Nearly a decade into his career in politics, Donald Trump has consistently argued that his potential rivals shouldn’t be permitted to stand between him and power. In October 2015, for example, the Republican said Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be “allowed” to run for president. In February 2016, Trump said Ted Cruz was “not allowed” to run for president, either. A month later, the future president said John Kasich shouldn’t have been “allowed” to run against him in a GOP primary.
Ahead of Election Day 2020, Trump said Joe Biden shouldn’t have been “allowed” to run for president. In July 2024, he said Kamala Harris shouldn’t be “allowed” to run, either.
Four months later, as a HuffPost report noted, the former president insisted that the Democratic vice president should now be “forced off” the campaign trail.
In a Thursday post on his Truth Social platform, former President Donald Trump argued that Vice President Kamala Harris ‘should be investigated and forced off the Campaign,’ thereby allowing President Joe Biden ‘to take back his rightful place’ at the top of the Democratic ticket. Trump did not specify what he believes Harris — who became the Republican’s rival in the White House race after Biden dropped his reelection bid this summer — should be investigated for.
In recent weeks, as the GOP nominee has struggled to come up with a coherent closing message, he’s fixated on a handful of preoccupations, including his desire to see Biden return to the ballot, his baseless “60 Minutes” conspiracy theory and his insistence that Harris should stop running against him.
Remarkably, in a pair of odd online missives, Trump managed to tie all three threads together in one weird package.
The harangue began with this item, in which the Republican called for “60 Minutes” to be “IMMEDIATELY TAKEN OFF THE AIR,” argued that CBS should “LOSE ITS LICENSE” to broadcast, said Harris “should be investigated and forced off the Campaign,” and concluded that Biden should “allowed to take back his rightful place” on the Democratic ticket.
Less than a minute later, Trump added strange new details to his “60 Minutes” conspiracy theory — he believes CBS News producers might have “‘CREATED’ many additional new answers for her” as part of the broadcast — before wrapping things up with a veiled threat.
“RELEASE THE TAPES FOR THE GOOD OF AMERICA,” the GOP nominee wrote. “We can do it the nice way, or the hard way!”
What, exactly, would “the hard way” entail? He didn’t say, and your guess is as good as mine, though the phrasing was certainly ominous. There’s no point in going line by line through Trump’s rants, pointing out every error of fact and judgment, though it’s difficult to brush off the Republican’s insistence that his major-party opponent “should be investigated and forced off the Campaign,” despite the fact that she’s done nothing wrong. It’s one thing to say that a rival candidate is undeserving of support, but it’s far more pernicious to argue that a rival shouldn’t even be permitted to seek support. The former is normal; the latter is authoritarian. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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