As the Democratic National Convention kicked off in Chicago this week, former President Trump turned to his Social Truth and repeatedly and falsely described President Biden’s decision to drop out of the race with a charged word: coup.
“The Democrats have staged the first coup in America,” Trump tweeted Monday afternoon. “Sorry Joe, you are losing to Trump, BIG, and you can’t beat him. You are fired.”
On Tuesday, Trump went further, claiming the violence had been committed by “Comrade Kamala Harris” and her fellow Democrats.
“That was a coup. It was a brutal and violent overthrow of a president of the United States,” he said during a news conference at the Livingston County, Michigan, sheriff’s office, with uniformed deputies standing behind him.
The word “coup” — and the false implication that Democrats illegally kicked Biden out of the race last month to replace him with Vice President Kamala Harris — has become increasingly common in Trump’s speeches and Truth Social posts in recent days as his campaign tries to adjust to its new opponent and its rise in the polls.
Asked about Trump's coup allegations on Monday, President Biden told CNN: “I think he has a problem.”
Trump’s use of that word is not new. The former president previously claimed that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign illegally coordinated with Russia during the 2016 campaign was “an attempted coup.” He said the same about his first impeachment trial in 2019.
But by using “coup” to describe Biden’s voluntary decision to drop out of the race, Trump appears to be trying to delegitimize Harris as a candidate and is potentially paving the way for election-related violence if he loses, said Sherry Zaks, an assistant professor of political science at USC who focuses on political violence.
“A coup, by definition, tends to involve a violent overthrow,” Zaks said. “If you’re equating something that Democrats are doing with something violent, what that does is justify the use of violence against Democrats.” [Trump’s] “final too.”
Zaks said the word will resonate deeply with Trump’s most ardent supporters, such as those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on his behalf during the deadly insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. They will be “even more likely to buy into this coup narrative,” he said, following last month’s assassination attempt, which Trump said he survived because “I had God on my side.”
In a lengthy and emotional speech Monday night, Biden, speaking to a packed stadium of Democrats chanting “We love Joe!” and “Thank you, Joe!”, wholeheartedly endorsed Harris, saying it has been “the honor of my life to serve as your president. I love the job, but I love my country more.”
The president said of Trump: “Think about the message he sends to the world when he talks about America being a nation in decline. He says, ‘We’re losing.’ He’s the loser. He’s dead wrong… America is winning.”
That same day, in a speech at a manufacturing company in York, Pennsylvania, that had been billed as a speech about the economy, Trump said that, thanks to the Biden-Harris administration, “right now, the American dream is dead.”
He added: Democrats “overthrew or staged a coup against Joe Biden.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who campaigned for the president at the Trump Hotel & Tower in Chicago on Monday, repeated the false claim.
“Tonight they’re going to formally kick the president off the road,” Johnson said of the first night of the Democratic convention. “Their coup is complete. Their nominee is going to be someone who didn’t get a single vote in the primaries. Is that what you call defending democracy?”
Trump, who is scheduled to give daily remarks during a swing through battleground states this week, posted on his Truth Social account dozens of times during the run-up to the Democratic convention.
Biden sharply criticized the party’s 2024 platform that Democratic delegates approved Monday night. The 92-page document was not updated to reflect Biden’s withdrawal from the race and makes multiple references to his “second term.”
“Democrats accidentally proposed Biden’s platform,” Trump posted. “His name is mentioned…and he was still removed from office, it was a brutal COUP. It’s foolish to ignore it, but the Fake News Media refuses to cover it. If he had made such a mistake, it would be the biggest story in America!”
In a Truth post on Sunday, she wrote that Harris “should never have been Vice President and had to stage a COUP against Joe Biden, with her America-hating friends Barack Obama [sic] Hussein Obama, crazy Nancy Pelosi, whiny Chuck Schumer and the rest.”
If Harris wins, he added, the United States will become “a communist and criminal garbage dump.”
