When Nancy Pelosi called Joe Biden to warn him about the bad polls that indicated he would not be able to win the next election against Donald Trump, the president insisted he had data that said otherwise.
The 84-year-old former chairwoman did something few others would have dared: She demanded to speak to the advisers who had told him this and suggested that they were not telling the president the truth.
"Put Donilon on the phone," she said, referring to Biden's longtime adviser and strategist Mike Donilon. "Show me the polls."
To openly challenge the president and imply that his advisers lied to him would be bold coming from anyone. Coming from Mrs. Pelosi, it must have been particularly painful.
Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Biden have known each other for a long time.
She was also a devout Catholic (Biden always called her "my Catholic sister") and led him to victory after victory in the House until her second term as speaker expired in 2022. Though they have clashed in the past, he has made it known that he considered her the best House speaker ever.
And they share the same instinctive institutional political instincts and fears about what Trump might do to American democracy.
Mrs. Pelosi was Trump's most implacable foe during his 2016-2020 presidency.
But she also has a reputation as the Democrats' toughest, smartest, most strategic thinker. And she seems to have concluded that to stop Trump this time, she must first stop Mr. Biden.
Mrs Pelosi has avoided directly calling on him to resign. But now it is believed she is using the phone behind the scenes to increase pressure on Biden to step aside.
Her strategy appears to have three parts: first, private calls to the president; second, when these are ignored, leaks of those calls to the press (the appearance of her comments about Mr. Donilon in the New York Times is a classic example); and third, rare but decisive public statements designed to keep the insurrection alive.
Fanning the flames of discord
Since his disastrous debate performance, Mr. Biden has seemingly doused the embers of discord. It is Ms. Pelosi who has fanned them both times.
By July 10, Biden's vows that only the "Lord Almighty" could convince him to step aside had quelled most public criticism from elected Democrats, who were unwilling to stick their heads above the parapet and jeopardize their careers by angering the White House.
But then Mrs. Pelosi appeared on Biden's favorite morning show to deliver a very clear message.
"It is up to the president to decide whether he will run. We all encourage him to make that decision because time is running out," she said.
That would have been scrupulously neutral if Mr. Biden had not already made that decision. The flames of rebellion immediately flared up again.
The race took a shocking turn on July 13 when Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania. Democrats said they believed the ensuing commotion would end the campaign to oust Biden, which was already nearly exhausted.
But Mrs. Pelosi again took up the cause, calling Biden shortly afterward to say she saw little chance of him being re-elected.
With Biden still stubborn several days later, Representatives Adam Schiff of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland, two close allies of Mrs. Pelosi, called on Biden to resign. Schiff was described by one Democrat as Mrs. Pelosi's "drone."
On Thursday, former President Barack Obama announced through intermediaries that he too has doubts about Biden's election victory.
But the president remained stubborn. When he responded Friday that he was "looking forward" to returning to the campaign trail next week, more of Ms. Pelosi's allies called on him to resign.
Every time it seems like Biden has found a moment of calm, the pressure on him is ramped up again with strategic defections.
Record of successfully executing major decisions
The President should be concerned that Mrs. Pelosi has a reputation for making important decisions right.
To Republicans, she is the epitome of the California champagne liberal (literally: she and her husband own a vineyard in the Napa Valley that supplies grapes to several wineries). The couple lives in a beautiful place in Presidio Heights, one of San Francisco's most exclusive districts. She has an estimated net worth of more than $100 million, making her one of the wealthiest members of Congress.
But she has proven time and again that she has political insight and can accurately assess voters.
She was one of the few Democrats who opposed the invasion of Iraq.
Mrs. Pelosi has long resisted calls to impeach Trump, saying she was not convinced it would succeed and that if he survived, he would emerge stronger.
She could still remember how Bill Clinton emerged from his impeachment trial with enormous popularity.
And Richard Nixon, she pointed out, was only forced out because even Republicans could see he had to go when the Watergate tapes surfaced. There has been no comparable shift in sentiment about Trump in the modern Republican Party, so expecting success would be naive.
'Most effective speaker of all time'
Her superpower as a politician is that she can assess the pros and cons right up until the last vote and knows what to offer representatives to get legislation through, even with the narrowest margins.
That skill was critical to the House of Representatives' approval of Obama's flagship legislation, the Affordable Care Act, in March 2010 by a narrow 219-212 vote.
She pulled the same trick on Mr. Biden in 2021 when she pushed through his infrastructure bill despite Democrats holding only a three-seat majority. The bill ultimately passed by a 228-206 margin, with 16 Republicans supporting it.
Bruce Melman, a Republican lobbyist, called her "the most effective speaker of all time" after that vote.
Much of that work has infuriated the alt-right. On January 6, 2021, Capitol rioters came looking for her office. Among those detained afterward was a woman who said, "We were looking for Nancy to shoot her in the fucking head, but we didn't find her."
Mrs Pelosi withdrew from the political front lines shortly after her husband was attacked in their home by a Canadian conspiracy theorist.
But it appears she is making one last attempt to stop Trump: by ensuring Biden is not the Democratic nominee on November 5.
While the president has openly said she needs more rest, Mrs. Pelosi has been tireless in pursuing her goals.
"People get tired," she said of the art of negotiation. "You can't get tired. You can never get tired."
It is now Mr. Biden who is the victim of that stubbornness.
