Does Nancy Pelosi want to become a meme?
Over the course of the first Trump administration, there have been attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to convert Nancy Pelosi into something of a meme, a symbol of liberal anger and feminist defiance. At times, Pelosi herself has seemed oblivious or unaware of these efforts, as when she was photographed wearing sunglasses and a rust-colored coat on her way out of a contentious meeting with the president at the White House, an outfit which some interpreted, to my mind inexplicably, as a symbol of her power. At other times, Pelosi seems to be consciously manipulating these efforts to make her a symbol, as at the end of Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address. When the speech concluded, Pelosi angled her hands toward Trump to clap softly and with a patronizing expression, a gesture that seemed deliberately designed to be turned into a gif and shared online, which it was.
Related: House still 'likely' to subpoena John Bolton after Trump impeachment trial – live news
The periodic effort to make Pelosi’s image into a symbol of anti-Trump sentiment received another installment on Tuesday night, at the end of another State of the Union address, when the speaker of the House ripped up her copy of Trump’s speech as soon as the president had finished giving it, in full view of the cameras. The gesture, again, appeared calculated and deliberate: an expression of anger and contempt at the president, and exasperation at the failure of Congress, and the Senate in particular, to check his abuses. The clip was shared widely, and within minutes it had been integrated seamlessly into the vernacular of social media. #NancyTheRipper started trending on Twitter. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared the clip captioned with a wide-eyes emoji.
But attempts to render Pelosi into a symbol seemed doomed to fail, or at least not to endure. She is less taciturn and more difficult to project one’s own values on to than perhaps the most heavily cathected figure in national politics, supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is less comfortable being seen as evil and omnipotent than her counterpart in the Senate, Mitch McConnell. Pelosi has a palpable anger that emerges in moments of frustration, but she is not as frankly or openly resentful as post-2016 Hillary Clinton, and at times seems weary of being seen as angry. She recently chewed out a reporter for asking if she “hates” the president, insisting that she doesn’t hate anybody. She does not possess the rigorously chipper commitment to an alternative vision of the country that is espoused by Elizabeth Warren. Pelosi’s talents have always lain in the less glamorous, less public side of politics: she is good at whipping up votes in her caucus and she is good at disciplining dissenters. She is good at offering incentives and punishments to get Democratic members of Congress to do what she wants them to do. She is not good at being a figurehead. She is not good at being all things to all people.
In part, Pelosi has failed to make herself a symbol because she means wildly different things to different sectors of the country. To the right, she is hated as a flaming and committed liberal, the embodiment of the culture war battles that preoccupy so much of the Republican base. She represents San Francisco, and in the minds of Republican voters she conjures images that to them seem darkly menacing: men holding hands or the rainbow flag over the Castro, the Venus symbol or maybe gender neutral bathrooms. To them, Nancy Pelosi represents a wholehearted commitment to the thing they fear their country is becoming, the thing they find ominous and threatening.
To rip up the speech on television was a bit of theatricality, a ploy designed to get attention. It also worked
To the left, Pelosi is entirely the opposite. She represents San Francisco, the tech hub that in the minds of Democratic voters conjures images that are unsettling: the sterile offices of internet giants, the unfathomable amounts of money, the unknown capacities and dark motivations of billionaires with questionable loyalties and ambivalent commitments to civic freedom. To those further to the left, Pelosi also represents a Democratic establishment committed more to process than to principle, and which has failed to respond to the moral crisis of the Trump era. To them, she represents centrism, and cowardice. In part, this is because Pelosi has been responding to a set of asymmetrical incentives that require Democrats to cater to the center while Republicans can indulge the worst impulses of their base: this is why, for instance, Pelosi dragged her heels for months before finally initiating impeachment proceedings against Trump.
But the reality that she has reasons for catering to centrists at the expense of the left does not diminish the sense that she is not much interested in leftist principles. In the aftermath of the 2018 midterms, she expressed a needless and ill-advised antagonism toward the younger, further-left women in her new caucus called “the Squad”, a moment of pettiness that mercifully seems to have subsided. She has become a symbol of the Democratic party that so much of its base is disgusted with: one more interested in preserving its own power than in seeking out justice. Indeed, it’s not always clear that she knows the difference.
And so perhaps it’s inevitable that any attempt on Pelosi’s part to make herself into an anti-Trump symbol will be met with dismissal and ridicule. In part, this is gendered: it is dangerous for a woman to attempt to dictate her own symbolism in a culture in which any woman’s image is already symbolically laden. Perhaps it is most dangerous of all for Pelosi, a figure who is understood wildly differently on the right and left but whom people from across the political spectrum can come together to hate.
Related: Pete Buttigieg looks to build on Iowa success as contest hits New Hampshire
After she ripped Trump’s speech up on TV, the right called her crazy. “#PelosiMeltdown,” was trending. The president took, as he does, to Twitter. The tactic was standard: to depict complaining women as insane, unreasonable. But misogyny emerged from the left, too. Some mocked her gesture with sarcastic declarations of “Slay, kween” – a phrase taken from black vernacular and used by mostly white men on the left to imply that expressions of defiance from women are contemptible due to their supposedly fraudulent feminist righteousness. It seemed there was no corner of the political discourse where open contempt by a woman for Trump would be met with anything besides eye-rolling ridicule.
It’s true that it is not clear whether Pelosi will bring the passion of her speech-ripping moment into congressional investigations of the administration’s corruption – something she could do, and so far mostly has not. And it’s true that she expressed in that moment, before the cameras, a passion that often seems absent from her moral stances.
But it is also true that the anger and contempt for the president that Pelosi displayed when she ripped up his speech on national television are appropriate reactions to Trump, appropriate reactions to a Senate which will acquit him on Wednesday in an impeachment trial that was rigged in his favor. It’s true, too, that many Americans, and particularly women, feel disgust and hatred for Trump, and that they saw that disgust and hatred reflected in Pelosi’s gesture. To rip up the speech on television was a bit of theatricality, sure – a ploy designed to get attention. It also worked. The day after Trump made a long speech full of misinformation that tried to make a case for his re-election, no one is talking about him. Instead we are talking about the speaker of the House. That, too, is a skill, one that Pelosi seems to be honing.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
