Dissecting the Psyche of the Right: Alexandra Pelosi Plunges Into Trump Country

NEW YORK — Alexandra Pelosi’s schedule over a recent 24 hours read like a liberal elite Mad Lib.

On a Sunday night Pelosi, a documentary filmmaker, was at the 92 Street Y to hear her mother, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in conversation with Paul Krugman, the economist and New York Times columnist. The next afternoon, she attended a fundraising lunch for Democrats, at a hotel on the East Side with Hillary Clinton. Then she popped over to the HBO headquarters at Bryant Park, where she has an office in a power corridor next to Ronan Farrow’s and across the hall from Sarah Jessica Parker’s. Later, she hurried down to New York University to hear her mother speak on a panel about women in power.

Maybe it’s just what you’d expect from the daughter of the House Democratic leader. But the younger Pelosi’s cable-news-viewing habits may surprise you.

“If I hear the term ‘blue wave’ one more time, I am going to personally walk up to MSNBC and punch someone in the face,” she joked, between sips of coffee in the HBO cafe overlooking the New York Public Library. “Yes, there’s a blue wave coming out of Manhattan and Los Angeles, where people are sitting home knitting their vagina hats. There’s no blue wave in Alabama. There’s no blue wave in Ohio.”

“MSNBC is barred from my household,” Pelosi, 48, said. “CNN is barred from my household.” She thinks all Manhattanites ought to be tuning into Fox News nightly. It’s not that she’s a Republican. It’s just, she said, that “We don’t want our kids to be pod people.”

This year she brought her two sons, who are 10 and 11, on an odyssey across what Sarah Palin once called “real America.” Together they went to Trump rallies (“Far more interesting than anything you’ll hear at a Manhattan dinner party”), to the fabled and still-under-construction border wall, and into the homes of Trump voters. The result is “Outside the Bubble,” as in Beltway, Pelosi’s 12th film for HBO, to air on Monday.

It’s not just another episode of the learned cosmopolitan descending from the ivory tower to produce anthropological discourses on that strange creature known as the Trump voter and make it back to the big city in time for a martini. Though she is Democratic royalty, Pelosi has spent much of her career dissecting, with compassion, the psyche of the political right in America. “Everything she does, she immerses herself in doing,” said Sheila Nevins, the grande dame of documentary who, when she was president of HBO Documentary Films, was Pelosi’s champion. “She swallows her subjects whole and spews them out the way they should be spewed.” For her part, Pelosi refers to Nevins as her “TV mom.”

Pelosi’s first film, released in 2002, was “Journeys With George,” shot during her time as NBC’s embed on George W. Bush’s campaign plane. Later, she parsed the beliefs of evangelicals in “Friends of God” (2007) and chronicled the rise of the Tea Party with “Right America: Feeling Wronged” (2009).

She spent some of the Obama years as a roving correspondent for Bill Maher, gauging the national mood from Mississippi to midtown Manhattan.

“She knows how to get people to reveal themselves,” Maher said in a phone interview. “She’s sympathetic, genuinely. She’s not fooling people, as so many in the media do — act like they’re your friend and then it comes out and they’re like, ‘oh, this jerk was just pretending to be friendly so he could make fun of me.'” (He used a stronger word than jerk.)

“I was indoctrinated into a Democratic Party cult from a very early age,” Pelosi said. “But I know that’s not the only America and we need to understand the other side.”

She seems like one of the few trying. President Donald Trump now refers to Democratic voters simply as “mobs.” Hillary Clinton said in an interview with CNN this month that “you cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for.” Even Michael Moore, the blue-collar troubadour who foresaw Trump’s path to victory, portrayed the president as a Hitler-like manqué in his most recent film, “Fahrenheit 11/9.”

If bridging today’s partisan chasm seems an Augean endeavor, Pelosi believes cable news is to blame. “There’s too much profit being made right now on the divide,” she said. “How many people in those cable news studios ever really go spend the night in America, not just in the Four Seasons in wherever Trump is at the moment, but I mean really go to somebody’s house, have dinner and talk to them?”

