Within minutes of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race, Sen. Tom Cotton leaped onto X to declare that “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.”
Radio host Erick Erickson was even more creative, tweeting that “Y’all can argue over the word coup, but Biden stepping aside is the American equivalent of all those people accidentally falling out of windows in Russia.”
David Sacks, the Putin lickspittle, Elon Musk appendage and featured speaker at the Republican National Convention, offered that “One candidate survived assassination. The other staged a coup. Your choice, America.”
And House Speaker Mike Johnson told a TV audience on Sunday that “It would be wrong and I think unlawful in accordance to some of these state rules for a handful of people to go in the backroom and switch it out because they’re — they don’t like the candidate any longer.”
This is rich. There is indeed a candidate in this race who attempted to stage a coup, and we know who that is. Trump submitted his false electoral votes, pressured his vice president and sent his goons to Capitol Hill because he would not accept the verdict of the voters. And the party that openly admires Vladimir Putin (see Carlson, Tucker) has no business making snarky comments about people falling out of windows. So please sit down and shut up with your coup talk.
The response of the GOP to a real attempted coup? After some initial condemnations, nearly the entire party fell into line denying that Jan. 6 had been anything to get excited about and endorsing the coup-plotter for reelection. There were no calls for him to drop out of the race.
As for the speaker’s suggestion that it’s somehow illegal for the candidate to decline to run, perhaps he might want to consult the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids involuntary servitude.
What we witnessed over the past several weeks was the Democratic Party acting like a healthy institution. Democrats ushered Joe Biden into the nomination in 2020, and they ushered him out in 2024 for good and sufficient reasons. Yes, it was painful for Biden, but with the stakes being so high, Democrats found that sentimentality was something neither they nor the country could afford.
Making wise calculations
In early 2020, Bernie Sanders won Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. A self-proclaimed socialist who had honeymooned in the U.S.S.R., Sanders was popular with a dedicated share of primary voters but widely perceived to be a general election loser. Yet the dynamics of nominating races being cumulative, he seemed to be rolling down the tracks toward victory. Only South Carolina stood as a speed bump between the first three contests and the Super Tuesday races that would decide the contest.
And so the party moved. Parties are more than primary voters. They are elected leaders and candidates and donors and influencers. They are community leaders and church voices and former presidents. In 2020, many of those figures took a hard look at the Sanders candidacy and recognized that if the party failed to take collective action — if half a dozen competitors remained in the race (as Republicans had done in the face of the Trump threat in 2016) — then the party would nominate a sure loser.
At that stage, Joe Biden had come in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. He finished second in Nevada, but with less than half the share of votes that Sanders received. Still, the Democrats proved themselves a mighty machine. First Rep. Jim Clyburn, with enormous influence among Black South Carolinians, threw his support behind Biden, and in short order, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the race, also endorsing Biden. Those candidates represented the Democratic center, and when they were no longer dividing it up, it coalesced around Biden. He didn’t so much win in 2020 as he was carried on the shoulders of a party that made a wise calculation about its main chance.
That’s not to discount the whole campaign. Biden did a good job in the general election campaign (though COVID made it an unprecedentedly undemanding race), performed well enough in the debates and town halls, and delivered a great convention speech.
In 2024, the party that hoisted Biden to the nomination had the dreary task of persuading him to hang it up. He was stubborn, and it required a full court press, but the former House speaker and former presidents and donors and elected officials and editorial writers and more did the sad duty that the moment required.
The Democratic Party demonstrated for the second straight election cycle that it remains a healthy organ of democracy. And it’s a damn lucky thing it is, because it is arrayed against a party that celebrates violence, marinates in lies and worships an insurrectionist.
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the “Beg to Differ” podcast. Her new book, “Hard Right: The GOP’s Drift Toward Extremism,” is available now.
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