Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) defended the decision to rip up her copy of President Trump's State of the Union address after he finished during her weekly press conference on Thursday.
Pelosi said she it send the right message to tear "up his falsehoods" and "I have tried to be gracious with him. I am always dignified. I thought that was a very dignified act." She further said it was not a real State of the Union, but a "state of his mind."
Pelosi criticized Trump for giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, accidentally calling it the "Medal of Honor," to conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh during his speech.
"Do it in your own office! We don’t come in your office and do congressional business. Why are you doing that here? Quite frankly, when he started talking about someone with stage IV cancer and all of that, I don’t know which stage John Lewis’ cancer's in but when he starts talking about someone with cancer, we thought he was going to talk about John Lewis. A hero in our country," she said.
"I feel very liberated. I feel that I have extended every possible courtesy. I have shown every level of respect, I say to my members all the time there is no such thing as in internal animosity," she continued.
Pelosi, describing herself as a speed reader, said she knew how the speech would end and that is why she decided to rip her copy.
"When I saw the compilation of falsehoods but then heard the first quarter or third and I started to think there has to be something that clearly indicates the American people that this is not the truth. And he has shredded the truth in his speech, he's shredding the Constitution in his conduct. I shredded the state of his mind address," she said.
Jody Jones, one of President Trump's guests at the State of the Union on Tuesday, criticized Pelosi for her conduct.
"It felt like she ripped our hearts out. Everybody there, all the guests, we couldn’t believe it. I don’t care how you feel about somebody. That was probably the most disrespectful thing I've ever seen in my life. Because, when she did that, it just tore us up. We couldn’t believe it," Jones said.