Pelosi Defends Punching Trump Comment, Would've Been 'Happy to Do So'

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell in an interview Tuesday that she does not regret comments she made on the day of the Capitol riot about wanting to "punch" out former President Donald Trump,

As rioters ransacked her office at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, the San Francisco Democrat told an aide she wished she "hoped" he would visit the congressional building after Trump's aides suggested he wanted to come to the Capitol during the peak of the violence.

"I want to punch him out," Pelosi said at the time per footage that aired on CNN last week. "This is my moment. I've been waiting for this. For trespassing on the Capitol grounds. I want to punch him out, and I'm going to go to jail, and I'm going to be happy."

More than a year later after the Capitol riot, the House Speaker is not taking back her remarks about Trump.

Asked by Mitchell whether she actually would have "punched" Trump as she had threatened, Pelosi stood by what she said, adding that she "would've been happy to do so for our country."

"He wouldn't have had the courage to come to the Hill," the Speaker added. "He's all talk."

Pelosi was a consistent foil to Trump during his administration as she oversaw her party's majority, making headlines from ripping up a copy of his State of the Union address after he'd finished it to walking out of a Cabinet meeting after a "meltdown" he'd had in 2019.

But Pelosi's focus in the MSNBC interview was more on her party's current battleground of resistance as the former president, by proxy, remains on the ballot in the upcoming midterm elections.

While the fate of a subpoena issued against Trump to testify on the events of January 6, 2021, likely rests in the balance pending the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections, Pelosi hinted that Republican-led legislation inspired by Trumpian efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election could very well be on the docket if the party managed to take control of Congress this election cycle.

"Our democracy is at stake, when you define democracy as integrity of the vote," said Pelosi. "They want to suppress the vote. They've been doing that for a long time. They want to nullify the result of an election. They're even proposing that after an election, if they don't like the results, they will change the rules that would have governed that election retroactively."

"If people think they can be casual about that," she added, "they just don't realize how serious the Republicans are about undermining our democracy."

Newsweek has contacted Trump's team for comment.