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Color me slightly surprised. Rumors of Nancy Pelosi's retirement have floated for months, and intensified over the last week, likely as she quietly began disconnecting from the process of campaigning for a 21st term in the House. At 85, Pelosi was at an age where either retirement or the Senate were the obvious choices, rather than another two years in the minority caucus.
Today, Pelosi made her retirement official, but that means she will leave Washington while her bete noire still presides over Washington DC:
Thank you, San Francisco. pic.twitter.com/OP8ubeFzR6
— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) November 6, 2025
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has wielded enormous power in Congress and in the Democratic Party for decades, announced on Thursday that she will not seek reelection and will retire from Congress after her term ends in early 2027.
Pelosi, 85, made her decision public in a video released Thursday morning that begins as a letter to the people of the San Francisco area, whom she has represented in the House since she was first elected in 1987.
(A quick note: That is not a typo from CBS. Pelosi won her seat in a 1987 special election necessitated by the death of Sala Burton from colon cancer, less than four years after Burton herself won the seat in a special election called after the death of her husband Philip Burton from an aortic aneurysm.)
Pelosi had made it clear enough of late that she was about to hang up her spurs. Rather than address the question in the moment, Pelosi pushed it off until after the elections this week. She didn't waste much time dragging out the suspense:
Amid growing speculation about her plans, Pelosi, 85 years old, had told reporters that she wouldn’t be making any announcement until after Election Day on Tuesday, when voters went to the polls to decide the fate of Proposition 50, which would redraw California’s congressional districts. The measure, which Pelosi supported, passed overwhelmingly.
What did one have to do with the other? California's proposition had nothing to do with Congress. Her retirement wouldn't have had any impact at all on its outcome. Perhaps Pelosi just didn't want to have her retirement trumped by election news.
Speaking of trumped, however, the real surprise is her exit while the object of her political and personal hatred remains re-ascendant. The WSJ notes her vituperative approach to Donald Trump:
For years, she was a central figure in Democrats’ opposition to Trump, including in some public clashes. After a contentious October 2019 White House meeting to discuss Syria policy, Trump tweeted a photo of Pelosi standing and pointing at him, saying the speaker had an “unhinged meltdown.” Her supporters embraced the moment, and her campaign store started selling mugs with a drawing of the image. Later, she ripped up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech in 2020.
Under Pelosi’s leadership, Democrats impeached Trump twice. The first impeachment centered on a phone call in which the president pressed Ukraine’s leader to investigate Biden. The second impeachment, which had some Republican support in both the House and the Senate, was in response to Trump’s actions related to the Capitol riot. The Senate acquitted him in both cases.
Retiring now means retreating from the field after Trump has pretty much conquered it. Pelosi thought she had personally banished Orange Man Bad from politics in 2020, only to watch as Trump returned to not just win a second non-consecutive term, but to absolutely humiliate her hand-picked nominee after Joe Biden had to withdraw in July 2024.
I suspect this is the real reason that Pelosi is deciding to withdraw herself. Her rush to anoint Kamala Harris blew up in her face, and now fingers are pointing in her direction after the debacle of the 2024 election. Both the Biden and Obama camps have publicly laid the blame at her feet in recent weeks, and the scrutiny around the scummy and corrupt cover-up of Biden's cognitive incapacity and the Harris switcheroo will only intensify as more of the conspirators and conspiracy-adjacent sell books, or act as sources to other authors.
Pelosi isn't retiring. She's quitting while the quitting's good. The Protection Racket Media will sing its hosannas to Pelosi for 40 years of getting rich in The Swamp, but her final chapter will prove to be the most revealing of her character and judgment.
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