Donald Trump and his allies keep talking about a coup.
I don’t quite see what that gets them.
It seems more an expression of frustration than anything else. The campaign spent two years preparing to run against Joe Biden, with frailty and mental acuity an overriding issue, and now they’ve got an energetic, 59-year-old vice president who has not been fully defined the way presidential nominees usually are by this point.
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In his interview with Laura Ingraham, Trump said: "They staged a coup against the President of the United States. They went in and they told him, you're leaving. You're way down in the polls, 17 points, I think. It's like you're in a fight with somebody, and you're really winning, and they take him out and they put somebody else in. Nobody ever heard of this before. This is a coup."
Now I can understand the argument that 14 million people voted for Biden in the primaries and none for Harris — though she was on the ticket with him — and that they have been disenfranchised.
Then the mainstream media and Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi, through increasingly blatant leaks, pressured Biden into stepping aside.
But the reason it’s not a coup is that Harris, armed with the president’s endorsement, was the only candidate who emerged. Not one Democrat challenged her. Not Gretchen Whitmer, not Gavin Newsom, not Pete Buttigieg, not Josh Shapiro, not any of the other names that have been bandied about.
Now that reflects in significant measure the worry about a backlash for passing over the first black woman and Asian-American woman to seek the presidency. Harris also deserves credit for assembling enough delegates to win in just 32 hours. So she ran unopposed.
JD Vance, in a recording obtained by the Washington Post, told donors in Minnesota that the VP represented a unique challenge.
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"All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch," Vance said. "The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did…
"Let’s be honest, 10 days ago, the two candidates who were running for president, everybody had an opinion about ’em. Love ’em or hate ’em, everybody has an opinion about Donald Trump and Joe Biden after the past eight years. But Kamala Harris, people don’t really know."
Now that’s candor behind closed doors.
It also underscores that the battle to define the vice president’s image over the next few weeks will make or break her candidacy.
In his first ad since clinching the nomination, airing in battleground states, blames Harris for the mess at the border, with the tagline: "Failed. Weak. Dangerously liberal."
Vance has also had a rough rollout. CNN reports that he said several years ago:
"We think babies are good because we’re not sociopaths…
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"And the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives.
"You know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable."
As for Twitter, "almost always, the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at all."
As I’ve argued, the mainstream press seems far more interested in Vance’s history of controversial statements than in Harris’ past ultra-liberal stances, including promoting a bail fund for BLM rioters in 2020.
The New York Times described her old clips and comments as "weaponization" by Republicans, as if the media don’t have an obligation to dig as well.
In other news from the "Ingraham Angle" interview:
–Trump made a false accusation against the president on classified documents. "Now, with Biden, he really was convicted of that case. He was let go of that case. And, by the way, you're talking about many more [documents]. And he didn't have the Presidential Records Act…They said he was incompetent and, therefore, he can't stand trial, and yet he would have been allowed to be president."
Biden wouldn’t have to stand trial because special counsel Robert Hur declined to bring charges. He voluntarily contacted authorities upon realizing that he had many classified documents from his vice-presidential years and turned them over.
Trump, who was indicted for withholding documents, boasted that the case had been thrown out – by the Florida judge he appointed, Aileen Cannon, who has made many rulings favoring him. That is being appealed.
–He sent mixed signals on the debates, saying he will "probably" debate Harris, "but I can also make a case for not doing it."
–Trump cleaned up a furor over telling a Christian audience that they won’t have to vote in four years because he will have fixed everything. He said he was telling them "you never vote. This time, vote. I will straighten out the country. You won't have to vote anymore. I won't need your vote. You can go back to not voting."
–The former president said Harris "got rid of the laugh. I noticed I haven't seen that crazy laugh that she's got. She's crazy. That laugh, that's the laugh of a crazy person."
With less than 100 days to go, there may not be many laughs in what promises to be an ugly campaign.
