Nancy Pelosi has 'mastered the art' of dealing with Trump's 'toddler meltdowns': Conservative columnist

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi continues to draw plaudits for her skillful handling of the showdown over the federal shutdown that President Donald Trump instigated by refusing to sign any funding bill that didn't including billions for the wall he promised voters Mexico would pay to build.

In a new Washington Post column, conservative writer Jennifer Rubin mocks the idea that Democrats would ever want another leader in the House given Pelosi's ability to handle Trump.

"To say Speaker Nancy Pelosi has mastered the art of dealing with President Trump would be a gross understatement. She fact-checked him in the Oval Office on live-TV, passed spending bills to re-open the government and thereby reinforced Trump’s responsibility for the shutdown," Rubin writes. "You wonder why in the world Democrats ever considered replacing her. She knows she has power, she willingly and skillfully deploys it and, as she has said, as a mother of 5 kids, knows how to handle a toddler’s meltdown."

As a grandmother, Pelosi understood what Trump craved and has been able to read the tea leaves on Trump's plummeting popularity with his demographic base as the shutdown drags on.

"Unlike Trump, many don’t view the wall as a dire issue but 58 percent do see the shutdown as a 'very serious' matter," she writes. "We don’t know how this will end, but should the shutdown create a serious safety hazard or take a big chunk out of the economy, there is little doubt who’s going to get the blame. And Pelosi knows it."

Read the full column here.