The Biden Coup

I understand the urge to dismiss right-wing media’s hobby horses as propaganda.

Most of the industry has become a house organ for Donald Trump and postliberal populism. It prioritizes what’s useful over what’s true.

The temptation to treat the activist right’s daily obsessions as bad-faith nonsense that a respectable media outlet shouldn’t touch is known as “the Fox News effect.” Jonah Goldberg has written about it many times. It’s the idea that if Fox News and its fan base are fulminating about some alleged outrage, more responsible media outlets have a duty to ignore it rather than amplify it.

Given the depths to which right-wing platforms have sunk, a presumption that their latest collective tantrum is so much hysteria would be defensible. The problem with “the Fox News effect” is that mainstream media applies it as a rule, not a presumption, and in so doing ends up giving short shrift to important stories that it really should be covering aggressively.

“There’s something seriously wrong with Joe Biden” is a nice example.

“The Fox News effect” doesn’t fully explain why the press was taken by surprise when the extent of the president’s decline was revealed on June 27. For three years Biden avoided media scrutiny as much as he feasibly could, and insiders who knew how far gone he was weren’t about to leak it in the thick of a presidential campaign. But we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t think scorn for right-wing platforms and the politician whom they serve didn’t inform the media’s undue skepticism that Biden might be enfeebled.

Trump’s party howled that the president was senescent because it knew that Trump would benefit electorally from perceptions that the president was senescent. And that led the press to be less curious than it should have been about whether the president was, in fact, senescent. They blew it.

Two days removed from Biden ending his campaign, there’s a new hobby horse in right-wing media: The Democratic effort to force him out of the race amounts to a “coup.”

Lowbrow MAGA influencers aren’t the only ones saying it. “Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes,” Sen. Tom Cotton wrote on Monday. Tech bro turned Russia apologist David Sacks, who spoke at the Republican convention, observed of Kamala Harris that “one candidate survived assassination. The other staged a coup.” Trump alleged in a post on Tuesday that “They stole the race from Biden after he won it in the primaries—A First! These people are the real THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!”

Has “the Fox effect” once again blinded the mainstream media to an uncomfortable truth revealed by the right, that a coup against the president has played out before our very eyes?

No. This time, as usual but not quite always, what appears at first blush to be bad-faith nonsense is bad-faith nonsense.

What coups aren’t.

A coup is when a lawfully empowered leader is deposed through illegitimate means.

If the means aren’t illegitimate then there’s no coup. A candidate who challenges election results in court and prevails hasn’t staged a coup. Neither has Congress if it impeaches and removes the president, as the Constitution authorizes it to do.

Coups can happen in non-democratic systems; imagine a hereditary monarch being overthrown by a military junta, for instance. But in the modern world, when we think of a coup, we picture an elected official chosen by the people being stripped by some usurper of the authority they’ve collectively vested in him.

So, hypothetically, let’s say that a fragile man-child became president and lost a national election but couldn’t bear to make way for the people’s preferred successor. Instead of respecting their choice, he promoted wild conspiracy theories about vote-rigging, connived to try to get phony slates of electors presented to Congress, pressured his Justice Department to lie about widespread fraud at the polls, and fed his fans so much propaganda about democracy being stolen that they resorted to storming the Capitol to try to stop the election from being certified.

That would be an attempted coup. Illegitimate means were used in hopes of preventing a lawfully chosen leader from taking power.

That’s not how Joe Biden departed the race. In the end, pressure or no, it was his decision to withdraw. And the circumstances of his withdrawal were such that it’s impossible to believe the choice of Democratic primary voters this year was fully informed.

We can come up with scenarios in which the end of Biden’s campaign would have seemed more coup-like than it was. For example, if he had been fit as a fiddle health-wise but slipped far behind Trump in the polls due to general unpopularity, a conspiracy among party leaders to replace him would have seemed dubious. By what right should primary voters be deprived of their choice of nominee just because he’s trailing? He might come back. They nominated him because they believe in him.

