This was no slip of the tongue or regrettable moment of ill-temper.

She was so proud of it that she posted a version of the clip to her own Twitter feed.

What is this country going to look like in November? The Speaker of the House, not normally regarded as a loose-cannon blowhard the way the president is, is all but accusing the other party of treason.

UNHINGED: Nancy Pelosi labels Republicans "domestic enemies…enemies of the state" pic.twitter.com/8TnFfk3VFQ

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 24, 2020

Jake Tapper asked her yesterday whether she’ll accept the results of the election if Trump wins. “Of course,” she replied. But how? If his attempts to discourage voting by mail make him an “enemy of the state”…

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1297495295266357248

…then how does “the state” abide if he profits from those attempts by winning? Even MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin can’t help but mutter “wow” as she pulls the pin on this grenade.

Pelosi is a highly strategic politician, which makes me think she’s seen data that the uproar over the Postal Service is helping Democrats a bunch. This is her turning the volume up to 11 to leverage that — maybe. The wrinkle is that this isn’t the first time lately that her rhetoric about Trump and Republicans has gone to a place that seems motivated less by strategy than by not-quite-controlled contempt. Sometimes it’s petty insults, like when she claimed in May that Trump was “morbidly obese.” Other times it’s bareknuckle demagoguery, accusing Republicans in June of trying to get away with the murder of George Floyd because their police-reform bill wasn’t to her liking. Last month she took to calling the coronavirus the “Trump virus.”

Most famously, there was the spectacle of her theatrically tearing up Trump’s prepared remarks on camera after he finished the State of the Union.

When, exactly, did Nancy Pelosi start to lose her sh*t? Can we pinpoint it?

The moment that sticks out in my mind is her finally authorizing the Ukraine impeachment inquiry last September. Up until then, her attitude towards impeachment had been to shoo progressives in her caucus away from it. They wanted to go after Trump over Russiagate but Pelosi, strategic as ever, wanted no part of it. She remembered how impeachment backfired on congressional Republicans under Clinton. Her eyes were on the prize of winning the 2020 election and ousting Trump the old-fashioned way.

Then the Ukraine thing blew up, she flipped, and she’s never really looked back. She spent most of January crowing that the stigma of impeachment would haunt Trump forever no matter what the Senate did. She’s getting Trumpier in tone by the day. At the rate she’s going, by October she’ll by sending the sergeant-at-arms out to arrest him and hold him in the House basement.

Increasingly I don’t know how this country survives this election fully intact. Trump is trying to delegitimize the results in the fear/expectation that he’ll lose. (Asked recently by a judge in Pennsylvania to produce any evidence of fraud involving voting by mail there, his campaign couldn’t do it.) And now here’s Pelosi, the definition of the Democratic establishment, the so-called adult in the room, tossing a rhetorical Molotov cocktail. If you’re the praying type, pray for America.