Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is back home in California this week after suffering a fall in “very high” heels that required her to have hip replacement surgery during her trip to Europe.
“Speaker Pelosi is well on the mend and continues to work,” her spokesperson Ian Krager told the New York Post.
Wearing heels, Pelosi slipped down marble steps while touring a World War II war site in Luxembourg on Friday. She then posed for a photo right away.
The Democrat was nearly down the Grand Ducal Palace staircase when she suffered a terrible fall, according to Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“I was right next to her. She likes to wear high heels — very high. She was on one of her last steps on this marble staircase that didn’t have a railing and she lost her footing and fell to the ground. I immediately helped pick her up. And we took a picture of that. You can see me holding her up by her hand and then very soon thereafter, a vehicle showed up and took her to the hospital,” McCaul told reporters after the incident.
In the delegation photo honoring the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, Pelosi appeared to be having difficulty standing while grasping McCaul’s hand.
According to the former speaker’s spokeswoman, she had hip surgery at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at Landstuhl Army Base in Germany on Saturday following the fall.
“Earlier this morning, Speaker Emerita Pelosi underwent a successful hip replacement and is well on the mend,” spokesperson Ian Krager said.
“She’s 84, but when I talked to her on the phone, she had a lot of energy. Very spunky. She wants to get out of there, she wants to fly back home to the United States. Overall, she’s in good spirits,” McCaul said Tuesday.
Pelosi, a Democrat, still represents San Francisco in Congress. Although she stepped down from her senior leadership position in 2023, she remains one of the most influential figures within her party. It’s not clear when she will be cleared to return to the U.S. following her surgery.
She was widely seen as a key influence in persuading President Joe Biden to withdraw from his re-election bid earlier this year.
The overwhelming win of President-elect Donald Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris probably marks the beginning of the end of the power of senior politicians like Pelosi in Democratic politics.
Pelosi, the woman “who for decades reigned as kingmaker in her party, facing the prospect of having her status as a power player in the party unceremoniously stripped away on the back of” the loss of Harris, the UK’s DailyMail.com reported this month.
The startling drop comes only months after she played a significant role in attempts to disqualify President Joe Biden.
The 84-year-old Pelosi was seen getting into a furious argument with fellow Democratic insider and former DNC chief Donna Brazile at Harris’ concession address at Howard University in November.
The outlet reported that the former Speaker is leading the charges as the blame game intensifies after the vice president’s significant defeat.
“The influences of a [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer or a Pelosi or a movie star or an Obama deciding to anoint somebody – those guys are gone,” business investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary said last week.
“In four years, they won’t have that kind of influence,” he added in a thinly veiled reference to actor George Clooney, who famously and publicly called on Biden to end his reelection following a disastrous debate with Trump.
Some Republicans are directly attributing the significant Democratic losses—from the top of the ticket to the Senate flipping red and the House still in contention—specifically to Pelosi.
“You’ve got to blame Nancy Pelosi,” former GOP House Speaker and fellow Californian Kevin McCarthy said during a Fox News interview earlier this month.
Pelosi has been widely recognized as a key figure in Biden’s July decision to withdraw from the race just months before Election Day.
McCarthy also stated that the effort constituted an attack on the democratic process, as primary voters across the country cast their ballots for Biden, only to see Harris emerge as their nominee.
“Joe Biden never should have run for office. I knew it when I sat with him. There was something wrong with him,” McCarthy said.
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