President Donald Trump used his downtime on Air Force One to fire off another attack on Nancy Pelosi, scolding the speaker for privately criticizing him while he was overseas.
Though Trump himself has not stuck to the political tradition of leaving politics behind at America’s shores, he referred to the speaker using a newly coined nickname, writing in a tweet that "Nervous Nancy Pelosi is a disgrace to herself and her family for having made such a disgusting statement, especially since I was with foreign leaders overseas.
”Sources told POLITICO this week that Pelosi, in a closed-door meeting about impeachment, told her colleagues that “I don’t want to see [Trump] impeached, I want to see him in prison.”
Pelosi has resisted her caucus’ growing impatience about impeaching the president, but said this week she would rather see him defeated at the ballot box and then prosecuted for his alleged crimes. Trump on Friday insisted that “there is no evidence for such a thing to have been said,” repeating his assertion that his 2016 campaign did not collude with Russia.
Pelosi on Thursday declined to address her remarks while in Normandy, France, for ceremonies commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Prior to her departure, she also criticized Trump’s threats to slap tariffs on Mexico over its immigration enforcement. Trump has spent the week in Europe, where he was honored by Queen Elizabeth II and met with the leaders of the U.K., France and Ireland.
Trump has taken the gloves off with Pelosi in recent weeks as she’s ratcheted up her criticism of the president, accusing him last month of engaging in a “cover-up” by stonewalling congressional investigators. He only assigned Pelosi a derisive nickname in the weeks since, telling Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Thursday that he'd "tried to be nice" to Pelosi, calling the speaker a “nasty, vindictive, horrible person" immediately after.
“Nervous Nancy & Dems are getting Zero work done in Congress,” he claimed Friday, “and have no intention of doing anything other than going on a fishing expedition to see if they can find anything on me - both illegal & unprecedented in U.S. history.” He instructed Pelosi to instead “go to work” on addressing drug prices and infrastructure, despite the fact that he upended an infrastructure meeting last month over the speaker’s “cover-up” remarks.
Pelosi, through a spokesman, declined to comment given she was traveling abroad marking the anniversary of the D-Day landings.
Trump’s criticism of Pelosi for admonishing him while overseas comes weeks after he decided not to follow the same tradition, siding with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in his criticism of former vice president and potential 2020 rival Joe Biden. Biden, in that case, did not respond to the president's attacks until moments after Trump had arrived back on American soil.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine