The Speaker Emerita's Master Stroke
Nancy Pelosi will be remembered as a hypocritical villain for the part she played in ending Biden’s campaign. She deserves to be lauded as a hero.
For the past 24 hours, as we’ve watched the intense psychodrama within the Democratic Party speed toward its climax, I’ve been thinking almost nonstop about a particular painting. The painting below: The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke by Richard Dadd, painted between 1855 and 1864 while Dadd was living in various mental health institutions, where he spent most of his adult life.
Folks who know me from my podcast know that I’m a great enthusiast of outsider art. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about. Outsider artists, unconstrained by commercial considerations, are almost always the ones who create the most honest and impactful works, the works that outlive their makers and take on lifespans of their own. Outsider art is frequently made under circumstances which the artists themselves ascribe to near-supernatural influences; they speak of “channeling” or “downloading” their works from some source that feels as if it’s separate from themselves, existing somewhere beyond the limits of their bodies and minds. Dadd was no exception to this rule. The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke is his best-known painting, yet the artist himself didn’t understand what it meant or who all the figures in the painting were supposed to be. He explained the process by which he made the painting in a lengthy poem, Elimination of a Picture and its Subject. It’s clear from the poem that Dadd felt largely out of control while he worked on The Fairy Feller. It was something coming through him, some larger, cosmic drama he was translating into images of Shakespearean fairies because someone had asked him to paint “a fairy picture.” But the medium of imagery never quite felt adequate to Dadd. He found the painting itself distasteful and frustrating, perplexing, antagonizing. And he couldn’t leave it alone for nearly a decade of his life.
The Fairy Feller has drawn me back into its deep and complex imagery over the course of the past day. As soon as I opened Twitter and saw that Biden had suspended his re-election campaign, the image sprang into my head and stuck there. I couldn’t understand why, at the time. I understand it a little better now, after a full day has elapsed and some of the dust has begun to settle. I understand quite a few things better now.
Joe Biden is a man of unparalleled quality. Countless other people, in articles and on social media, have lauded his accomplishments over the course of a political career that has stretched half a century. Despite his reputation among the modern left for centrist policies, he has in fact been one of the most progressive members of government from the start. At a time when it was much easier—and politically safer—for straight white men to stick with their own, Biden stood up for whoever was being oppressed, from people of color to women to the LGBT community. Even before his historic term as President, he was instrumental in ensuring that some of the most significant progressive legislation in American history was passed, including, as Vice to President Obama, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act, both of which paved the way for much-needed advancements in LGBT rights.
Biden was and is the man we needed in office to lead this country out of the cataclysmic mess the Republicans made of it during the Trump administration. I won’t re-hash the critical role he played—it’s everywhere on the internet just now, if you want to read it for yourself—but I will say that my admiration and gratitude for Biden is as boundless as my love for him. I voted for Warren in the 2020 primary. I figured Biden, as an “establishment Dem,” would take the nomination, and when he did, I shrugged and said, “He can’t be any worse than Trump.” I didn’t expect to find such a deep respect for him as a politician and as a man. He impressed me in every possible way, far exceeded my expectations for what a political leader can and should do, and saved this nation from imminent destruction like no other person could have done. We owe Biden a debt of gratitude and respect that, because the treason and corruption of Trump and the Republicans who’ve enabled him is still coming to light, won’t even be fully understood for years to come. Perhaps, we won’t appreciate the full dimensions of Biden’s heroism until after the man himself is no longer with us. I hope that’s not the case. He deserves to know that we see and are grateful for everything he did for this country.
I’ve spent the past several months disgusted and angry with the way the most objectively and materially successful President of the past 60 years has been treated. Biden has been relentlessly attacked by the media and by members of his own party for being “too old.” He has borne up under this disheartening onslaught with a grace only he is capable of, a grace no one else could show. Trump’s moral failings, far too many list here, were rarely if ever commented upon by corporate media—an unforgivable failure of the so-called Fourth Estate which I trust will soon be remedied by the people, who still hold the real power in this nation despite the concerted effort of tech-bro oligarchs to make it otherwise. Even when the notorious “Epstein files” were released, showing just how often Trump called his buddy Jeffrey Epstein, the so-called journalists at every major media outlet ignored their duty to the American people and continued banging the “lol Biden is old” gong. It was ridiculous, infuriating, and an obvious op perpetrated by the billionaires who own those media outlets, an attempt to sway the election to Trump so the wealthy could continue to exploit the American people for financial gain and profit from GOP policies that favor the rich and no one else. The backlash from citizens against corporate media has been heartening to see; CNN and MSNBC both reported catastrophic drops in their ratings. Good. I hope they never recover. None of these corporations deserve to have such an influence over the American electorate.
