Lara Trump: 'You do have to admire Nancy Pelosi'
Lara Trump, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, on Tuesday offered praise for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who earlier in the day oversaw a historic step toward trying to remove her father-in-law from office.
The complimentary remarks from Lara Trump, who is married to the president’s son Eric, came at POLITICO’s Women Rule Summit, after she was challenged to name a female Democratic lawmaker she admires.
“Well, I think you do have to admire Nancy Pelosi. She's been in the game for a long time,” Lara Trump said.
“She has tenacity. She has — certainly is willing to put down and throw down whenever she needs to,” she added. “Whether or not I agree with it, that's a different story. But you certainly can admire somebody for spending their life, you know, here in Washington, D.C., and trying to serve the country.”
Asked at a separate Women Rule event later Tuesday whether she was surprised by Lara Trump's assessment of her, Pelosi said: “Nothing surprises me. Surprise is not a word in my vocabulary. It's over there with ‘hate.’”
The speaker added: “Who knows what people say? Who knows what they mean?”
Lara Trump has emerged as a popular surrogate for the president on the campaign trail, leading efforts to recruit female voters in his bid for a second term and attempting to galvanize the suburban women who have turned away from the Republican Party in large numbers.
Just two hours before Lara Trump's on-stage appearance at the forum in Washington, Pelosi stood alongside her top committee chairmen on Capitol Hill as they unveiled two articles of impeachment charging the president with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
The president has leveled increasingly bitter attacks at Pelosi as the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry has steadily advanced, calling on her to testify in a Senate trial and accusing her of having a “nervous fit” at a news conference last Thursday.
Their relationship has not always been so acrimonious. Trump largely spared the speaker from frequent criticism as recently as earlier this year, with some of the president’s allies interpreting his lack of aggression as a sign of genuine respect for Pelosi, the highest-ranking female elected official in American political history.
During a phone call with Pelosi following Trump’s election in 2016, the president-elect hailed her as “terrific” and assessed that she was “somebody that gets things done, better than anybody.”
Lara Trump on Tuesday also addressed speculation that she might mount a campaign for the House seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Peter King, acknowledging that while she does not live in the New York Republican's congressional district, “you can't rule anything out” and “you never know what could happen.”
Still, she insisted she is “solely dedicated right now” to the president's re-election fight and is “currently not running” for Congress. “I think we'll all need a good decompression from politics after this because it's been a lot, but I could never say never,” she said.
