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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
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President Donald Trump’s resounding victory over former Vice President Kamala Harris likely signals the beginning of the end of the influence of aged leaders like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi, “who for decades reigned as kingmaker in her party, facing the prospect of having her status as a power player in the party unceremoniously stripped away on the back of” Harris’ defeat.
The shocking decline occurs just months after her key involvement in efforts to push President Joe Biden out of the race.
As the blame game intensifies in the wake of Harris’s defeat, Pelosi finds herself at the center of the accusations.
“The influences of a [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer or a Pelosi or a movie star or an Obama deciding to anoint somebody—those guys are gone,” business investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary said this week.
“In four years, they won’t have that kind of influence,” he added in a thinly veiled reference to actor George Clooney, who famously and publicly called on Biden to end his reelection following a disastrous debate with Trump.
Some Republicans are directly attributing the significant Democratic losses—from the top of the ticket to the Senate flipping red and the House still in contention—specifically to Pelosi.
“You’ve got to blame Nancy Pelosi,” former GOP House Speaker and fellow Californian Kevin McCarthy said during a Fox News interview this week.
Most people agree that Pelosi played a significant role in Biden’s July decision to drop out of the race just months before Election Day.
McCarthy also stated that the effort constituted an attack on the democratic process, as primary voters across the country cast their ballots for Biden, only to see Harris emerge as their nominee.
“Joe Biden never should have ran for office. I knew it when I sat with him. There was something wrong with him,” McCarthy said.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fed into the irrational fear-mongering many in her Democratic Party have been using to denounce President-elect Donald Trump’s massive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, making irrational claims about entering a period of “fascism” and “authoritarianism.”
The New York Democrat posted a message to followers on her social media accounts when it became apparent that Trump would win Tuesday evening.
“I’m not here to sugarcoat what we all are about to collectively experience, but I think that what we can do to prepare is build community. We do not have a choice. We don’t have a choice. Our choice is to build. Our choice is to continue to fight. Our choice is to win. Our choice is to have each other,” she said.
“We are about to enter a political period that will have consequences for the rest of our lives. We cannot give up. We now find ourselves in a time in history that has precedent, and we find ourselves, I believe, in a time where there are, let’s say, peers in history of mass movements of people that mobilize to protect one another in times of fascism and authoritarianism. And this is the era that we are poised to enter,” she claimed without any evidence,” she added.
“Donald Trump has talked about turning the military on U.S. citizens that he deems his domestic political enemies. Authoritarians and people that he affiliates closely with and strongmen abroad in regimes like that, it is not uncommon to jail political dissidents or legislative opponents. This is the world that we very realistically may be entering. And the way that we do everything that we can to prevent this is by building a very strong social fabric and social infrastructure,” she said.