Most of all, the attack on Biden was both ageist and ableist. His frankly astounding record of accomplishments was entirely ignored, though in his single term, Biden passed far more meaningful legislation than any two-term President, and the successful Presidents of generations gone by were working with much friendlier Legislative branches with wider margins in House and Senate. Who cares if Biden is old and has a speech impediment? He was showing that he could do the job, and do it better than anyone else had since the recovery from the Great Depression.
The fact that Biden was hounded out of office by relentless discrimination is shameful and must never be swept under the rug. We’re supposed to be eliminating discrimination and bigotry from our society, and ageism is just that: bigotry. It’s a subject I feel strongly about because of my own family history.
My grandmother, Georgia Grant, made history by being the first woman to successfully sue the same company for two different kinds of discrimination and to win both lawsuits. In the early 1970s, she joined a class-action suit against her employer, Pay N Save, a department store which would only allow women to rise to the position of Assistant Manager of the Cosmetics department, but not to lead any other department… and certainly not to manage an entire store. This was in the days before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 allowed women to take out lines of credit and to hold bank accounts in their own names at all financial institutions. For women to fight for the right to lead entire corporate teams in a social environment of such overwhelming discrimination was audacious and difficult, to say the least. Before the lawsuit was won, each of the other seven women who were my grandmother’s co-plaintiffs had dropped the case. It was too much stress, too hard to fight for their due. She was the only one left standing, and when the court finally ruled in her favor—after years of fighting—she became the first woman to manage a Pay N Save store.
(The fact that she turned to the courts at all is especially remarkable, given that, just prior to this lawsuit, the judge overseeing her divorce from her abusive husband refused to grant her alimony or child support because—I swear I am not making this up—her breasts were so large that she would “get another husband in no time.” What woman wouldn’t be disillusioned by such an experience with the American legal system?)
Twenty years later, after my grandmother turned her Pay N Save into such a successful store that the company decided to remodel it and make it into a flagship, they first tried to force her out by making her work grueling hours overseeing the local warehouse. When she didn’t give up, they sat her down and explained to her that they wanted “a younger image” to lead the flagship store—the very store she had managed to such unprecedented success. She sued again, this time for age discrimination, and won a second time.
I was twelve years old when my Granny won her second lawsuit against Pay N Save, and damn, was I proud of her. To tell a person that they can’t do a job because they’re too old is questionable in the most liberal of circumstances. To do so when they’re already demonstrating, through consistent excellence that outshines almost anyone else who’s done that job before, is disgusting and unforgivable. Our elders are not incapable merely because of their age. We all face declines in capability due to time or shifts in our health, but this happens at different rates and stages for everyone. Some people remain sharp and capable into their hundreds. And Donald Trump—who started out dumber than a bag of hammers with no grasp of policy or diplomacy and has been showing blatant signs of rapidly progressing dementia over the past few years—hasn’t been called out once by corporate media for his patent unfitness to act as President of the United States. President Biden has been the victim of bigotry, and everyone who has participated in his harassment should be deeply ashamed of their own sick prejudices.
The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke is a bizarre, intoxicating view of a political court in oblivious chaos. As baffled as Dadd was by his own painting, he was sure of one thing: this was a representation of the court of Queen Mab, Shakespeare’s legendary queen of the fairies. The composition is unusual, to say the least. The strong, dark lines of grass and twigs in the foreground obscure the painting and give the impression that the viewer is peering through a thicket onto a scene of constant activity. Yet almost no one is really doing anything. Self-important fae in the finery of their elevated stations gossip and preen, cavort and whisper in one another’s ears. They blow their brassy trumpets from the top of a rocky ledge. They are focused on themselves and one another, not on what’s going on around them. A repetition of small daisies and hazelnuts leads the eye in an unpleasant circle around and around the composition, never providing any comfortable place to rest.
The only clear areas of focus are near the center, where a fairy man in workman’s clothes raises a golden axe above his head. He’s poised to strike the hazelnut before him—which, Dadd explained, was about to be cleaved to serve as Queen Mab’s chariot.
