Pelosi has one man that lives rent free in her head. No, it isn’t her husband.
And now Nancy Pelosi’s Trump derangement syndrome is on display for all to see.
A Commencement Address With One Topic: Donald Trump
Nancy Pelosi delivered the commencement address at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, on Saturday — and in a development that surprised precisely no one who has attended a college graduation in the past decade, she used the occasion primarily to attack the sitting president.
Pelosi, who is retiring from Congress at the end of this term after nearly four decades in office, told the graduating class that “America has always been a long-standing promise and an ongoing project,” and warned that “decades of peace and prosperity made it tempting to believe that our democracy would be self-sustaining.” She urged the graduates to be a “force for justice” and to serve as “patriots of our time” — language that, to her credit, could theoretically apply across party lines, though the framing and the targets left no ambiguity about what she meant.
Legal commentator Jonathan Turley, who has himself delivered commencement addresses and explicitly commits to not using them for political purposes, noted the obvious: Pelosi “slammed the GOP and Trump while” speaking to what was supposed to be a celebration of graduates’ achievements. He observed that this year’s commencement speaker lineup is, once again, “overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal,” with schools from coast to coast inviting figures ranging from Pelosi to Jamie Raskin to Democratic primary candidates. Conservative students and their families, Turley noted, are expected to sit through these partisan performances as a condition of attending their own graduations.
The Pelosi address follows a pattern she has established throughout this year — from her appearance at George Washington University, where she called Trump a “master distractor” and declared it an “absolute fact” that Democrats will win the House, to her remarks at SXSW, where Vox’s Astead Herndon allowed her to describe Trump as a “vile creature” while framing the impending midterms as a battle for democracy itself.
The Message, The Medium, And The Audience That Wasn’t Consulted
There is something worth examining in the choice to deliver this particular message at this particular venue. Notre Dame de Namur is a small Catholic university in the San Francisco Bay Area — as geographically and politically friendly a room as exists for this brand of Democratic politics. The audience was not being persuaded; they were being affirmed.
What Pelosi did not do, in any of her public appearances this spring, is grapple seriously with why the Democratic Party finds itself in the position it is in. The party lost the White House, lost the Senate, and nearly lost the House in 2024. Its polling favorability has hit historic lows. The coalition that once seemed durable has frayed badly along lines of age, race, and class — particularly among working-class voters who no longer feel the party speaks for them.
Pelosi’s answer to all of this — at George Washington, at SXSW, at Notre Dame de Namur — is the same: the problem is Trump, the answer is saving democracy, and the path forward is winning by 30 or 40 House seats in districts where the party has been losing ground for a decade. What she doesn’t say is why those voters left, or what the party plans to offer them. It’s a remarkable omission from someone who has spent nearly forty years as one of the most effective political operators in American history.
A Retirement Tour With A Familiar Script
Pelosi urged the graduates to “save our democracy” — a phrase she and her colleagues have deployed so relentlessly that its emotional impact has been considerably diluted among the very voters the party needs to win back. She is entitled to her views and to express them. But graduates at a commencement ceremony, whatever their politics, are there to mark an achievement in their own lives — not to receive a primer on the Democratic Party’s midterm strategy.
The practice of using college commencements as partisan rallies has become so normalized on the left that it no longer registers as unusual. Turley’s observation that liberal figures are selected “almost exclusively” for these events, while conservative families are expected to sit through them in silence, is a fair one — and the pattern says something about the ideological insularity of American higher education that goes well beyond any one commencement speech. For a party that claims to speak for all Americans, the inability to perceive that insularity — let alone address it — is a significant part of why its national coalition keeps contracting.
