Nancy Pelosi is a high-profile U.S. politician who has been no stranger to controversy. Born in Baltimore in 1940, Pelosi began her political career as an intern having completed a bachelors in political science at Trinity University Washington. From there, she gradually worked her way up through the ranks of the Democratic Party, earning an election to the House of Representatives in 1987 for California’s Eighth District.
Pelosi is perhaps best known for being the first female leader of the House of Representatives and the first woman to hold the position of Speaker of the House. During her time in Congress, she has been an outspoken defender of human rights and the environment. She has also campaigned vociferously for improved housing for disadvantaged groups and was a key figure in the pushing for President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010.
In her long career, Nancy Pelosi has courted controversy on many occasions with things that she has said. She was also an outspoken critic of American involvement in the Iraq War, once saying: “The president [George W. Bush] led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence; he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history; and he failed to build a true international coalition.”
Pelosi is also a fierce opponent of the presidency of Donald Trump. In 2017, she claimed that the Democrats had “won every fight” it had had with the Republican Party that year. While this claim may have been a slight exaggeration, with hindsight, Pelosi’s assessment seems to have indicated a general swing in fortune in favor of the Democrats that came to bear when the party took control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.
