WASHINGTON, D.C. — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told reporters today that she is praying for the country and for the United States after a contentious, hostile, and abruptly finished meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office. Not long before the meeting, Pelosi had used perhaps he strongest words to date about the effort the White House is engaged in to silence witnesses and stymie congressional investigators when she said the president was participating in a “cover-up.”
BREAKING: President Trump walks out of White House meeting with Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer; holds unscheduled Rose Garden statement and says Pelosi was inconsiderate for her "cover up" accusation; Pelosi says she'll pray for the president. https://t.co/1y2Noggn8i
— NBC News (@NBCNews) May 22, 2019
Reportedly, this outraged President Trump, who not only walked out on the meeting, but then held an angry press conference in the Rose Garden in which he demanded that House Democrats end all their oversight into his administration, or he would not engage with them on legislation.
He then marched out into the Rose Garden, where reporters had been gathered, and delivered a statement bristling with anger as he demanded that Democrats “get these phony investigations over with.” He said they could not legislate and investigate at the same time. “We’re going to go down one track at a time,” he said. (The Failing New York Times)
Moments after she and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer held a press conference about the meeting Trump walked out on, Speaker Pelosi told reporters walking with her to lunch that she is “dismayed, shocked, saddened, outraged, and very unhappy” with what she learned after reading the redacted Mueller Report, and with how the president has consistently ignored Congressional subpoenas. She said she’s “horrified” that Trump seems to think he’s above the law and she said she’s “absolutely apoplectic” about the fact that he seems to have no regard for the Constitution.
Pelosi said reading the report and watching Trump’s behavior since it came out made her want to hold the president accountable “more than ever.” She said that “so many Americans want him to be made to answer for his abuse of power.” Speaker Pelosi said she’s been stopped on the street a dozen times or more now, and is told by various American citizens they want Donald Trump’s power to be “checked and balanced against Congress’s power.”
However, she also doesn’t “have the foggiest clue” how to do any of that.
“I just wish that there was some way, somehow, some mechanism that Congress had to do anything about it,” Pelosi lamented. “If only the founders had given us some tool by which to hold a president accountable when you have evidence of his lawless disregard for the Constitution. But I can’t think of anything like that at the moment, can you?”
Speaker Pelosi said that she and her staff are “poring over every legal document [they] can get their hands on.” As of yet, though, she reports that they haven’t been able to locate anything to help them in this situation. Pelosi says she knows that voters are looking to her for leadership, but that she is worried that she might not be able to find a way to “hold Trump’s feet to the fire” by election time next year.
“What if I spend the next eighteen months or so painstakingly checking every document in the National Archives and I still can’t find a way for us to hold Trump accountable,” Pelosi asked the reporters. “I’ll feel so devastated helpless. It’s so strange. You’d think that somewhere maybe even in the Constitution there’d be a way for us to get rid of a guy who anyone with a pulse and an honest thought in their brains can see isn’t fit for office. But, well, if it’s out there, we haven’t found it yet.”
An aide brought Ms. Pelosi a glass of iced tea.
“Mmm. Peach mint,” Pelosi said, prompting reporters to lean in and start scribbling notes furiously, “I just love peach mint tea, don’t you? The combination of peach and mint is just fantastic!”
The reporters pulled back again, putting their pens away.
“I’m afraid that as completely damning as Mueller’s report is, and as clearly as he handed the ball to us to hold the president to account,” Pelosi said, “We’re going to have to just wait eighteen months and trust that somewhere along the line he’ll start holding himself accountable. It’s bound to happen eventually. Right? Right? Right guys?”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Writer/comedian James Schlarmann is the founder of The Political Garbage Chute and his work has been featured on The Huffington Post. You can follow James on Facebook and Instagram, but not Twitter because he has a potty mouth.
