After President Joe Biden ended his 2024 re-election bid, Republicans scrambled — in the most cynical way possible — to turn this into some kind of scandal for Democrats. In fact, one word came up more than any other: “coup.”
The argument, to the extent such a word is applicable, is that Biden prevailed against token opposition in presidential primaries and caucuses and earned his party’s nomination in the process. For the party to urge him to stand down, and for the president to voluntarily agree to do so ahead of the Democratic National Convention, constituted a “coup.”
It was, and is, a ridiculous claim, though it’s been embraced by a wide variety of Republicans, including vice presidential nominee JD Vance. One of his Senate colleagues, Arkansas’ Tom Cotton, went in an even weirder direction, writing via social media, “Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes. Donald Trump took a bullet for democracy.”
He didn’t appear to be kidding.
In reality, of course, we know what a “coup” is. Merriam-Webster’s definition is as good as any: “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.”
To think this applies to an incumbent president voluntarily withdrawing from a re-election campaign is obviously bad-faith nonsense, but there’s a related angle to this that shouldn’t go overlooked: If Republicans like Vance and Cotton are looking for evidence of developments that actually resemble a coup, perhaps they should turn their attention to Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol?
CNN’s John Berman pressed Cotton about this on the air yesterday, asking, “As much as any politician I’ve seen, you choose your language very carefully. So, why call this a coup and not January 6th?” The far-right senator tried to change the subject, and the host tried again: “You used the language ‘coup.’ And, again, you’ve never said that for January 6th. And as far as I know, no cops were beaten up, no one defecated in the Capitol, there was no criminal trespass in terms of changing the Democratic candidates, were there?”
Cotton dodged the question again. That wasn’t too surprising; there is no good answer to these questions. As a Washington Post analysis concluded this week, after Trump’s 2020 defeat, the Republican “tried to cheat Biden voters in those five states out of their choice. He tried to short-circuit the effort to count electors. And then he suggested that the furious crowd near the White House direct their anger at the Capitol. It’s useful for Trump’s allies to pretend that Biden’s decision was comparable. It isn’t.” If Cotton and his cohorts are looking for a party that took steps to subvert democracy, we can show them one, but they might not like the look in the mirror.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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