The Other Coup

In a better world, Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis would be a moment to wish him well and leave things there. But we live in the world that he and his inner circle created, in which there’s no longer a reason to assume good faith when they have something to say about the former president’s health.

So, for once, conspiratorial populists are justified in “just asking questions” about the timing of the disclosure.

The world learned on Sunday that Biden has stage 4 prostate cancer that’s “metastasized to the bone.” In February 2024, the White House physician pronounced him “fit for duty” after an annual physical and noted that the findings had been reviewed by specialists in “optometry, dentistry, orthopedics (foot and ankle), orthopedics (spine), physical therapy, neurology, sleep medicine, cardiology, radiology and dermatology.” That list doesn’t include oncology, interestingly, despite the fact that Biden had a cancerous skin lesion removed in 2023.

On Monday, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, appeared on Morning Joe to discuss the new diagnosis. Emanuel isn’t a right-wing attack dog; he was a member of the Biden administration’s medical advisory board on COVID. He was asked: Is it possible that this cancer developed suddenly and progressed rapidly to stage 4?

It is not, Emanuel said. Biden surely has “had this for many years, maybe even a decade, growing there and spreading,” he told host Joe Scarborough. “He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021.” Emanuel described himself as “surprised” that a test for older men designed to detect prostate-specific antigens in the blood would have repeatedly failed to detect a cancer as aggressive as Biden’s—unless, for some reason, the former president had refused the test during all of the years that his cancer was advancing. Or …

“If he took it and didn’t report it and it was elevated, that is another case of doctors not being straightforward with us,” Ezekiel concluded. “We’ve had several of them with President Trump, especially around his COVID diagnosis. And if that is true, that would be very troubling.”

Republicans are passing around a video from 2022 on social media today in which Biden mumbles something about “why I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer.” At the time, that comment sounded like a standard-issue Sleepy Joe gaffe. In hindsight, it sounds different. What did the president know, and when did he know it?

And if he was quietly diagnosed earlier and refused to share the information, why is he sharing it now? It wouldn’t have anything to do with trying to distract the public from the new book exposing his decline in office that’s being published tomorrow, would it?

“They’re using a more sympathetic, smaller lie to deflect from the giant, unsympathetic lie they’ve been caught in and trying to make you feel like you’re not allowed to say anything about it because that would be mean,” podcaster Mary Katharine Ham said of members of Team Joe, speculating that they covered up his cancer too and chose to reveal it now for strategic purposes. “I know this is the M.O. because it has always been Biden’s M.O. to point to his (significant) personal tragedies when he’s in hot water, and now his family is doing it on his behalf.”

If her theory seems uncharitable, well, that’s the point of the strategy. Having forfeited all right to ask the public to trust their claims about his mental acuity, the Biden claque might now feel it has no choice but to try to shame critics into silence. But it’s not going to work: If Biden were senile and stricken with a deadly disease while president, covering all of that up with “fit as a fiddle” happy talk would make the giant lie to which Ham refers that much more gigantic, no?

What on earth are Democrats going to do about all this?

Birds of a feather.

The most arresting line I’ve seen about Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book on the Biden cover-up came from Tyler Austin Harper in a review for The Atlantic. “The American people … must confront the possibility that the book raises,” he wrote, “that we may not have had a president capable of discharging the office since Barack Obama left the White House, in 2017.”

Eight years is a long time for a supposedly serious country to be led by people whose brains don’t work properly. Not only is American decline a choice, as Charles Krauthammer said, it’s a choice to which we seem unusually committed.

Democrats dislike comparisons between Biden and Donald Trump because Trump is a proudly malevolent authoritarian. He doesn’t seek to expand executive power incrementally, as all modern presidents do, so much as he rejects limits on his power as unfair per se. He thinks the constitutional system (or, really, law writ large insofar as it inhibits him) is stupid. He’s a different kind of beast.

He’s the only president who lost a national election and then connived, through incitement and chicanery, to try to overturn the result. But he’s no longer the only president to attempt a coup of sorts for the sake of remaining in power.

Joe and the Biden mafia were prepared to deny American voters an informed choice for president last year, until his debate performance last June made his candidacy untenable. We call it a coup when a duly elected leader is suddenly replaced by someone whom no one voted for, don’t we? Well, that’s what Biden’s inner circle aimed to achieve. The insiders offered the electorate someone whom they swore was fit for office and hoped to deceive them into handing power to someone who actually was unfit. Had he won, according to Tapper and Thompson, we’d be governed by a man whose trains of thought began to derail as far back as 2017 and who might soon have needed a wheelchair to get around. And who, as of Sunday afternoon, there’s reason to believe may have been harboring a secret about stage 4 prostate cancer.

