‘Where Is Your Calculator Now?: MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend Scorches Nancy Pelosi for ‘Helping Orchestrate the Very Public Demise’ of President Joe Biden
MSNBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend vilified former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for helping organize what she called “the very public demise” of President Joe Biden.
During a segment on MSNBC’s “The Weekend,” Sanders-Townsend and several other panelists discussed the fallout from the 2024 presidential race and what ultimately contributed to Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss. In that discussion, Sanders-Townsend challenged Pelosi for not running interference sooner in the presidential race.
After Biden’s rough debate performance in June, in which he was seen making several verbal gaffes and struggling to form intelligible answers, questions began to surface about his mental fitness and overall capability to handle another four years in office. Pelosi went on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on July 10, offering a mostly neutral response about whether the president should withdraw from the race.
“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” Pelosi said on “Morning Joe.” “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short. 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.”
Yet, in a post-election interview with The New York Times, Pelosi stressed that Biden should have backed out sooner and made way for Vice President Kamala Harris to begin her campaign earlier in the year.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi told he Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro last week. “Kamala, I think, still would not have won, but she may have been stronger, having taken her case to the public sooner and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened … If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”
Sanders-Townsend, who once served as a senior adviser in the White House for Harris, stated that Pelosi should have acted on those exact sentiments sooner.
In a panel conversation with Democratic National Convention Rules Committee Co-Chair Leah Daughtry about what Democrats could have done better in this election cycle, Sanders-Townsend said:
“Well, let me just be clear, I’m gonna say it if she ain’t gonna say it — Nancy Pelosi, everybody talks about how the Speaker Emerita, you know, she’s so strategic, she can count, she did all of that when she was the Speaker in Congress, but my question is: where is your calculator now?” Sanders-Townsend said, as reported by Mediaite. “’Cause Democrats about to lose the daggone House. And for her to sit on this podcast, and we played the sound of my podcast about, ‘Oh, I don’t deal with presidential politics — ‘”
Watch Sanders-Townsend’s comments below at the 09:00 mark.
The MSNBC host added that Pelosi “played in presidential politics this cycle, and she helped orchestrate the very public demise of the president.”
“I hope, I surely hope, that Democrats eke out the majority in the House,” Sanders-Townsend continued. “But if they don’t, I think the people that had so much to say about the president and the vice president earlier this summer, I think those people need to take a back seat. They obviously fleeced the vice president’s campaign and made a whole bunch of money!”
While the election results for the presidency and the U.S. Senate have been determined, the votes for the House of Representatives race were still being counted at the time of the MSNBC show. As of Wednesday morning, the results show that 216 Republican and 207 Democratic representatives have been voted into the House, according to The Associated Press. The Republicans are just two seats shy of taking the 218 seats needed to win the majority. The GOP has already won the majority in the Senate.