Nancy Pelosi predicts Democrats will win the House in 2026, reflects on her career and the January 6 attack

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is confident that Democrats will take back the House in the 2026 midterm elections and that Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will wield the Speaker’s gavel.

“Hakeem Jeffries is ready, he is eloquent, he has the respect of 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 will be Hakeem Jeffries?” Carl asked.

“Nothing,” Pelosi said.

The California Democrat, who resigned from the party’s House leadership in November 2022, announced in November that she would not seek re-election in 2026. With about a year left in her term, the longtime Democratic leader and first female Speaker of the House spoke with Karl in Washington about her career, her relationship with President Donald Trump, and offered advice for Democrats moving forward.

Pelosi said that “when” Democrats take back the House, they need to take back Congress’s powers, which she says the current Republican-led Congress has essentially handed over to Trump.

“Right now, Republicans in Congress have overruled Congress. They are only doing what the president insists on doing. This will end,” Pelosi said. “This will be over as soon as we get the hammer.”

But on the question of whether a third impeachment of Trump should proceed, Pelosi said it depends on the president’s actions.

“I’ve told people that the only person who was responsible for impeaching Donald Trump was Donald Trump,” she told Karl. “It’s not something you decide to do — it’s a violation of the Constitution that he’s engaging in.” “So this isn’t something you say, ‘Oh, we’re going to impeach him.’ But you can get subpoena power for information from these government agencies that are not providing 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 about that,” she said.

Pelosi was one of only 23 women in the House when she won, and she went on to make history as the first woman to be chosen as party whip, the first woman to be Minority Leader, and, in 2007, the first woman to serve as speaker of the House, making her third in line for the presidency.

“Actually, I never intended to run for leadership. That’s what’s so funny about this because I loved my committees and my appropriations and my intelligence,” Pelosi told ABC News. “But we lost in ’94, ’96, ’98, and then we’ll get to 2000. I said, you know, being a player [former] Party Chairman, I know how to win elections. And I’m just tired of losing.”

As speaker, Pelosi helped sponsor landmark legislation under President Barack Obama, including the Affordable Care Act, for which Pelosi said she hopes people remember her.

“I’m very proud of the Affordable Care Act. And I think it’s been — it’s made a huge difference in terms of what working families need for their health and their financial health. And we’re going to continue to fight this fight,” she said. “The health care bill was a way to not only meet health needs, but also meet the financial needs of families. So, if I were to remember one thing, it would be the Affordable Care Act.”

But her controversial relationship with Trump will be a defining part of her legacy as well. That includes widely circulated footage of her tearing up his final State of the Union address during his first term — something Pelosi said she did not plan.

“I wasn’t going to go to the speech to tear it up. But I just — the first part of it, I tore out a page because it was false. Then the next page, then the next page. And I thought it was a statement of lies the whole time, so I might as well tear up the whole speech,” Pelosi said. “But I had no intention of doing that. I thought my staff would die.”

Pelosi said the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters seeking to prevent the formal certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory was “absolutely” the darkest day of her presidency.

Her daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, was with Pelosi on Capitol Hill that day, photographing her as she was evacuated to a secure facility as she and the rest of Congress’ leaders spent hours trying to return to the Capitol to finish the proceedings. The shocking footage was featured in the 2022 HBO documentary “Pelosi in the House.”

“What’s going through your head? I mean we see the images, we see the pain, we see what’s happening in the Capitol — what’s going through your head?” Carl Pelosi asked.

“Well, it was clear that the president of the United States incited the insurrection. We begged him to send in 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.”

“What is also deplorable stems from the fact that this president is trying to rewrite history, and he has a different narrative about what happened that day,” Pelosi added.

She said: “What happened that day was terrible. It was an assault on the Capitol, a symbol of democracy to the world. It was an assault on Congress, a day in which we respected our responsibility under the Constitution to certify the Electoral College, which elected President, as an assault on the Constitution of the United States.” “It was terrible.”

In the HBO documentary, Pelosi says Trump must “pay a price” for the Capitol attack.

“Did he pay for that?” Carl asked.

“No, he’s the president of the United States now. But history will do that, and he will pay a price in history.”

After Trump won the 2024 presidential election, the two federal cases against Trump were dismissed, including charges related to his actions leading up to and on the day of the Capitol attack. Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to investigate Trump, filed a motion to dismiss the charges due to the Justice Department’s presidential immunity policy. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all federal charges against him.

With one year left in Congress, Pelosi said her priority is to return the gavel to House Democrats.

“I’m busy, focused on winning the House for Democrats, making Hakeem Jeffries speaker, and moving us to a better place,” she said.

She added: “The American people are generally good people. I would like to see us return to a place where governance and politics understand that.” “So the next step for me is all I’m going to do, in addition to winning the House for Democrats, is we try to move the discussion to a place that believes in the goodness of the American people, and gives them hope.”