J.D. Vance has joined the chorus of conservatives who have begun claiming that President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race constitutes a so-called “coup” in the Democratic Party.
In an interview filmed on Saturday with Fox News’s Jesse Watters, a clip of which aired on Fox & Friends Monday morning, Watters asked former President Donald Trump and his newly minted running mate, Vance, the new question plaguing Republicans: “Is it a coup against Joe Biden?” Both of them fumbled their answers.
“Uh, sort of,” Trump said unsure, looking over to Vance for explanation.
At the time the interview was filmed, Biden had not yet dropped out of the race, nor endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump seemed ambivalent about whether switching to Harris would be a coup, while Vance took the opportunity to be more outspoken.
“I think it is,” Vance said. “Look, there’s a constitutional process, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. If Joe Biden can’t run for president, he can’t serve as president. And if they want to take him down because he’s mentally incapable of serving, invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
“You don’t get to sort of do this in the most politically beneficial way for Democrats. If it’s an actual problem, they should take care of it in the appropriate way,” Vance added.
Both Trump and Vance are going to need to get a lot better at answering this question, unless they can resign themselves to the fact that a presidential candidate dropping out is not antidemocratic. Vance’s brief answer failed to explain why an 81-year-old’s decision to opt out of rigorous campaigning and another four-year term, but not resign in the next four months, would constitute a coup.
Across the board, Republicans haven’t seemed to settle on a party line about Biden’s withdrawal, except that they all think it’s totally unfair.
“Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes,” wrote Senator Tom Cotton in a post on X.
MAGA Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also weighed in on X. “There’s a soft civil war happening in the deep state and the elites in power. The Democrats, the IC, and their activists in the media have been lying to us saying there’s nothing wrong with Biden for years,” she wrote. “Next, they start a coup against him demanding he drop out of the race when they couldn’t hide it anymore.”
Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec wrote on X that Biden’s decision to drop out indicated that he’d already been removed from power altogether. “Right now we do not have an elected leader running this country,” he wrote. “The most powerful nation in the world is being run by bureaucrats and a shadow government.”
Trump’s former senior adviser Stephen Miller called it the “defenestration of Biden.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t call it a coup, but he suggested it was undemocratic in a post on X. “Having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president, the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite,” wrote Johnson.
Johnson has been working in tandem with the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, to set the stage for chaos by continuing to insist that Democrats will face a number of legal challenges when getting another candidate’s name on the ballot, a bid that election law experts have firmly disputed. If the Democratic Party were to replace Biden as their party’s nominee, that would be one thing, but he was never the official nominee in the first place.
