Trump The Choir Boy, Part 2: Nancy Pelosi's Feelings Were Hurt

Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer

By Robert Wenzel

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Chuck Schumer and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer visited President Trump at the White House on Wednesday ostensibly to talk about Syria.

Trump tried to talk policy. He mentioned the letter that he sent to the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But Pelosi was there to toss a stink bomb. She told the president that the House had just voted 354-60 in a favor of a resolution condemning his decision to pull troops from northern Syria.

Schumer gave the stink bomb extra lift. "The fact that someone no less than General Mattis has said that ISIS has been enhanced, that the danger of ISIS is so much greater, worries all of us,” he told the president.

Trump hurled the stink bomb back at Pelosi and told her she was a third rate politician and a Communist sympathizer.

The Democratic trio then walked out in what appeared to have possibly been a planned revolt.

Outside the three were ready for the cameras.

“He was insulting, particularly to the speaker. She kept her cool completely. But he called her a third rate politician. He said that there are communists involved and you guys might like that,” Schumer said of the woman who just told the president that the United States House under her leadership had just condemned the actions of the president which did nothing but remove American troops from harm's way.

“This was not a dialogue. It was sort of a diatribe, a nasty diatribe not focused on the facts, particularly the fact of how to curtail ISIS, a terrorist organization that aims to hurt the United States,” he said.

"What we witnessed on the part of the president was a meltdown, sad to say,” Pelosi said.

But such a reaction takes a very limited view of presidential history.

It was the presidency of the Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson that makes Trump look like a choir boy and with this as context, you have to wonder what all the huffing and puffing of The Democratic Three is all about.

The National Post reports on stories in several LBJ biographies:

So, exactly how repulsive was Johnson? He was horrid enough that the way he said things was almost as bad as what he said. Anyone who came into contact with him was at risk of encountering a spectacle of burping, farting, nose-picking and crotch-scratching. Congressman Richard Bolling, who witnessed some of this, told Merle Miller: “I wouldn’t say Johnson was vulgar — he was barnyard.” Worse, Johnson had no sense of personal space and treated conversation as a creepy hands-on affair. Miller learned from Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee that, “You really felt as if a St. Bernard had licked your face for an hour, had pawed you all over.”...

A truly unlucky few even got to see Johnson relieve himself. Reporter Sam Schaffer toured Johnson’s Texan ranch and was stunned when Johnson urinated right in front of him, in the open. Arthur Goldschmidt, a friend and United Nations official, was in the Oval Office with Johnson when the latter suddenly headed for the washroom, “took a crap, then shaved and showered, all the while continuing his conversation as though what he was doing was the most normal thing in the world.”..

UPI reporter Bill Theis was told by him that subsequent White House economic policies were “the worst thing that’s happened to this country since pantyhose ruined finger-fucking.”..

Regardless of gender, Johnson’s treatment of subordinates could be appalling. In one of her very rare confirmations of Johnson’s behaviour, Katherine Graham says she saw Johnson apoplectically yelling at aide Jack Valenti over some mistake. She describes the tirade as “callous and inhuman.” A senior adviser, James H. Rowe Jr., reportedly quit after witnessing a similar incident. Johnson’s own vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, informed Miller that Johnson’s need to control people caused him to say of certain individuals that, “I’ve got his pecker in my pocket.”

Seymour M. Hersh writes in his memoir, Reporter:

Poor Pelosi, only a third-rate politician wouldn't know how lucky she, herself, has it.

Also see: President Trump is a Choir Boy Compared to Other Recent Presidents

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.comand Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bankand most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.