President Trump is a master at nicknames, even better than George W. Bush (although the 43rd president nicknaming senior adviser Karl Rove “Turd Blossom” was pretty inspired).
Trump calls Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) “Pocahontas” for her false claims that’s she’s Native American. He calls Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who falsely claimed to have fought in the Vietnam War, “Da Nang Dick.” Jeb Bush was, of course, “Low Energy Jeb.” Then there’s “Crooked Hillary,” “Lyin’ Leakin’ James Comey,” “Jeff Flakey,” “Head Clown Chuck Schumer,” and “Mad Maxine Waters.”
On Thursday, Trump added a new one to the list for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“I call her ‘Nervous Nancy,'” Trump said to Fox News as he prepared to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion in France. “Nancy Pelosi is a disaster, OK? She’s a disaster. Let her do what she wants, you know what? I think they’re in big trouble,” Trump said.
And they indeed are. Top Democrats last week were spouting off about impeachment, especially after former special counsel Robert Mueller held a press conference and essentially said the ball was in their court. Mueller failed to find sufficient evidence to proceed against Trump and his campaign in the counsel’s probe into allegations of collusion with Russia, but opened the door for congressional action.
Trump also slapped Mueller, who he said “made such a fool out of himself” last week in remarks to the media.
“What people don’t report is the letter he had to do to straighten out his testimony because his testimony was wrong,” Trump said. “‘Nancy Pelosi doesn’t talk about it.”
Pelosi, meanwhile, said “I don’t want to see him impeached, I want to see him in prison,” according to Politico.
But Democrats have lately been moving away from impeachment. Pelosi has not back such a move, and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said this week that House Democrats are mulling censure instead of impeachment.
“The advantage of that is it can be done with the House. We can hold the president accountable and say that his actions are unethical, and he’s engaged in blatant misconduct and that there can be some accountability for future presidents. It’s a permanent mark on the president’s record.”
Khanna added that, “it would send a warning to future administrations that Congress won’t sit idle in the face of presidential malfeasance.”
Former Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) said, “The advantage is it perhaps becomes a strategic substitute to an impeachment process that could backfire electorally. The disadvantage is that it could negatively impair the investigations that House Democrats are conducting,” according to RedState.
Ashley Etienne, a Pelosi spokeswoman, told Politico that the Speaker and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler “had a productive meeting about the state of play with the Mueller report.”
“They agreed to keep all options on the table and continue to move forward with an aggressive hearing and legislative strategy, as early as next week, to address the president’s corruption and abuses of power uncovered in the report,” Etienne said.
