Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said former president Donald Trump looked like "a scared puppy" as he arrived at a D.C. courthouse for his arraignment on charges related to his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Pelosi, appearing Friday on MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports," said Trump lacked the "bravado or confidence" that she said is usually standard to the former president's persona.
“He knows the truth that he lost the election, and now he’s got to face the music," Pelosi, who still represents a California district in Congress, said.
Pelosi also characterized some Republicans’ support for the former president amid his legal woes as "really sad," calling it proof that the party is dangerously attached to Trump's brand.
"They have to change the subject and they have nothing to offer the American people in terms of jobs and the rest," she said, adding that the Republican party "shouldn’t be a cult to somebody frivolous with the law and his puppets."
Pelosi has long been at loggerheads with Trump. In 2019, she and other Democratic leaders walked out of a White House meeting with Trump after he had what Pelosi described as a “meltdown,” and at the end of Trump’s third State of the Union address in 2020, Pelosi famously ripped up a copy of his address.
Tensions between the two leaders peaked in the days after the Jan.6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. During the attack, Pelosi said she had hoped then-President Trump would come to the capitol complex so that she could “punch him out,” according to documentary footage that was later made public.
The lawmaker, however, declined to say whether Trump's trial should be televised.
"I would leave that up to the Justice Department," she said Friday. "I don’t give them advice."