Or imagine that an enfeebled Biden resisted the effort to pressure him out of the race, made it to the convention, but was then denied the nomination by a floor revolt of Democratic delegates insisting that they couldn’t support him in “good conscience” because of his health. That would be tricky: If he believed he could continue in the race, replacing him would amount to delegates overriding his political judgment and the millions of primary votes he received. That might be lawful but would it be “legitimate”?

The way Biden actually left the race was far less tricky. For weeks, figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer tried to convince him that he couldn’t win and should step aside for the good of the party. For weeks, he refused. Then his own campaign brought him polling that showed him not only losing battleground states to Trump but at risk of a landslide defeat with strongholds like Virginia and New Mexico turning red. He threw in the towel.

Pelosi didn’t force him out. No one save the convention delegates could have taken the nomination from him against his will. It was American voters who got him to quit by persuading him that humiliation lay ahead if he continued. It’s not illegitimate in a democracy for an elected leader to heed the people when they tell him they’ve lost confidence in him. Rather the opposite.

The claim that Democratic primary voters have been deprived of a nominee they chose is also limp given what propelled the “Joe must go” effort in the first place. Biden’s performance at the June 27 debate wasn’t just historically bad, it was so shocking in its frailty that it amounted to a health crisis in full public view. Despite having spent months insisting that the president was a near-vegetable, even Republicans seemed stunned by how feeble he appeared to be.

If he had suffered a massive heart attack onstage that night instead, we can safely assume that Democratic voters would no longer want their primary votes in his favor to be binding. They didn’t have the information about his health when they cast those ballots and they’d now have strong reason to doubt that he’d be able to campaign as vigorously in the fall as they had hoped.

The same logic applies to him suffering through the most pitiful, least coherent 90 minutes of public speaking in American political history. Do we honestly believe Democrats would have rolled the dice on him again in this spring’s primaries if they had known how far gone he was?

A new Pew Research poll finds 71 percent of Biden supporters wishing they could replace both party’s nominees on the ballot this year. Among Trump supporters, that number is just 26 percent. There’s a reason why the right has sounded more disgruntled this week than the left about the Biden-Harris switcheroo. Rank-and-file Democrats don’t appear to feel disenfranchised; rather, they seem energized by the fact that they finally have a nominee who’s able to campaign and stands a modest chance to win.

All of which brings us to the great irony in Republicans insisting that there’s a “coup” afoot in this year’s Democratic nominating process. They’re right, but for the wrong reasons.

There has been “a Biden coup.” But Joe Biden isn’t the victim. He’s the perpetrator.

What coups are.

Right-wing attempts to paint the president as a victim of Democratic elites are stupid on their own terms.

For instance, if Nancy Pelosi and her establishment cabal were hellbent on ousting him, why did they wait until three and a half months before Election Day? Why not move against him a year ago and give the party a chance to hold an actual primary featuring strong candidates? By waiting as long as they did, they’ve saddled themselves with (sigh) Kamala Harris.

Or imagine if they hadn’t moved against Biden after the debate. Instead of scrambling to replace a man who had just revealed himself to be grossly unfit for office, picture them rolling over for the president and simply accepting their beating in November. People like Tom Cotton who are whining today about “coup” plots would be marveling at the irresponsibility of sticking with a candidate who had proved on national television that he couldn’t possibly serve effectively until 2029.

What are parties for, if not for doing everything possible to win when fate deals them a bad hand? “If democracy for the whole country is on the ballot, nominating a winning candidate should be the party’s overriding goal,” Jonah wrote in his Los Angeles Times column on Tuesday.

Still, the strongest evidence of stupidity and/or bad faith in the “coup” attacks is how they’ve let Joe Biden himself off the hook for attempting to hoodwink his own voters.

If a coup is when a lawfully empowered leader is deposed through illegitimate means, how else should we describe a deliberate, years-long effort to mislead Americans about the president’s health in hopes that they’d sleepwalk into electing him again?

