I asked about the Politico report that she privately told Jerry Nadler and other Democrats about the president: “I don’t want to see him impeached, I want to see him in prison.”

She said, “I didn’t exactly say that,” and noted: “You can’t impeach everybody. People wanted Reagan impeached but that didn’t happen. O.K., they impeached Clinton for something so ridiculous — getting impeached for doing a dumb thing as a guy. Then they wanted to impeach Obama.” And now comes Trump, who she says, “has given real cause for impeachment.”

I ask her if the president ever pressured her on the issue.

“He may have one time said something like, ‘I’m glad you’re not doing this impeachment because there’s nothing there,’” she said. “But that means nothing to me.”

The speaker, who is trying to keep the party center left, must know that getting Trump out of office is a goal that could be jeopardized by the fact that the Democrats lurched so far left in the first debates, with bilingual pandering and talk about busing and decriminalizing illegal border crossings and abolishing private health insurance.

This is the pol whose name was synonymous for decades with extreme San Francisco liberalism. (A “Saturday Night Live” sketch in 2006 depicted Pelosi, played by Kristen Wiig, talking to a pair of chain-and-leather-clad aides, one with a ball-gag in his mouth.) Now, astonishingly, the woman formerly scorned as a pinko is the voice of moderation, urging the kids to turn down the music and slow their roll or risk having a second unbearable helping of Trump.

“If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it,” she said, breezily. “As I say to these people, come to my basement. I have these signs about single-payer from 30 years ago. I understand what they’re saying. But we have a responsibility to get something done, which is different from advocacy. We have to have a solution, not just a Twitter fight.”

What does she think about the latest sexual assault accusation from E. Jean Carroll, the New York writer, who said Trump attacked her in a Bergdorf’s dressing room in the ’90s?