The right’s playbook against Kamala Harris is already clear.
Over the past 24 hours, MAGA world has coalesced remarkably quickly around a shared reaction to the news that President Joe Biden will not seek reelection: It’s saying that the race was stolen from Biden.
“The people who called us a threat to Democracy for years just ran a coup against the sitting President,” declared @libsoftiktok, a high-profile anti-trans X account. Other accounts chimed in, comparing Biden’s announcement to the insurrection attempt at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “For anyone who still believes January 6th was a coup, take notes. You just witnessed a real one. July 21st,” @EndWokeness posted. Mike Cernovich, a far-right influencer and an early perpetuator of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, who has more than a million followers, posted, “By any objective analysis, we witnessed a coup.”
More reputable conservatives joined in: “One candidate survived assassination. The other staged a coup,” the prominent venture capitalist (and major Donald Trump supporter) David Sacks wrote on X. “Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors,” agreed Senator Tom Cotton. This morning, Trump himself amplified the “coup” attack line on Truth Social, posting that Democrats “stole the race from Biden after he won it in the primaries—A First!”
The right-wing talking point is an attempt to point out perceived hypocrisy. Democrats have tried to run a presidential campaign predicated on the notion that “democracy is on the ballot.” It’s a reference to Trump’s strongman tendencies, especially his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which culminated in the January 6 insurrection. Now the right has a rare opportunity to try to undermine that message—and they’re pursuing it.
July 21 was quite obviously not like January 6. For one thing, there was none of the violence that typically accompanies a government overthrow. For another, Biden voluntarily removed himself from the presidential race.
Trump loyalists are arguing that he did so against the will of primary voters. “Having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson posted on X, “the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite.” In fact, most Democrats did want Biden to bow out of the race—nearly two-thirds of them, according to recent polls. And although it’s understandable that some voters are grousing about Biden passing the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris rather than pushing for an open convention, the idea that this is a coup demonstrates that the right is overplaying its hand.
It’s also an example of the right’s ongoing January 6 revisionism. As my colleague David A. Graham wrote, some Republicans have sought to “convert a shameful catastrophe into a celebration of the valor and honor of the culprits and portray those who attacked the country as the true patriots.” Flooding the zone with accusations of a coup can end up stripping the word of all meaning.
We should expect to hear this type of rhetoric more in the coming days and weeks. The “coup” line was one of two big reactions on the right-wing internet after Biden’s announcement yesterday, offering a clear preview of the right’s playbook against Harris. Predictably, certain parts of the right-wing internet also defaulted to its fixation on the topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion. To many Trump loyalists, the fact that Harris is a Black woman automatically makes her a “DEI presidential candidate.”
“Bye Joe. Kamala is worse and a DEI hire also her laugh is annoying,” Valentina Gomez, a candidate for Missouri’s secretary of state, posted on X. Other notable right-wing figures made comments about Harris and DEI. Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Turning Point USA, posted that if Democrats did not make Harris the nominee, “they’d be admitting that they don’t really believe in all the DEI and ‘female empowerment’ nonsense,” revealing that “their ideology is a fraud.”
“Kind of poetic and perfect that Democrat obsession with DEI has stuck them with Kamala Harris being their nominee,” the right-wing influencer Jesse Kelly posted, suggesting that Harris is a weak candidate who will get trounced by Trump. Harris is already the target of a reinvigorated “birther” conspiracy, which the right originally leveled against Obama in 2008 (and which Trump famously helped mainstream). One poster went viral citing a 2020 Newsweek article by the Claremont Institute scholar and former law professor John Eastman, which claims that Harris is not a natural-born citizen and thus cannot serve as vice president. (Eastman was recommended for disbarment for his alleged role in trying to help Trump overturn the 2020 election.)
This all builds on racist attacks that far-right factions of the party have been making against Harris for weeks now, as the calls for Biden to end his campaign proliferated. At the beginning of July, Wired noted that users on X trotted out similar claims about Harris being an “anchor baby” and questioned her status as a natural-born citizen. For years, people have been fighting over Harris’s race on her Wikipedia page. More recently, a member of the far-right forum The Donald wrote that Harris “is why DEI is particularly dangerous: idiots like her are lifted up above far smarter people so she starts to believe she’s the smartest one in the room.”
By the time Biden actually ended his campaign yesterday, there was already a MAGA playbook waiting for her. All Trump loyalists had to do was pick which messages they wanted. And their followers knew exactly what to do next.
