House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is opening up about her threat to punch then-President Donald Trump if he actually attempted to enter the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
And she said there was a reason they never had that confrontation.
“He wouldn’t have had to courage to come to the Hill,” she said on MSNBC on Tuesday. “He’s all talk.”
Behind-the-scenes footage from Jan. 6 released this week showed Pelosi receiving word that the Secret Service had nixed Trump’s plan to join the crowd and march to the Capitol. But, they said, that could change.
“I hope he comes. I’m going to punch him out,” Pelosi said in the video. “I’ve been waiting for this. For trespassing on the Capitol grounds. I’m going to punch him out. And I’m going to go to jail and I’m going to be happy.”
Trump on Tuesday called her a “despicable person” in response.
In her new comments, Pelosi said she didn’t like to talk about Trump “because it’s really a tragedy for our country.” But, she was concerned about the big picture.
“Our democracy is at stake when you define democracy as integrity of the vote,” she said. “They want to suppress the vote. They’ve been doing that for a long time. They want to nullify the results of an election. They’re even proposing that after an election, if they don’t like the results, they will change the rules that would have governed that election retroactively. So you have to recognize that they are undermining our democracy.”
See more of her interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell below: