Liberal icon Nancy Pelosi has made a career out of attacking President Donald Trump, but a newly resurfaced video from nearly 30 years ago is sending shockwaves through political circles—and exposing the staggering hypocrisy of one of Washington’s most entrenched elites.
In the clip, filmed in July 1996, a much younger then-Representative Pelosi delivers a fiery speech on the House floor railing against China’s predatory trade practices, blasting the exact kind of trade imbalance that President Trump is now tackling head-on with his aggressive new tariffs.
Fast forward to April 2025, and Pelosi—now a liberal senator from California—is once again making headlines, but this time for slamming Trump’s efforts to put America first. Her sharp criticism of the President’s latest tariff package, aimed at correcting decades of unfair trade with China, stands in stark contrast to her past rhetoric. The contradiction is drawing intense backlash, especially as more Americans grow weary of globalist policies that have shipped jobs overseas and gutted our manufacturing base.
The newly resurfaced clip is damning. “How far does China have to go?” Pelosi asked her colleagues in 1996. “How much more repression, how big a trade deficit and loss of jobs to the American worker… before members of this House of Representatives will say, ‘I will not endorse the status quo’?”
Sound familiar? It’s the same argument President Trump has been making for years—and the exact reason he recently announced a dramatic 34% hike in tariffs on Chinese imports during his April 2 “Liberation Day” address. Trump laid out the cold, hard facts: while American goods face tariffs as high as 67% in China, Chinese products flood into U.S. markets with minimal barriers. The result? Job losses, economic dependency, and a hollowed-out working class.
Pelosi didn’t stop at general concerns back in ’96—she specifically called out the exact trade imbalance Trump is now fighting. “The average U.S. tariff on Chinese goods… is 2%, whereas the average tariff on U.S. goods going into China is 35%. Is that reciprocal?” she thundered.
She even admitted that the trade relationship was a “job loser,” handing China “at least 10 million jobs” and directly harming American workers. In other words, Pelosi’s old speech could have come straight from a Trump rally.
But today’s Pelosi? She’s singing a very different tune.
Within hours of Trump’s tariff announcement, Pelosi took to X (formerly Twitter) to smear the plan. “Donald Trump’s reckless tariffs will cause chaos in our economy, raise prices for consumers, and hurt hardworking American families,” she wrote, calling it “the largest tax hike on the American people in history.”
Then, in a confusing turn that raised questions about whether she even realized she’d already posted, Pelosi followed up with an almost identical post just days later. “His inept trade war is crashing the economy,” she warned—despite the fact that many economists have noted strong manufacturing rebounds and job growth in key industries since Trump’s announcement.
It’s a classic case of political opportunism. When it suits the globalist agenda, Pelosi is happy to feign concern for American jobs. But the moment a leader like Trump takes bold action to level the playing field and put America first, she reverts to the same tired scare tactics that the D.C. elite have used for decades to sell out the working class.
The real question is this: If Nancy Pelosi believed in fair trade in 1996, why does she oppose it now? Maybe it’s not about the tariffs—it’s about who’s leading the charge. And in this case, it’s Donald J. Trump, fighting once again for the American people.
