When former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thanked Joe Biden in her 2024 DNC speech, the candidate she more or less forced out of the race, giving one of the briefest speeches of the star-studded evening. It wasn’t splashy, it wasn’t rousing, and it wasn’t even totally necessary. The point was perhaps to publicly extol Biden after—reportedly, if not admittedly—shanking him. The speech was a flex of tightly controlled unity rather than pomp. Pelosi doesn’t wield her power in boisterous public displays or in long-winded speeches, like certain former presidents. She speaks softly, and she carries the biggest stick. And her goal now is simple: to make sure that Donald Trump never steps foot in the White House again.

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Four decades ago, she was a 41-year-old Democrat whom The New York Times had just called “probably the least known of the key women at the Democratic National Convention,” when she was preparing to host delegates from her home state of Maryland at her well-appointed home in San Francisco.

“Basically, I’m an organizer,” Pelosi told the Times. “I had five children in six years, so this is not so difficult.”

As Democrats gathered for the 2024 Democratic National Convention, she was widely considered the most powerful woman in politics – with the exception of the newly minted Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. Pelosi is now, and has always been, more orchestrator than organizer. She helped facilitate President Biden’s exit from the race, which was earthshaking to some and a long time coming to others. The last time a president decided not to seek a second term was more than 55 years ago, when Lyndon Baines Johnson shocked the country – and most of his staff – with the announcement that he wouldn’t run again. After Pelosi made it clear that she was not exactly begging Biden to stay, his days were apparently numbered. “She is as brilliant as Steve Jobs; she’s as brilliant as Jeff Bezos,” says Stacy Kerr, who was a senior adviser to Pelosi from 2002 to 2011. “Her domain is politics, and she’s created a new benchmark.”

Even as chair of the host committee for the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Pelosi was already exercising “the art of power,” the phrase that became the title of her recently released book. (The title shades The Art of the Deal, by her nemesis, former President Donald Trump.) The committee raised $3 million to help finance that convention, and Pelosi oversaw 10,000 volunteers. Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in a landslide victory that year, but the convention itself was a triumph. She and Diane Feinstein, who was mayor of San Francisco at the time, worked to convince wary Democrats that the city was safe amid the AIDS epidemic, which was just beginning to get attention. It was a launching point for each of their groundbreaking careers.

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John Burton, a former California congressman and chair of the California Democratic Party, has known Pelosi since the 1970s. He told me recently that he didn’t know that Pelosi had politics in her blood, even though she hailed from a famous Democratic family in Maryland. When his sister-in-law, Representative Sala Burton, who was dying of cancer, told him that she wanted Pelosi to take over her seat in Congress, he said he remembered thinking, Is she bullshitting me or what? “Obviously,” he quipped, “she was not.”

“People have been underestimating her for a long, long time and they do so at their peril,” says Burton.

She’s always had a backbone made of steel. In a New York Times feature from July 1, 1984, a couple of weeks before the convention began, Pelosi addressed criticism of San Francisco’s welcome to the queer community. “Who are these gays?” Pelosi asked rhetorically. “They’re somebody’s child, brother, sister, friend, that’s who. They’re not from another planet. The fact that they’re here means that the rest of the country is not as hospitable to them as we are.… This is a city of equal rights and all God’s children, and one of the reasons San Francisco is the way it is is because other places out there don’t practice what they preach.” But she learned a painful lesson when she lost a bid to become DNC chair in the mid-1980s. “I learned a lot,” she told Jerry Rafshoon, who had been a top White House aide to Jimmy Carter. “I learned that men will lie to you.”

Pelosi no longer has to wait for anyone’s approval. The “Speaker emerita,” an honorific bestowed upon her by House Democratic Caucus members, seems to be getting what she wants, from Biden’s ouster to Trump’s ire to Harris’s nomination to her decision to name Tim Walz as her running mate.

When during a July 10 interview on Morning Joe Pelosi was asked about Biden’s reluctance to give up the race, her answer was considered by many to be the final straw that forced him out. “It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run,” she said evenly for the cameras. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short…. He’s beloved, he’s respected, and people want him to make that decision.” She added, “I want him to do whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is. Whatever he decides, we go with.”

Drew Hammill, Pelosi’s former deputy chief of staff who worked for her for nearly two decades, thought it was classic Pelosi. “I think the Morning Joe interview was not a nudge. I think there’s a difference between a firm nudge and a grandmother asking after a decision has been made, ‘Have you made the best decision?’ That’s the level of subtlety we’re at here…. The brilliance of her power is the art of subtlety, and that doesn’t always come through in sound bites.”

In the days leading up to Biden dropping out, Pelosi told colleagues in the California delegation that she wanted an “open process” to determine the party’s nominee. In a July 10 Capitol Hill meeting of the delegation, which is made up of 40 members, Pelosi, along with others, expressed worries that it not look like a coronation of Harris. But there was also concern that bypassing the first Black woman as a presidential nominee would be a major mistake. Pelosi quickly issued a statement that said, “My enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris for President is official, personal and political.”

