Pelosi Shares Dire Warnings She Received on Trump’s Mental Health

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was warned by doctors and mental health professionals about Donald Trump’s mental health in 2019, according to her upcoming book.

The Guardian obtained an advance copy of Pelosi’s book The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House, which will be released next week. In the book, Pelosi recounted what she was told by several “doctors and other mental health professionals” at a memorial service for a psychiatrist.

They told her that they were “deeply concerned that there was something seriously wrong” with Trump, “and that his mental and psychological health was in decline.”

“I’m not a doctor,” Pelosi wrote, “but I did find his behaviors difficult to understand.”

The 2019 memorial was a service for Dr. David Hamburg, whom Pelosi refers to as “a distinguished psychiatrist who … served as the president of the Carnegie Corporation, where he had been a great voice for international peace.”

Pelosi elaborated further on her opinions of Trump’s mental health.

Before the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, “I knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. I had seen it up close. His denial and then delays when the Covid pandemic struck, his penchant for repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots, and his total separation from reality and actual events. His repeated, ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time,” Pelosi wrote.

Pelosi also described how Trump’s staff members, such as Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, allowed Trump to listen in “surreptitiously” on private meetings with congressional leaders, causing Pelosi to ban cell phones from her meeting rooms on Capitol Hill.

She also wrote about Trump calling her on the phone, sometimes late at night, including one call where Trump told her that missile strikes he had just ordered against Syria were his predecessor Barack Obama’s fault. Pelosi told him “It’s midnight. I think you should go to sleep.”

On January 6, Pelosi said she was calm because she was “already deeply aware of how dangerous Donald Trump was.”

She wrote that she realized that she had “more respect for the office of president of the United States than Trump. “It was clear to me from the start that he was an imposter—and that on some level, he knew it.”

Pelosi’s remarks show that Trump’s ongoing cognitive decline isn’t something new and, in fact, was noticed by those around him years ago. In recent months, he’s confused members of Congress, fumbled during speeches, gone on incomprehensible rants, and made enough gaffes for critics to make brutal supercuts. Pelosi’s new revelations show just how much his mental state may have put the country in danger when he was president—and serve as a warning that another presidential term would likely be worse.

In a Truth Social post Thursday morning, Donald Trump appeared to suggest, again, that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris isn’t really Black, ramping up his identity-based attacks to the horror of those in his party who consider racism a losing electoral strategy.

Earlier in the week, many GOP strategists, including in the Trump camp, worried that attacks on Harris’s race and gender—which seemed all but inevitable considering Trump’s history of racism and misogyny—would pose a serious liability for the campaign. “We hope he doesn’t act like a crazy racist and sexist person, but we can’t control him,” a source close to the campaign told The Washington Post.

These hopes were quickly dashed in the course of Trump’s interview with the National Association of Black Journalists Wednesday afternoon, in which the candidate claimed that, for years, Vice President Kamala Harris “was Indian all the way, and then suddenly she made a turn and she became a Black person.”

Politifact noted this was a “false mischaracterization of Harris’ background and how she has spoken about, and identified with, her race and ethnicity.” Harris, whose mother is Indian and father is Black, has “embraced her Black identity and multicultural background in several ways.”

By Wednesday evening, many Republicans were dismayed. One House Republican told Axios the interview “was not a demonstration on how to win over undecided voters,” and another said it “raised concerns about whether Trump can contain his impulses.”

But Trump dug in his heels again on Truth Social Thursday morning, posting a family photo in which a young Kamala Harris wore a sari, with the snide caption, “Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian heritage are very much appreciated.”

Commenting on Trump’s obstinate commitment to mocking Harris’s biracial background, political analyst and X user ettingermentum wrote, “How does he even theoretically see this helping him,” and commentator Tim Miller sarcastically posted, “Gotta say I am extremely impressed with the strategic discipline that [Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita] has brought to this campaign. I doubted the punditry that indicated Trump could be tamed … but the proof is in the pudding.”

A former Trump aide has accused Donald Trump of falsely identifying as Swedish, following his outlandish claim that Vice President Kamala Harris “happened to turn Black” despite being “always of Indian heritage.”

Omarosa Manigault Newman called out Trump during an appearance on CNN’s Laura Coates Live Wednesday night, saying that she distinctly remembered him identifying as Swedish, “because he didn’t want to acknowledge that his father was German and his mother was Irish, and he thought that that would play better to those who were patronizing his businesses.”

“So can we call the question, his past of self-identifying as first Swedish, then German, and then Irish whenever it’s convenient?”

