Nancy Pelosi Proposes Adding Joe Biden to Mount Rushmore

On Sunday, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) suggested that President Joe Biden had earned a place on Mount Rushmore for choosing to drop out of the 2024 presidential election, a comment which garnered her significant pushback and ridicule on social media.

Pelosi was being interviewed by CBS journalist Lesley Stahl when she was asked about reports claiming that she had been at the forefront of efforts to remove Biden from the race, following his June debate against former President Donald Trump, which was widely viewed as a disaster for his reelection chances.

Pelosi refused to state the details of her conversations with Biden when asked what she had said to him to get him to step aside, but when Stahl pushed further, noting that she was viewed as the leader of a “pressure campaign” to get Biden out, Pelosi pushed back.

“I wasn’t the leader of any pressure- let me say the things I didn’t do. I didn’t call one person. I did not call one person, I can always say to him, I never called anybody,” she said. “I had confidence that the president would make the proper choice for our country, whatever that would be, and I said that, whatever that is, we’ll go with.”

Pelosi was frequently reported to be at the head of a silent campaign within Congressional Democrats in the wake of the debate, however, she always publicly supported Biden.

“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” Pelosi told MSNBC at the time. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short. The, I think, overwhelming support of the caucus, it’s not for me to say. I’m not the head of the caucus anymore, but he’s beloved, he is respected, and people want him to make that decision. Not me.”

She also denied seeing any decline in Biden, but says she told him that he needed “a more aggressive campaign.

It was then that she made the claim that Biden was “a Mount Rushmore president.”

“He was in a good place to make whatever decision, top of his game, such a consequential president of the United States, a Mount Rushmore kind of president of the United States,” Pelosi said, prompting disbelief from Stahl.

“Are you really saying that he belongs up there? On Mount Rushmore? Lincoln and Joe Biden.” Stahl asked incredulously.

“Well you’ve got Teddy Roosevelt up there,” Pelosi responded. “And he’s wonderful, I don’t say take him down, but you could add Biden.”