Just above the nut, with his eyes fixed on the axe man, is a small, frail-looking, aged male fairy, his bald pate shining, his white beard stark and eye-catching amid the dim colors around him. He watches the titular Feller and the gleaming axe with an expression of unmistakable dread.
The viewer is left with the impression that it’s not the hazelnut that’s about to be stricken. Rather, it’s the old man at the center of the painting. The blow is coming. He can already see the arc of its fall. And there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
I’ve got a lot of feelings about Nancy Pelosi right now. It’s surprising to me that not all those feelings are negative. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve never been on the de facto anti-Pelosi bandwagon. In fact, I’ve always had a lot of respect for the Speaker Emerita. Her career has been every bit as historic and consequential as Biden’s. When you consider that she achieved much of her many laudable accomplishments during an era in which women had far less of what we have now—a closer approximation of rights and access equal to those afforded to men—Pelosi’s success is nothing short of extraordinary.
But there can be no doubt that she was the driving force behind the destruction of Biden’s campaign. Pelosi has made no bones about it, issuing statements that, while being characteristically sphinx-like and subject to interpretation, did nothing to dispel the rumors that she was spearheading a “palace coup” to subvert the will of the 14 million Democratic primary voters and rid herself of a candidate she disliked in favor of one hand-picked by her—or, more ominously, by wealthy donors.
Some even speculated that Nancy and her closest allies in this maneuver (including but not limited to Adam Schiff) were actually working for the Republicans, trying to destroy Biden’s campaign from the inside so Trump could return to power.
The “palace coup” certainly had cringe enough optics that I can understand why some people feel that way. However, not only is Pelosi’s legislative record far too progressive for me to buy into the idea that she would ally herself with the MAGA faction… there’s also this:
Those are neither the countenance nor the actions of someone who likes the Republicans.
But why the hell was Pelosi doing what she was so obviously doing? In the first hours following Biden’s announcement, as I watched the news unfold, I was sick at heart, confused and hurt as to why Pelosi, who’s been serving the American people as an elected official almost as long as Biden, would sabotage the campaign of a successful President and a good, decent man.
But as the day passed—as I watched not only the Dem base but important factions of the Republican opposition to fascism rapidly and enthusiastically coalesce around Vice President Harris—I began to see the intricacy and the perfection of the Speaker Emerita’s plan.
Now I get it. And I don’t think this could have happened any other way.
I think Pelosi deserves to be honored as a true master of statecraft, a singular genius with an inborn talent for political gameplay the likes of which has seldom been seen in any western nation. I’m still angry with her. Biden deserved so much more kindness and respect than he was showed. But also, thank God she is serving now—the right woman in the right place at the right time—and thank God her uniquely brilliant mind, her astonishing political aptitude, is allied with those of us who are fighting for democracy rather than with the people who hope to destroy the American experiment in favor of a dictatorial regime, a white Christian nationalist hellscape that will destroy every life that isn’t straight, white, Christian, and male.
For weeks, the media had been harping on Biden’s “polling,” how poor the polls looked for him, how the Dems weren’t happy with “internal polling.” I couldn’t figure out what they were going on about and assumed (understandably) this was a bunch of nonsense being pushed by Republican-favoring corporate fat cats to tip the scale in Trump’s favor. All the polls were favorable to Biden. At worst, he was trailing Trump within the margin of error, which was nothing that couldn’t be turned around with four months left to go.
But Nancy Pelosi was looking at those same polls with a very different eye. She understood—as I now understand—that a Biden win wouldn’t be enough to save this country from devolving into outright civil war.
That’s not hyperbole; it’s truly where we stand now as a country, on that dangerous brink. Trump has stacked the Supreme Court with soulless, hate-filled, loyalist toadies who’ve already demonstrated that not only are they quite content to be seen as the corrupt bad actors they are, but they’re also happy to disregard the Constitution itself to give Trump what he wants. The GOP has been salivating to throw this election to SCOTUS, so the white supremacist conservative Justices will do what they did in 2000: overturn the votes of American citizens and unlawfully hand the election to the candidate who did not win the electoral college.