“Donald doesn’t know the difference between ancestry and race. He doesn’t want to know the differences, nor does he understand the nuances of how people self-identify. And so, I believe that that’s disqualifying for him,” Newman said.

Trump’s grandfather, Frederich, came to New York City from Kallstadt, Germany, according to The Daily Beast. Trump’s father then lied about having Swedish heritage, so that he could more easily sell apartments to Jewish tenants in the aftermath of World War II, according to The Boston Globe.

That lie made its way into Trump’s 1987 bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, where he wrote that his grandfather “came here from Sweden as a child.” It was only when the Trump family received a request from a Swedish organization to put up an exhibit about the family in one of their museums, that it was time to give up the charade. When Trump wrote his next book 13 years later, it correctly identified that his grandfather had come from Germany.

While Newman identified Trump’s mother as Irish, she was Scottish by birth.

As many other Republicans criticized Donald Trump for questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’s race on Wednesday, Senator Tom Cotton took a different tack and defended the former president and convicted felon.

On CNN Wednesday, Kaitlan Collins asked the Arkansas senator if Trump’s comments were defensible, and he said yes.

“Kaitlan, of course,” Cotton said. “First off, it’s refreshing to see a presidential candidate who’s willing to go in front of the media, something that Donald Trump knew would be a tough interview. It turned out to be a hostile, adversarial interview, but he’s been doing that for nine years. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has been hiding out for the 10 days that she’s been a president nominee.”

Cotton attacked Harris as a “San Francisco liberal,” saying she had not granted any interviews since President Biden stepped down from the 2024 election and endorsed her for president.

“Yeah, I didn’t hear Donald Trump bring up any of her policy positions today or stances when he was on that stage,” Collins followed up. “But your argument is that just because she hasn’t done an interview since she became the top of the ticket, that it’s OK to question what her race is?”

Cotton denied Collins’s assertion.

“Kaitlan, if you didn’t hear Donald Trump talking about her positions and his record, then you didn’t watch the interview. It went on for 30 minutes,” Cotton said.

“The vast majority of it, Kaitlan, was Donald Trump talking about his record, contrasting it to the Biden-Harris record of higher inflation and wide-open borders and war and chaos around the world,” Cotton added.

Throughout the interview, Collins tried to press Cotton to address Trump’s comments, but the Arkansas senator continued to deflect.

“We have talked about her past positions and the reversals of those,” Collins said. “And we’ve delved into all of that. That’s actually what voters care about. But when your party’s nominee is on stage telling a panel of three Black women that the first Black woman to serve as vice president hasn’t always identified as Black, how does that help your party win elections?”

“Donald Trump said that what matters is that she identifies as a dangerous San Francisco liberal. It’s not what race she identifies as,” Cotton replied.

It’s not surprising that Cotton would be one of the few senators to publicly jump to Trump’s defense, considering his own record on race. In 2020, he called for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in federal troops to crush Black Lives Matter demonstrations. That same year, he claimed that America’s Founding Fathers saw slavery as a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.”

But Cotton is out of step with many of his Republican colleagues, and if he and the rest of the GOP who are defending Trump’s remarks think that the former president will emerge unscathed, they are in for a reckoning, especially considering Trump already has minuscule Black support.

As reports emerge suggesting some Trump allies regret Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance, who has made an abysmal first impression in the public eye, many in the campaign suspect former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway of maligning Vance to the media.

The Bulwark reports that over a dozen “​​Trump campaign staffers, allies, confidants, and advisers” said, without being prompted, that they thought Conway “was undermining him through leaks to the press expressing doubts about his readiness and the campaign’s vetting.”

“He’s pissed off about it. He knows it’s her,” a source close to Donald Trump Jr. told the center-right news site.

Conway was rumored to be a “serial leaker” during Trump’s presidency, and, as his “veepstakes” were underway, she opposed Vance. The New York Times reports that, as the Ohio senator emerged as the favorite, Conway “argued privately” for “other options,” like Marco Rubio.

Maintaining her loyalty and close relationship to the former president, Conway called her accusers “gossip girls” and “ankle biters,” telling The Bulwark that she did favor Rubio but is “not anti-Vance.” A member of the Trump family reportedly said, “The family in general thinks very highly” of her.

When the Republican “veepstakes” were still underway, Conway told CNN that Trump should choose somebody who would not be “a distraction or subtraction,” saying he “should not be made to explain other people’s scandals or statements.” Whatever their thoughts of Conway, such advice is surely ringing in the ears of Trump and his allies as they are having to do just that.