In the aftermath of Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential race just a few weeks before the Democratic National Convention, many Republicans including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) have either suggested or strongly insinuated that this was nothing short of a palace coup of sorts.
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“Having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president, the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite,” Johnson wrote in a tweet Sunday in which he also called on Biden to resign from office.
2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and his vice presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), also hinted at the palace coup possibility in a Fox News interview that was taped the day before Biden made his announcement.
SEE ALSO:The Party of ‘Saving Democracy’ Sure Does Like Removing Presidential Candidates From the Ballot
As it turns out, they might not be too far off the mark. According to sources quoted by the New York Post, a plan by top Democrat operatives had been in place “for weeks,” one which included pushing Joe Biden out on the debate stage to prove to diehard supporters that it was time for him to exit the presidential race:
Operatives at the very highest levels of the Democratic Party threatened Joe Biden with forcibly removing him from office unless he stepped down, sources told The Post.
The well-orchestrated “palace coup” to stop the faltering president seeking re-election has been in place for weeks, but stubborn Biden fought against it every step of the way, a source close to the Biden family told The Post Monday.
The insider also made clear the anger, paranoia and frustration Biden displayed as the party elite circled around him and piled on the pressure.
Part of the “elaborate” strategy to remove Biden from the race – as he announced in a shock letter posted on X Sunday – was allowing him to debate Republican candidate Donald Trump last month on live TV in Atlanta.
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The Post later noted that “As [post-debate] calls for him to bow out mounted, Biden insisted he would continue, but party bigwigs threatened to invoke the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution.”
This dovetails in part with a story from Politico Sunday that talked about how former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had been frantically working behind the scenes for weeks to get the ball rolling to get Joe out of the race in part by putting on some very public pressure:
Senior Biden aides were bracing for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who’d worked behind the scenes to encourage others in the party toward the kind of collective action that might finally push the president to end his campaign, to go public this week and possibly even disclose Democratic polling clarifying Biden’s dire political straits.
“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” said one Democrat familiar with private conversations who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”
Pelosi’s comments some two weeks after Biden’s nightmarish debate performance, where she refused to say whether she supported him staying in the race (“I want him to do whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is”) have been widely viewed as the turning point on the conversations on the Democrat side about what Biden should do.
Regardless of whichever top Democrats were behind the great unraveling of Biden’s 2024 presidential candidacy, at this point I think it’s been confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt who the real “threats to democracy” are, as explained well by my colleague Nick Arama:
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They suddenly decided after the disastrous debate that they wanted to push him out the door because they thought he was going to lose. That isn’t the way our system is supposed to work; this would just be shoving the 14 million votes to the side to have the political elites foist a candidate on us at their convention in August — and it might not even be Kamala. They don’t care about what the voters think or that they previously rejected Kamala in 2020 as a choice for president. If they had cared about his condition, they wouldn’t have put him forward to begin with; they’re only doing it now because they’d lose.
‘Nuff said.
Related:The ‘Biggest Question’ Kamala Harris Faces Going Forward That May Very Well Be Her Undoing