House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Friday that she was “personally delighted” by the apparent results of the 2020 presidential election, and claimed that President Donald Trump seeks to “paralyze government” in the waning days of his presidency.
“I wish we weren’t wearing masks so we could see how exciting it is to come before you today with Joe Biden having the tremendous mandate that he has,” Pelosi said. “And that pretty soon the hyphen will be gone from vice president to president-elect Joe Biden [sic]. It’s a happy day for our country because Joe Biden is a unifier. Because he is determined to bring people together. Because he respects all points of view, and as he has said, ‘I ran as a Democrat. I’ll govern as president for all of the people, whether they voted for me or not.'”
“So I am so officially pleased with the outcome that is imminent and also personally delighted because of the quality and caliber of leadership that Joe Biden will provide,” Pelosi continued. “This morning it is clear that the Biden-Harris ticket will win the White House. His election is historic, propelled by the biggest vote ever in the history of our country, 73.8 million-and-counting Americans. The most votes ever received by any presidential ticket in history.”
Pelosi went on to say that “President-elect Biden has a strong mandate to lead and he’ll have a strong Democratic House with him and many Democrats in the Senate. This has been a life or death fight for the fate of our democracy, as he says, ‘the soul of our country.’ We did not win every battle in the House, but we did win the war.”
Pelosi also claimed that President Donald Trump will be “up to mischief” during the last months of his administration and called him a domestic enemy.
“So many people have said to me, and perhaps some of you along the way, ‘What damage do you think that Trump will do between losing the election and the inauguration of Joe Biden?’ Maybe you didn’t phrase it quite that way, but that’s how I heard it. And we knew that he would be up to mischief, separate and apart from trying to destroy the credibility of our elections, which we criticize other nations for doing. And now with all enemies, foreign and domestic, making an assault on our elections. Well, we have one domestic, but apart from that on the policy side, which is why we are here,” she said.
“This lame duck Trump rule seeks to paralyze government and generations of life-saving protections and try to burden the new president elected by the American people right out of the gate,” Pelosi later added, citing “a radical new rule that would make regulations from the FDA and other health and human services agency automatically sunset, unless the agencies undertake a cumbersome time consuming process to renew them.”
As of Friday afternoon, five states — Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Alaska — have yet to be called, though Biden leads in the Electoral College vote 264-214. The leads Trump had in Pennsylvania and Georgia earlier in the morning disappeared as the ballot count continued.
WATCH:
Tune in as I speak with reporters this morning in Washington. https://t.co/P20e3SZxiy
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) November 6, 2020
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