Some MAGA diehards fantasize about an end-around the 22^nd Amendment in 2028 that would see a Vance-Trump ticket elected, at which point President J.D. would resign and stand aside for the real leader. That’s basically what Democrats attempted last year: Healthy Joe Biden was on the ballot but Infirm Joe Biden would have replaced him in office. It wasn’t a traditional coup attempt of the “bludgeoning cops with flagpoles at the Capitol” variety, but it was a willful ploy to rig an election by deliberately misrepresenting the stakes.

And it succeeded. Unlike Trump’s coup attempt, Biden’s worked—at least until the presidential campaign began in earnest. There’s no way to know precisely when he went from having “lost a step” to being unable to perform the duties of his office, but it’s clear now that moment came long before the June debate. Rather than inform the public of that fact, the Biden White House let America sail on without a captain. “Five people were running the country. And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” one insider told Tapper and Thompson. Instead of a president, we had a junta. That’s a coup.

The most one can say to mitigate Democrats’ election-year conspiracy of silence around Biden is that it was extremely dumb, possibly the most futile attempted cover-up in American political history. It wasn’t just unsuccessful, it was actively counterproductive.

After all, many voters had concluded that the incumbent was too old for another term long before his debate meltdown. Team Joe pressed on anyway. Some Democrats, like Beto O’Rourke, now accuse Biden and his aides of “having failed the country” by foolishly proceeding with a reelection campaign that appears doomed in hindsight to have ended with a Trump victory. David Plouffe, Kamala Harris’ campaign manager, told Tapper and Thompson frankly that the then-president “totally f—ed us” by remaining in the race so long.

I invite you to imagine what the country would look like today if Harris had prevailed and the new book exposing Biden’s condition had dropped during the first months of her presidency. The only reason she won, Republicans would insist, is because Democrats insisted on sticking for so long with a nominee who they knew was frail, sickly, and unfit to serve another term. They deliberately denied voters a chance to vet Harris properly by keeping her off the ballot as long as possible. They rigged the election—and she must have been in on it, having spent four years watching Biden up close.

“How can anyone regard her administration as legitimate?” they would say. What would the answer have been? What would have been left of the argument that only one of our two modern parties is contemptuous of American democracy?

The single silver lining for congressional Democrats in Trump’s victory last fall is that they’ve been spared from having to answer that question. But they’re going to need to answer some others.

The new January 6?

There are two ways ambitious Democrats will spin the Biden coup. The first is by showing contrition, aligning themselves with Americans who are shocked by the revelations.

“It was a mistake for Democrats to not listen to the voters earlier and set up a process that would have gotten us in a position where we could have been more competitive that fall,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said Sunday, referring to the pre-debate public anxiety last year about Biden’s age. “Ultimately, in retrospect, you can’t defend what the Democratic Party did because we are stuck with a madman, with a corrupt president in the Oval Office, and we should have given ourselves a better chance to win.”

If that logic sounds familiar, it’s because populist Republicans reliably pull the same trick when confronted with the latest indefensible Trump stunt. The stunt is bad not because it’s immoral or undemocratic, you see, but because the public’s reaction to it will hurt the party at the polls. Murphy can’t condemn the Biden coup on civic grounds without antagonizing liberals who defended the president’s fitness last year, so instead he’s making common cause with them by reframing it as an electoral strategy. Covering up Biden’s infirmity was bad because it helped Trump. Poor polling, not poor health, is the chief problem with the Biden team’s scheme.

The other way to spin the coup comes from Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice. “Democratic voters want their representatives to fight; they want them to oppose Trump. They want them to stop curling into the fetal position whenever the media scolds them,” he wrote, chastising officials like Murphy who have resorted to self-flagellation. “We don’t need endless mea culpas. We need a commitment to fight—and a commitment to hold fascists accountable for their assault on the Constitution.”

His reasoning, replete with manic exhortations to “fight,” will also feel … familiar to connoisseurs of MAGA media. If you’re fragging your own general, you’ve lost sight of who the real enemy is. This is why Democratic politicians will be reluctant to go full “Sister Souljah” on Biden despite the fact that he’s retired from politics and commands nothing like the degree of loyalty that the head of the GOP commands on the right. It’s not a matter of being afraid to criticize Biden, it’s a matter of not wanting to be seen as helping Trump by changing the subject from whatever his newest outrage happens to be. 

Most Democrats will presumably settle on a combination of the two approaches. “Joe Biden shouldn’t have run again, and we shouldn’t have nominated him, but forgive me for being less concerned with that than with Donald Trump trying to make himself king” will become the standard response to questions about the former president. It should work fine for the average blue-state governor or blue-district congressman, who can semi-plausibly claim that they didn’t interact much with Biden and were as fooled as anyone by his handlers’ stagecraft.