If that were to happen—and it might still happen; we aren’t out of the woods yet—there would be no possible alternative but civil war. This isn’t 2000. Too much is at stake now. With Project 2025, the Republican Party has declared its intentions to gut our institutions, rid this nation of democracy, rescind the rights of women, children, people of color, disabled people, queer people, elderly people, veterans, and even to destroy public education and climate protections. At the RNC, Trump pledged mass deportations of 12 million people from American soil—immigrants who have every right to be here, the children of immigrants, asylum holders, refugees, and anyone with brown skin or liberal leanings whom they dislike. His raving followers cheered and waved signs that read “MASS DEPORTATION NOW,” a sight that should have chilled every viewer with its echoes of Adolf Hitler’s rallies.
Twelve million deportations means concentration camps. It means putting people on trains and shipping them to places like Auschwitz and Dachau, where they’ll be subjected to the same things that were done to the political prisoners of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s and 40s; the same things that were done to victims of the Holocaust.
Worse still, allowing Trump and his fascist enablers to regain the White House means putting the most powerful military on the planet in the hands of people who’ve already professed an ideology and a plan for “governance” that’s far too close to Hitler’s Third Reich for any sane person’s comfort.
Far too much is at stake.
We cannot allow this election to end up in the hands of the Republicans’ captured Supreme Court. We cannot allow our nation to devolve into civil war.
In order to avoid that potentiality, it’s imperative that voters turn out in numbers so historic, so massive, so earth-shaking that any question of a challenge in the courts is laughable in the extreme. It’s not enough to win. We have to mop the floor with the GOP so fucking hard, with such devastating margins, that no one may reasonably question the outcome.
Pelosi, who has spent most of her 84 years ably rising above institutionalized misogyny to gain unprecedented power in American politics, understands that narrative is the most crucial factor in any political victory. Whoever has control of the prevailing narrative will win, period. That’s just human nature. That’s the way society works. And with the stakes being as high as they are—existential to democracies around the world—she made a masterful move when she saw a window of opportunity open. Thank God for her vision and her confidence. I don’t think anyone else could have pulled it off. Pelosi regained control of the political narrative with such a sure hand that everything has changed in a mere 24 hours.
Now the media isn’t talking about how old Biden is. They’re not even talking about the fact that only nine days ago, someone tried to assassinate Trump (a fact which Trump is salty as hell about, you can be sure.) Everyone is talking about the Dems now, but in a positive light. The Republicans and the media licked their chops, hungry for another “Dems in disarray” narrative, and instead they got Dems swiftly and powerfully uniting behind a single candidate. Now it’s the Republicans who are on the defensive, scrambling to reassure their base and themselves that they can still win in the face of unprecedented organizational energy and record-shattering fundraising on the opposing side.
The Republicans worked so hard (in obvious collusion with corporate media) to make this entire election a referendum on the age and speech impediments of a single candidate. Now, it’s the Republicans who are saddled with the old guy who don’t talk so good. (This might be Pelosi’s deftest maneuver of all—dumping MAGA’s own narrative squarely in their laps and forcing them to own it. I applaud you, Nancy; that was smooth as hell.)
Speaking of that record-shattering fundraising, the turn came on the heels of Elon Musk’s announcement that he would donate $45M per month to Trump’s campaign. The grassroots of America, the people who actually respect democracy, have responded by giving the Harris campaign over $82M in 24 hours, and the number is still rising. As of the writing of this essay, the total seems likely to climb over $100M within the next few hours.
Although Pelosi kept her cards close to her chest and said nothing about Harris initially, when she did finally endorse the Vice President, she did so with an effulgence and warmth that made it obvious to me that she understood all along that Harris would be the presumptive nominee once Biden stepped down. Not only would Harris as nominee honor the 14 million primary votes, but Harris instantly proved to be a motivating candidate, inspiring several difficult-to-mobilize blocs, including the youth vote and the progressive left, both of whom are looking for real change in American politics. Harris can also hold onto the elder vote, who were rallying strongly behind Biden due to the unforgivable ageist attacks he suffered over the past months. Harris was his respected Vice and has nothing but praise for Biden as a statesman and as an individual. Those facts will go over well with our elder voters.