The White House’s deceit about Joe Biden’s decline was illegitimate. And its goal was to deny Democratic primary voters, the lawful authority in choosing a nominee, the power to make a fully informed decision about which candidate was best suited to represent their interests and ultimately govern as president.

Thanks to Biden’s long con, the electoral timetable is now such that those voters are stuck with Harris instead of having the opportunity to choose Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro. They’ve been deposed as the decision-maker in the nominating process. It’s a coup—against them, by the Biden campaign. Which is why the simpering tributes to the president’s supposed heroism in finally bowing to reality on Sunday are so skin-crawling.

But if Biden is the perpetrator of the coup rather than its victim, why do Republicans insist on pretending otherwise?

In part it’s because there’s nothing more to be gained politically by attacking him. He’s yesterday’s news. The GOP doesn’t benefit from making Democrats mad at him at this point; if anything, persuading liberals to turn on him might bind them more tightly to Harris as a preferable alternative.

She, not he, is the GOP’s enemy now. And for the next three and a half months, the Republican message about her will be simply this: Everything about her is illegitimate. Everything.

It’s already started: She slept her way to the top. She’s a “DEI vice president” by virtue of her race and sex. She’s not a natural-born citizen within the meaning of the 14th Amendment—a line of attack that was used against the last African American nominee for president, you might recall.

Portraying her as the usurper in a narrative about Joe Biden being ousted in a Democratic coup is part of that. If everything else about Harris is illegitimate, it stands to reason that her ascension to the nomination must be illegitimate too. “Poor ol’ Joe was dubiously shoved aside by the DEI hire and her enablers” serves that end. “Joe conned his own voters and it blew up in his face, forcing them to turn to Harris” does not.

There’s another reason Republicans are keen to spin the Democratic switcheroo as a “coup.” As ever, being a member of Trump’s party requires you to spin his most egregious failures as not egregious or not failures at all.

Philip Bump explained the GOP strategy at work here in a piece for the Washington Post. “The play is … to try to erode one of the most significant arguments against Trump’s candidacy: that he did try to subvert democracy and that, returned to the White House, he would try to do so further,” he wrote. “When your candidate is appearing at campaign rallies and praising Chinese autocrat Xi Jinping and his ‘iron fist’ control over his population, it’s useful to have a way to suggest that your opponents are just as bad.”

Trump attempted a coup in 2021 and now Democrats here in 2024 are attempting a “coup” of their own. Both parties do it. Why, then, should any voter hold January 6 against him?

It’s the same logic that leads right-wing insurrection enthusiasts to hype certain left-wing demonstrations as “insurrections.” Democrats do it too, see. So why should Republicans trying to overthrow the incoming government after the 2020 election be disqualifying?

Needless to say, the image of Harris benefiting from a “coup” against Joe Biden also helps the right prepare the ground to argue that the result in November is illegitimate if she wins. In addition to the usual sore-loser huffing about rigged voting machines and midnight ballot dumps, the fact that Democratic primary voters never chose her will be treated as some sort of fatal flaw that renders her election forever tainted.

Never mind the enormous burst of donations and prominent endorsements she’s received since Sunday. Never mind the polling that shows her performing at least as well as Biden did against Trump. Never mind months of Democratic voters telling pollsters they feared the president was too old to run again, or the fact that no credible challengers were willing to test his popularity among the base by opposing him in a primary.

“If not for the Democratic coup, we would have beaten Joe Biden.” That’s what Trump and his apologists will say on November 6, hoping that no one on the right thinks too hard about how the GOP might have fared against Harris with a nominee of its own whom half the country doesn’t hate.

It’s hard to overstate the trauma that a right-wing nationalist party would suffer if its messiah were to lose to a black woman from San Francisco. The core belief of the MAGA movement is that it represents “real America,” and nothing would test that more severely than if the real “real America” ended up preferring Kamala Harris to Donald Trump.

The insult to its tribal pride would be unbearable. And so excuses must and will be made, and there’s no time like the present to start making them. “Joe Biden, coup victim” is this week’s excuse. There are many more to come.