She’s not behaving any differently, aides tell me, than she ever has. Her political maneuvering is simply more obvious because the stakes of the election are so high. Her reputation as an iron fist in a Gucci glove precedes her.

“The past few weeks have absolutely been vintage Pelosi and a precise and accurate reflection of her leadership style,” Steve Israel, the former New York congressman who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015, told me. Israel represented a Republican-leaning district, and he remembers struggling with a vote that allowed Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy to expire. When he went to Pelosi and said he didn’t think he could get reelected if he voted the way she wanted him to, she replied coolly, “That’s what leadership is about, my dear. Your job is to go home and explain it to them. If you can’t explain it, then what are you doing here?”

After she appointed Israel as DCCC chair, he saw firsthand that she could be flexible if she really believed that a single vote in a particular district was going to cost any member an election. Sometimes, Israel said, she even encouraged a member to vote against her. “She knew districts almost as well as the members themselves, but if she thought you were casting a vote because you didn’t want to be inconvenienced, which was what my situation was, then her attitude was, If you can’t manage it, why the hell are you in Congress?”

She was downright giddy about Harris’s selection of Walz. Soon after the news came out, she called him “a heartland of America Democrat” in a television interview. Having a House veteran on the ticket is a dream come true for the Speaker emerita – because House reps have to run for reelection every two years, they know how to fight. The folksy former high school history teacher and football coach is a favorite of hers. She knew him from his dozen years on the Hill, where he became the top Democrat on the Veterans Affairs Committee.

While representing Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, Walz demonstrated Pelosi’s most precious commodity – being “operational.” If you were “operational” – a word she loves – then she’s a fan. In the House, Walz recruited candidates in rural districts, and showed a knack for advising Democratic leadership on tough districts that were still winnable, and presented ways to expand the party’s reach.

“When she comes to you, she’s not coming to you with gut feelings. She has data,” says John Lawrence, who served as her chief of staff from 2005 to 2012 and wrote a book about his former boss: Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership, 2005-2010. “She wouldn’t strong-arm the president to do anything…her style is to gather and synthesize information better than most people. And then you have to step into the cold shower. We weren’t going to get the public option in the health care bill, for instance, and that’s the cold hard reality.”

In a series of interviews to promote The Art of Power, which details her rise through the ranks to become the first female Speaker of the House, she deftly sidestepped questions of whether she had pushed out Biden. On CBS News Sunday Morning, Lesley Stahl asked her what she did. “I didn’t call one person. I did not call one person, I could always say to him, I never called anybody.” Social media blew up with people saying that she had the cold composure of a mobster.

CNN’s Dana Bash pushed back on Pelosi when the former Speaker insisted she didn’t put covert pressure on the campaign. Bash said it was easy to believe, given that Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, and Zoe Lofgren are among Pelosi’s closest allies in Congress, and they all respectfully issued statements that Biden should step aside. “I have hundreds of allies in the Congress of the United States…. No, I had nothing to do with that. If you ask them, it’s almost insulting to them because they’re formidable figures in the Congress of the United States. They make their own judgment and their own statement.”

She said she has not spoken to Biden since he left the race. Whether their relationship has survived the unprecedented intraparty tumult, she said, “You’d have to ask him, but I hope so.”

The only thing that seems to surprise people who know her well is that brief flash of vulnerability when she told a small group of reporters on August 7 that she was devastated by the effect Biden’s stepping aside has had on their four-decade friendship. They first met in 1983.

“I love him so much. We pray together. I cry over it, I lose sleep over it and the rest, but that’s what’s evolved.”

Her superpower has always been her ability to separate personal emotion from political strategy. Emotion was what prevented a lot of Democrats from making the hard call to suggest that Biden leave the race. She said that she wanted “a better campaign” and she worried that if things continued it would be placing “rose petals” on the path for Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

It’s always been about the math. Bring the votes. Do the work. You don’t get a win because of a cult of personality. Pelosi always has the receipts. She has a strategy and a plan.

Back in 2019 during a private meeting of the Democratic Caucus, she reportedly scolded some progressive members who were airing their grievances in public. “So, again, you got a complaint? You come and talk to me about it,” she said. “But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just okay.” She was going to get things done, which involves compromise, vilifying moderate Democrats was not the answer. “Some of you are here to make a beautiful pâté,” she told them, “but we’re making sausage most of the time.”She could retire if she wanted to. Her husband has made a fortune as an investor, and, in addition to the house in San Francisco, they have a vineyard in Napa Valley. But she will stay to make sure that Donald Trump never becomes president again, she says. Besides, she’s having too much fun to leave now.

In a conversation with David Remnick for The New Yorker, she said that Trump was a threat to America’s children, citing gun violence and pollution. She concluded, as only she can, by saying, “You take a punch, but you have to be willing to throw a punch. For the children.”