Pelosi has also simplified and clarified the narrative in a way that inspires my fullest admiration as a storyteller. Harris is a stark opposite to everything Trump is and everything his Republican enablers stand for. She is a thoroughly experienced prosecutor; he is a 34-time convicted felon. She is a woman of Black and Indian ethnicity; he is yet another white man who has proudly displayed his disgusting misogyny and racism for his entire life. She is the child of immigrant parents; he has pledged to throw all the brown immigrants out of the country. She is a brilliant and capable orator; he slurs and mumbles and rambles for 92 minutes about Hannibal Lecter and sharks. She has a strong record of advocating for queer rights; the Republicans have been scapegoating transgender people for years and have promised, in Project 2025, to rescind marriage equality for gay Americans. The stark, binary contrast between the two is a simple message that the simplest among us can understand. Harris is an obvious “good guy.” Trump is an obvious “bad guy.” It’s easy for any person with the least shred of decency to know which candidate they ought to vote for.
The timing of Pelosi’s maneuver is not coincidental. She has been pressuring Biden for three weeks now, if anonymous “sources” are correct (and in this case, they seem to be.) But she didn’t make her move until after the Republican National Convention. After having forced the GOP to spend all its money and energy and branding and messaging on attacking Biden, the Dems now pivot to an entirely different candidate—a move which has left Republicans gaping like landed fish all across their Kremlinesque media machinery and has left Trump himself apoplectic with impotent rage on Truth Social.
Most importantly of all, this maneuver leaves Joe Biden himself, one of the most capable Presidents this nation has seen, unencumbered by the demands of a campaign. That’s good. We need Joe working in the White House for us, right now, because we are far from being out of the woods, my friends. Harris now takes up the work of campaigning while Biden does what he does so damn well, what he does better than anyone has done it since Roosevelt or Eisenhower: he leads us through one of the most dangerous political moments this country has ever seen. The risks are still very high for more political violence or a “black swan” event, orchestrated by one of America’s enemies. We need Biden, the thoroughly experienced and wise statesman, fully focused on guiding us and our international alliances through the tenuous months between now and January’s inauguration.
This is the Speaker Emerita’s master stroke. A precision of timing, confidence, and a political aptitude that goes beyond keen to the realms of the positively supernatural. Time has yet to prove whether the gamble will pay off, but as of right now, things are looking very positive for Harris’s campaign. If this maneuver manages to drive a historic voter turnout, keep the Supreme Court’s dirty hands off our election, and prevents our toppling into civil war, then it will have succeeded… and Nancy Pelosi will probably be remembered by history as the villain of this story, an eighty-four-year-old hypocrite who stabbed a beloved, kind-hearted President in the back.
No one will talk about her true legacy. She is the longest-serving member of California’s 11th Congressional District. She was the first woman to hold the positions of House minority whip and House minority leader. She was the first female Speaker of the House and, until Harris was elected VP, the highest-ranking woman in the line of Presidential succession in the history of the nation. She was the first former Speaker since 1955 to be re-elected to the position after losing it. She openly and vociferously opposed Bush’s Iraq war and the Bush administration’s attempts to privatize Social Security. She helped pass some of Obama’s best-known and most consequential bills, including Dodd-Frank, the ACA, The American Recovery and Investment Act, and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. She helped pass Biden’s American Rescue Act that got us through the disaster of the pandemic and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that has been responsible for the creation of nearly 15 million new jobs in America. She was instrumental in passing the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Respect for Marriage Act that formally repealed the bigoted DOMA.
Nancy Pelosi should be remembered for all that hard, good work. She did it for us, the American people. But as a master stateswoman who clearly understands the critical importance of narrative, I have no doubt that she knows where history is headed for her. She was perhaps the only politician who saw a slim window of opportunity open, who recognized the narrow and difficult path that could lead to an outcome that still might, we all pray, avert a civil war. She saw, and she knew she could only take us down that path if she sacrificed her legacy, which she built over a lifetime of exceptional and historic service to the United States. In order to pull it off, she would have to fall on her sword, willingly become the bad guy of this story. She would have to be cruel and relentless to a man whom she knows is good and effective and deserving of the highest respect.
You may dislike Pelosi. You may find her Machiavellian personality unpalatable—and, like me, you may still be angry with her for doing the best President we’ve had in generations so damn dirty.
But if I’m right about her—if she isn’t just being bribed by asshole tech-bros, if this was the brilliantly timed and deliberate maneuver it appears to be, a gamble made by the steadiest, most experienced hands in our government—then she has made a major personal sacrifice for the good of our nation and the stability of democracies around the world.
Her sacrifice is on par with Biden’s. She deserves our respect and honor.
Let’s not put Pelosi’s remarkable gift for political forethought to waste. Let’s give Harris the massive turnout which Nancy Pelosi has killed her own remarkable legacy to inspire.