Pelosi says Trump keeps her up at night: 'He's authentically a bully'

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated that she had trouble sleeping after Tuesday night’s debate between Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

“As Speaker, people say to me, ‘What keeps you up at night?’” she said at a press conference on Thursday at the Capitol.

"The night of the debate, you saw what keeps me up at night," she said.

Americans saw authenticity from both candidates on the debate stage on Tuesday, Ms Pelosi said.

On the one hand, Mr Trump could barely let Mr Biden or even moderator Chris Wallace speak without interrupting them, and he was unwilling to directly denounce white supremacists.

He was "authentically a bully," Ms Pelosi said.

On the other hand, Democratic nominee Joe Biden showed poise and decency, she said.

The president has "no respect for the office that he holds," Ms Pelosi said.

She suggested jokingly that the anxiety the president has caused her has made her more grating around other House Democrats.

“My colleagues don't like it when I don't get enough sleep,” she joked.

Ms Pelosi had been publicly urging Mr Biden for weeks not to debate the president, saying it was not worth his time to "legitimise" Mr Trump's words by appearing with him on-stage.

"Why bother? He doesn't tell the truth," she said last week.

The speaker has not directly spoken with Mr Trump herself in more than 11 months, relying instead on conversing and negotiating with intermediaries such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The two most powerful leaders of their respective political parties last spoke at a 16 October 2019 meeting at the White House, CNN reported, where Mr Trump called Ms Pelosi a "third-grade politician."

The speaker fired back that “all roads with [Trump] lead to Putin,” referring to the Russian President Vladimir Putin, before abruptly gathering her things and leaving the meeting.

Since then, Ms Pelosi's House Democratic caucus has impeached Mr Trump for abusing his power in foreign policy with Ukraine for political gain; the two leaders have snubbed each other at the president's State of the Union address in February, with the speaker ripping up her copy of his speech; and the coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 200,000 Americans and sent the US economy into a tailspin, upending the regular presidential election cycle in the process.