But what about Harris? Or Cabinet members like Pete Buttigieg? Or up-and-comers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who absurdly went on arguing that Biden remained the least bad option as the party’s nominee even after the debate last summer? Considering how guests at fundraisers were able to detect the president’s decline from their seats in the audience, it’s easier to believe that those who saw him regularly face-to-face were knowing co-conspirators in the cover-up than that they simply missed the evidence in front of them. Will grassroots Democrats hold it against them?

Well, have grassroots Republicans held January 6 against their own leaders?

Those on the right don’t seem to care a bit that some of their representatives in government abetted a coup plot. Insofar as they do care, they regard it as a badge of honor. Multiple Republicans have lost congressional primaries after condemning Trump’s coup attempt, but I can’t think of one who was ousted for enabling it. Feeling appalled by the riot at the Capitol has become a litmus test on the right for how leftist one’s political sympathies are, in fact, egged on by Trump and the White House. Just today, word came that the family of the insurrectionist who was shot to death by police while trying to breach the House chamber on January 6 was set to get nearly $5 million from Trump’s Justice Department to settle a wrongful death lawsuit. 

I doubt we’re going to see the left react the same way to their own side’s coup plot.

No Democrat will be primaried for failing to blow the whistle sooner on Sleepy Joe, I suspect, but I also doubt that anyone will be primaried for harshly condemning Bidenworld’s cover-up now. Unlike Trump, Kamala Harris’ participation in a coup attempt will not be an advantage for her in the next presidential primary. (On the contrary, her opponents will redirect any awkward questions about Biden’s unfitness squarely at her.) Grassroots liberals won’t be read out of the party as closet conservatives because they believe the former president should have been more candid about his cognitive decline. And no one will be cashing in on defiant “BIDEN WAS FINE” merchandise.

But why? Why the difference between the two sides? It can’t be as simple as “the right is a movement of depraved cultists and the left is not.”

Two coups.

I don’t think it is. The great advantage of the Trump coup over the Biden coup was the relative unfalsifiability of the claims.

To believe Trump, you could take his word for it that ballots had been thrown out here and voting machines had been tampered with there and Democratic “mules” were caught on camera messing with drop boxes and yadda yadda yadda. The supposed conspiracy was vast and complex, beyond voters’ capacity to disprove firsthand. Having a president whom you admired assure you that sophisticated fraud was afoot was enough to make it plausible, at least if you really wanted it to be.

The Biden coup lacked that advantage. His aides said he was fine; voters who’d spent three years watching him with their own eyes said he wasn’t. Even hardened Biden defenders surely had moments during his term when they stumbled across video of him looking vacant and found themselves wondering. How mad can a Democratic voter be at any politician for daring to acknowledge now that, on second thought, he didn’t look great? Will half the country plausibly be persuaded that all was well with him if only the party asserts it aggressively enough, as Trump managed to do with respect to January 6?

There’s also a difference in the two sides’ respective political investments. Democrats don’t need to go on defending Biden because his political career is over; there’s nothing to be gained for them by continuing to insist that he got a raw deal. Trump, on the other hand, never truly lost control of the GOP after January 6. Rehabilitating the insurrection was a matter of rehabilitating his political career for those who hoped that he’d one day return to power. Wayward right-wingers like Liz Cheney had to be primaried to reinforce the notion that opposing Trump was, and would remain, tantamount to opposing the party. There’s no need for that on the left with respect to Biden.

Rather than punish him, my guess is that the closest thing Democrats have to a Liz Cheney—Dean Phillips—will be treated by liberals with a modicum of strange (and grudging) new respect from now on.

But yes, certainly, Republican cultism also helps explain the difference in the two sides’ behavior. Of course a party that’s abandoned all pretense of civic virtue to empower an authoritarian sociopath will cut him more of a break on a coup plot than a party that’s corrupt within more traditional parameters. Democrats might not end up punishing anyone for participating in the Biden cover-up, but I doubt that they’ll reward anyone for it either. Especially Harris: After all this, she seems to me less likely to become the nominee in 2028 (which was already unlikely) than she was a week ago.

The dull but probably correct answer is that the Biden coup won’t matter much long-term because Americans’ political attention spans have been completely shot by ubiquitous fast-moving digital media and endless Trumpy political shiny objects. It’ll probably end up as a pro forma GOP talking point whenever the insurrection is brought up—whatabout the Biden cover-up?—but, because it failed in the end, otherwise not a particularly galvanizing one.

Unless, that is, Democrats nominate another older-than-time candidate in 2028 like Bernie Sanders. Given their terrible political instincts, that can’t be worse than a 50-50 proposition.