Still, she remains a kind of bipartisan Wilkins Micawber, the optimistic clerk in “David Copperfield.” “I don’t think it’s as bad as people are saying,” Pelosi said. “I just don’t know that we’re as filled with hate as cable news leads us to believe. It’s hard to hate up close.”

The film, which examines the issues on which Americans are most divided (immigration and abortion, for starters), is testament to her sunniness. In one remarkable exchange, a fanatical supporter of the president tells Pelosi, without realizing exactly to whom he is speaking, that his ilk refer derisively to the far left as “Nancy Pelosi’s grandchildren.”

But, after the documentarian produces the actual grandchildren of Nancy Pelosi for his perusal, he lowers his dukes and the unlikeliest of friendships is able to blossom.

However, the younger Pelosi does concede that the connection between the president and his aggrieved electorate is unlike anything she’s ever seen before. “It is cultlike, and there’s nothing you can do to break it,” she said. “The more outrageous he gets, the more they love him. They’re like ‘That’s our guy!'”

As for Pelosi’s sang-froid outside the bubble? “I get that Republicans have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn my last name into a curse word,” she said. A blanket of ads works. “It’s like, duh, you turn on the TV and you see McDonald’s makes good fries. You can’t blame them.” She was once spit on by a Republican voter, she said, while filming at the Iowa state fair during John McCain’s 2008 run. Later, in a room backstage at NYU before the panel, Nancy Pelosi, not one hair out of place, chastised her daughter for not having brushed her own long, dark mane. Also in the room, chuckling at this perhaps familiar scene, were Alexandra Pelosi’s father, Paul; her sons; and her husband, Michiel Vos, a Dutch journalist she met at a film festival in Amsterdam.

The younger Pelosi was wearing the green plaid skirt she first wore at Catholic girls school in San Francisco, a plum-colored jacket and lilac glasses. She has long had an affinity for the color purple and said she is known as “the purple sheep” in the family.

“I wouldn’t call you a black sheep,” mother said to daughter. “I’d call you an individual.”

Alexandra said she remembers playing grunge and punk rock on the radio (“anything by SST records”), and having “the biggest loser boyfriends,” who she defined as “dirty unwashed wannabe rock stars that never went anywhere — but I thought they were the greatest guys in the world.”

She is the youngest, the fifth child born in six years, and it wasn’t until she was nearly out the door that her mother seriously contemplated a run for office. Nancy Pelosi remembers first broaching the topic with Alexandra, saying: “I’d probably be gone about three nights a week. Whatever answer you have is OK with me.” To which her daughter replied: “Mother, get a life. What teenage girl wouldn’t want her mother out of the house three nights a week?”

It’s been said that the younger Pelosi partly inspired the camcorder-wielding character of Catherine Meyer on “Veep,” the daughter of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer. “I can neither confirm nor deny,” Pelosi said with a shrug. She almost never tells her mother about her work until she is finished with a project because, she said, “you don’t want Nancy Pelosi editing your movie.”

This latest film is no exception. “I don’t even know what it’s about,” Nancy Pelosi said, with a look toward her daughter. Told it was about Trump voters, she said with convincing surprise, “Oh, is it?” then paused. “She holds these things very close to the vest.”

Has her youngest always been fascinated by “the other”? “Well, she’s interested in the American people, she’s not particularly interested in politics,” Nancy Pelosi said. “She thinks, basically — she’s told me that we’re talking heads and were largely boring.”

First elected to Congress in 1987, Nancy Pelosi has seen many iterations of the divide. Is she as hopeful as her daughter about the state of the one we find ourselves in today?

“Well, I do think that there were differences of opinion in our country and that’s a healthy thing, our founders told us it’s OK to disagree,” she said. “But I do know what the president presents, and I think it’s a message of fear that exacerbates any differences that we may have in our country.”

Does she mind that her grandchildren have been catching that president’s roadshow?

“It’s great, it’s great,” she said. “They should see America in all of its manifestations.” But then, like a good pol, she concluded with a cautious note: “I again haven’t heard very much about all of this yet, because I haven’t seen the movie.”