‘You’re the Best,’ Trump Once Told Pelosi. Can They Deal Again?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/us/politics/trump-nancy-pelosi-congress.html

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WASHINGTON — The message came in a distant January, at the dawn of a power transfer in Washington — dictated, like so much would be in due time, by something Donald J. Trump saw in the news.

“Nancy — you’re the best,” Mr. Trump wrote to Nancy Pelosi at the beginning of 2007, scribbling on an article about her swearing-in as House speaker after Democrats seized control of the chamber. “Congrats. Donald.”

Mr. Trump had a small hand in her elevation. He had made a $20,000 donation to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

A decade later, long after the two first made a gilded acquaintance at Trump Tower in Manhattan, they have emerged from the administration’s first 100 days as partisan foes with divergent policy aims but one common political goal: proving their deal-making clout in a city where each has a history of being underestimated.

As Mr. Trump strains to demonstrate progress on his main campaign pledges, he has slogged through his early months with few Sherpas on Capitol Hill, pursuing halting partnerships with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Speaker Paul D. Ryan that have yielded few legislative successes.

Ms. Pelosi — whose hard line on subsidy payments for insurers under the Affordable Care Act helped extract an apparent concession from the White House during recent budget negotiations — will not help Mr. Trump dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature law. She will not shepherd his tax plan, which she has called a “wish list for billionaires.”

But with an ideologically shape-shifting president — and a former speaker seeking relevance in a moment when the title of House minority leader often confers little — she seems to retain at least a measure of hope that the man she met in his previous political life might re-emerge.

“I could be helpful to him,” Ms. Pelosi offered without prompting during an interview last week in her office at the Capitol, saying that she knew how to address some Republicans’ concerns over the Affordable Care Act and would gladly help if they stopped pushing for a full repeal. “We’re not here to obstruct him.”

Political realities make her a highly unlikely partner in the near term. Ms. Pelosi remains an avatar of San Francisco liberalism and progressive excess to Mr. Trump’s base.

Mr. Trump remains the most potent proponent of a Republican health bill that Ms. Pelosi recently appraised as “doo-doo on their shoe, tattooed on their forehead.”

Yet for Ms. Pelosi, recent negotiations over government funding have delivered the first meaningful bipartisan exchanges of this Congress — arriving at a moment when some Democrats have chafed at her continued grip on power, expressing a desire to elevate new voices. (A newly agreed upon budget deal, announced on Sunday night, requires Democratic votes in both chambers to pass.)

There have been occasional gestures toward collaboration. In a phone conversation the day after the election, Ms. Pelosi suggested that Mr. Trump meet with a bipartisan congressional caucus on women’s issues. Mr. Trump said his daughter Ivanka should go instead, handing her the phone. A person close to Ms. Trump said she would be happy to attend.

Mr. Trump has in many ways made Ms. Pelosi’s job easier by declining to bother much with Democrats so far, binding the minority caucus in opposition. She has called Mr. Trump “one of the best organizers the Democratic Party has ever had” — a boon of sorts but also a testament, critics say, to an absence of inspiring affirmative leadership from top Democrats in Washington.

The president has elevated other Democrats with characteristic name-calling: Senator Chuck Schumer of New York (“head clown”), Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont (“crazy Bernie”), Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts (“Pocahontas”).

Ms. Pelosi has avoided this fate, mostly. “When he lost the health care bill, he called us losers,” she said in the interview. “All right, way to go!”

It is not clear if this more gentle treatment reflects Mr. Trump’s assessment of Ms. Pelosi’s importance or a signal of respect for a woman he used to describe privately as a tenacious negotiator, the kind he championed at times in his business life.

“He said she was a very tough leader — he respected her,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide to Mr. Trump. “He thought that she got a lot over on Bush those last couple years.”

One White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the Trump administration’s tenuous ties with congressional Democrats, dismissed the notion of any current relationship with Ms. Pelosi, calling it “nonexistent” and suggesting that she was a minority-party leader searching for purpose.

But she has, at times, made herself heard.

It was Ms. Pelosi who interjected, during Mr. Trump’s meeting with congressional leaders days after taking office, to correct his claim that millions of unauthorized immigrants had cost him the popular vote in November.

And it was Ms. Pelosi, according to people familiar with the negotiations, who led the charge in recent days to earn assurances from the Trump administration that it would continue making subsidy payments to insurers under the Affordable Care Act. The White House had threatened to withhold the payments as leverage.

Ms. Pelosi played down any past relationship with Mr. Trump when he was a donor to Democrats, and her office said she had no record of Mr. Trump’s note from 2007. She recalled that former Representative Charles B. Rangel, the recently retired 23-term Harlem congressman, had helped arrange her initial meeting with Mr. Trump.

“I’m a likable guy, and he liked everybody,” Mr. Rangel said in an interview.

The feeling is no longer mutual. “The one good thing that Donald Trump does for our great nation,” Mr. Rangel added, “is that he shatters the myth of white supremacy once and for all.”

Ms. Pelosi’s public assessments have been nearly as blistering. But she has seemed disinclined to take Mr. Trump’s appeal lightly.

During their phone call the day after the election, smarting from Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss, Ms. Pelosi posed a question to the president-elect, noting his upsets in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

“What did you know?” she asked him.

“I saw the hostility,” Mr. Trump replied, according to Ms. Pelosi.

She praised Mrs. Clinton for her concession speech, telling Mr. Trump it “must have been very hard for her to do.” “It would have been hard for me, too,” she recalled him saying.

Holding forth in her office, Ms. Pelosi brandished an instinct for Trumpian adjectives and workday habits. She took stock of his budget (“pathetic”), his praise of the far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen (“I mean, really?”) and his tax proposal (also “pathetic”).

She described Sean Spicer, Mr. Trump’s press secretary, as “that poor slob” from television, when she could not recall his name.

She interrupted herself at one point to turn to the four TV sets in the room, which play cable news and C-Span on a loop, remarking on the lighting of an interview with Mr. Schumer on CNN.

In private, Ms. Pelosi has appeared to discourage members from taking needless swings at Mr. Trump, invoking another presidential obsession, his poll numbers, and informing colleagues that they compare unfavorably to every president’s dating to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“We have a very clear responsibility to take our shots very carefully,” she said during a whip meeting last week, according to an aide in the room.

Mr. Trump’s shaky standing, she added, supplies “a real opportunity for us.”