The violent attack on Paul Pelosi led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to step down from the House Democratic leadership, with the family deciding while she was in intensive care with him that they were “done,” their daughter explained in a lengthy interview with CNN on Tuesday.  morning.   

  “You have to make sense of it in your mind.  You have to understand the fact that there is an 82-year-old man who is sleeping in his bed and is being attacked in his own home.  And I don’t care how you vote.  I don’t care what your political beliefs are.  This is not right in any way,” Alexandra Pelosi told CNN’s Don Lemon in an exclusive interview on CNN This Morning.   

  “It’s just, at some point, you’re just done.  After the attack on my father, that was it.  We were sitting in the ICU and just saying, ‘We’re done,’” he added.   

  Alexandra Pelosi, a documentary filmmaker, has spent years filming her mother behind the scenes for “Pelosi in the House,” her film out Tuesday on HBO Max.  Nancy Pelosi announced last month that she would step down from her leadership post after leading House Democrats for two decades.  The decision comes just weeks after a male assailant attacked her husband with a hammer at the couple’s San Francisco home.   

  The documentary describes how Nancy Pelosi stayed on message as House Democratic caucus leader amid several bills where she had to whip up votes, including passing the Affordable Care Act and securing her own votes for speaker — twice .  It focuses in part on the behind-the-scenes horror as Nancy Pelosi and her staff hid on January 6, 2021 from US Capitol rioters, many of whom stormed the California Democrat’s office looking for her and the trash.   

  Alexandra Pelosi said she believed toxic rhetoric from the GOP contributed to what ultimately led to her father’s attack in the early hours of Oct. 28 and her mother’s decision not to take a leadership position in the next Congress.   

  The responses of some Republicans in the wake of the attack, he said, were “inexcusable.”   

  “What I do know is that how the Republicans responded to this attack was so inexcusable.  The jokes.  You saw the jokes.  The governor of Virginia, the wanted governor of Arizona, members of Congress made jokes about an 82-year-old man who was attacked in his own home.  I don’t see how that’s excusable,” she said, referring to comments by Virginia Gov. Glenn Young and Arizona gubernatorial candidate Cary Lake.   

  “Well, for me, the toxic media landscape is so hard to try — I don’t know.  I just don’t know how to talk about it without going dark.”   

  Youngkin eventually sent a handwritten note apologizing to Nancy Pelosi for his comments,   

  “If I watched Fox News, I’d hate Nancy Pelosi too, I get it,” said Alexandra Pelosi.  “You don’t have to support her politics.  You have to at least say, okay, he’s spent 35 years doing this.  Her husband looks like Frankenstein over here.  It has finished.  It has finished.”   

  Alexandra Pelosi said that 35 years ago, her mother asked her if she could run and that she gave her blessing.  After the attack on her father, she looks at it differently.   

  He says, “Mom has a chance to run for Congress, but I won’t unless I have your permission.”  And I said, “Mom get a life.”  Okay?  What teenage girl doesn’t want her mom out of the house?  go right;  So we are in the ICU and I tell her, “if I had known 35 years later where this was going to end up, I would never have given you my blessing to run in the first place.”   

  He added: “Now my father, coming out of everything he’s been through, says to me: ‘You can’t say that.  You have to say that if you came to me today in this toxic social media environment, you wouldn’t give your permission.  But you can’t say the last 35 years of your life, I’m going to erase it because of this one incident.’  So that’s what we’re fighting with.”   

  “Was it all worth it?  For my family?  What have we been through?  Was it worth it?” she told Lemon. “Now, my parents would say yes, my father, after everything he’s been through, would say yes. And my mother, of course, would say, ‘I’m proud of my scars.’ Because it’s proud of the life she lived. But for family, families are the ones who pay the highest price for that kind of life.”