Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi is confident that Democrats will re-take the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms and that Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will hold the speaker’s gavel.
“Hakeem Jeffries is ready, he’s eloquent, he’s respected by the members, he is a unifier,” Pelosi told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl during a new interview that aired Sunday on “This Week.”
“You have no doubt it’ll be Hakeem Jeffries?” Karl asked.
“None,” Pelosi said.
The California Democrat, who stepped down from the party’s House leadership in November 2022, announced in November that she would not run for reelection in 2026. With about year left in her term, the longtime Democratic leader and first female speaker of the House spoke to Karl in Washington about her career, her relationship with President Donald Trump, and offered advice for Democrats going forward.
Jonathan Karl sits down with Nancy Pelosi in Washington D.C., on Dec. 18, 2025, for an interview on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” airing Dec. 21, 2025.
Al Drago/ABC
Pelosi said that “when” Democrats win back the House, they need to reclaim Congress’ powers, which she argues the current Republican-led Congress has essentially handed over to Trump.
“Right now, the Republicans in the Congress have abolished the Congress. They just do what the president insists that they do. That will be over,” Pelosi said. “That ends as soon as we have the gavel.”
But on the question of whether to pursue a third impeachment of Trump, Pelosi said it depends on the president’s actions.
“I’ve said to people, the one person who was responsible for the impeachments of Donald Trump is Donald Trump. It’s not something you decide to do – it’s what violation of the Constitution he engages in,” she told Karl. “So that’s not something you say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna impeach him.’ But you can have the power of subpoena to get information from these agencies of government who are not supplying any information now.”
When she first ran for Congress in 1987, Pelosi’s campaign slogan was “Nancy Pelosi: A voice that will be heard.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it? Isn’t it funny that I would become speaker of the House and, of course, my voice would be heard, but I never thought of that,” she reflected.
One of only 23 women in the House when she won, Pelosi went on to make history as the first woman chosen to be a party’s whip, the first woman to be minority leader and, in 2007, the first woman to be speaker of the House, making her third in line to the presidency.
“I actually never intended to run for leadership. That’s what’s so funny about this because I got to – I loved my committees, appropriations, intelligence,” Pelosi told ABC News. “But we lost in ’94, ’96, ’98, and then it’s coming up to 2000. I said, you know, being a [former] party chair, I know how to win elections. And I’m just tired of losing.”
As speaker, Pelosi helped shepherd historic legislation under President Barack Obama, including the Affordable Care Act, for which Pelosi said she hopes she’ll be remembered.
Members of the House of Representatives take photographs with their phones as President Barack Obama signs the Affordable Health Care for America Act during a ceremony with fellow Democrats in the East Room of the White House March 23, 2010 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“I am very proud of the Affordable Care Act. I think that it was – it just made a big change in terms of what working families need for their health and their financial health. We’ll continue to have that fight,” she said. “The health care bill was a way of not only meeting health needs, but financial needs of families. So if I were to be remembered for one thing, it would be the Affordable Care Act.”
But her contentious relationship with Trump will be a defining part of her legacy, too. That includes the viral footage of her tearing up his final State of the Union address during his first term – something Pelosi said she hadn’t planned.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tears up her advanced copy of President Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union address before members of Congress in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol Feb. 4, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
The Washington Post via Getty Im
“I didn’t intend to go to the speech to tear it up. But I just – the first part of it, I tore a page because it was lying. And then the next page, and then the next page. And I thought it was a manifesto of lies all throughout, so I better just tear up the whole speech,” Pelosi said. “But I had no intention of doing it. I thought my staff was going to die.”
Pelosi said that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters seeking to block formal certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory was “absolutely” the darkest day of her speakership.
Her daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, was with Pelosi on Capitol Hill that day, filming her as she was evacuated to a secure facility where she and the rest of congressional leadership then spent hours trying to return to the Capitol to finish the proceedings. The harrowing footage was featured in the 2022 HBO documentary, “Pelosi in the House.”
“What’s going through your head? I mean, we see the pictures, we see the anguish, we see what’s happening to the Capitol – what’s going through your head?” Karl asked Pelosi.
ABC News’ Jonathan Karl sits down with Nancy Pelosi in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025 for an interview on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” airing Sunday, Dec. 27, 2025.
Al Drago/ABC
“Well, it was clear that the president of the United States had incited an insurrection. And we begged him to send the National Guard,” Pelosi said. “Even Mitch McConnell was on the phone with us saying, get them here right away. But they never sent them.”
“The sorrow of it also springs from the fact that this president is trying to rewrite history, have a different narrative of what happened that day,” Pelosi added.
“What happened that day was horrible. It was an assault on the Capitol, the symbol of democracy to the world. It was an assault on the Congress, the day we honored our responsibility under the Constitution to certify the Electoral College, who was elected president, as an assault on the Constitution of the United States,” she said. “It was horrible.”
In the HBO documentary, Pelosi says Trump must “pay a price” for the Capitol attack.
“Has he paid a price for it?” Karl asked.
“No, he’s president of the United States now. But history will, he’ll pay a price in history.”
After Trump won the presidential election in 2024, the two federal cases against Trump, including the charges related to his actions leading up to and on the day of the Capitol attack, were dismissed. Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to investigate Trump, filed a motion to dismiss the charges because of the Justice Department’s presidential immunity policy. Trump pleaded not guilty to all federal charges levied against him.
With a year left in Congress, Pelosi said her priority is returning the gavel to House Democrats.
“I’m busy, and focused on winning the House for the Democrats, making Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker of the House, and to take us to a better place,” she said.
“By and large, the American people are good people. And I would like to see us take us back to a place where governance and politics understand that,” she added. “So what’s next for me is whatever I do in addition to winning the House for the Democrats is that we try to take the discussion to a place that believes in the goodness of the American people, that gives them hope.”