Republicans made Nancy Pelosi out to be a public enemy — the attack on her home that left her husband bludgeoned with a hammer is the result.
Friday’s brutal attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, at their San Francisco home was overtly political — and a logical endpoint to the decades deeply personal villainization House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has weathered from her political opponents.
It’s now clear the speaker was the target of Friday’s attack. The assailant broke into the home looking for her, reportedly shouting, “Where is Nancy?” — echoing the chant insurrectionists called out when they breached the US Capitol on January 6 — and saying that he would wait “until Nancy got home” as he tried to tie up Paul Pelosi. The speaker’s husband suffered a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands that required surgery after the assailant bludgeoned him with a hammer. (A spokesperson for the speaker said in a statement that Paul Pelosi is expected to make a full recovery.)
Even before she became speaker, Republicans in the party, and those adjacent to it, have demonized Pelosi regularly featuring her in attack ads and lambasting her on Fox News. At least one of her colleagues in the House, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), has directly indicated support for violence against her. And members of right wing militia groups such as the Oathkeepers and the Three Percenters have sought her assassination.
Police haven’t gone into further detail about the attacker’s motivations, but his Facebook posts on conspiracy theories around Covid-19 vaccines, the 2020 election, and the January 6 attack provide a window into his radicalization. Other blog posts under his name contained screeds against minorities, politicians, women and global elites, and content related to QAnon — the false pro-Trump conspiracy theory that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, including prominent Democrats like Pelosi, are running the world.
None of those posts reference Pelosi specifically, but all of them do intersect with the ways she has been a familiar target of the right — and not just on the political fringes. The long history of Republicans demonizing Nancy Pelosi
Pelosi has been villainized by Republicans since she first ascended to Democratic leadership.
In 2003, within days of her election as House Minority Leader, she quickly faced gendered attacks from Republicans who were, as Mark Z. Barabak wrote for the Los Angeles Times at time: “eager to attack Pelosi as a loopy San Francisco liberal and exploit her city’s reputation as the odd-sock drawer of America. Within days, her face — garish and twisted — showed up in an attack ad slamming the Democrat in a Louisiana House race. (He won anyway.) She surfaced as Miss America, complete with tiara, in a spoof on Rush Limbaugh’s Web site.”
Such attacks continued throughout her tenure as minority leader, including during the 2006 election when Republicans ran a swath of attack ads featuring unflattering photos of Pelosi often looking angry, bug-eyed, or startled. And they increased in 2010, after she had become speaker. Republicans made her the face of their attacks on Democrats’ Affordable Care Act and launched a “Fire Pelosi” campaign, which involved a bus tour and images of Pelosi engulfed in flames.
Under the Trump era and in the years since, the attacks only escalated in tenor. Former President Donald Trump, who has remained silent about the attack on Paul Pelosi, shared doctored videos of the speaker designed to call into question her mental fitness, retweeted accusations that she was “drinking booze on the job,” and had a litany of derogatory nicknames for her, among them “Crazy Nancy,” “Nervous Nancy” and “Nancy Antoinette.
