried to counter attacks on President Biden’s age, 81, by highlighting Trump’s age, 77, and raising concerns about the former president’s mental competency.
Pelosi, however, stressed the need to refute the underlying premise of the false claim — regardless of whose name Trump mentioned at the moment.
Pelosi pushed back on the suggestion that Trump “tried to say that Nikki Haley did not allow the National Guard to come, but it was Nancy Pelosi,” adding, ”It was neither, nobody.”
“It was Donald Trump. [Trump] knows, and you know that Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer and I begged for hours for the National Guard to come. He knows that we don’t have the authority to bring the National Guard, the President does,” Pelosi said, adding that it’s “sad to say” neither does “the District of Columbia because in every other state, the governor has that power.”
“So I’m more concerned about what he was trying to accuse her of than, again, his many misrepresentations,” she added.