As the Democratic National Convention kicked off in Chicago this week, former President Trump took to his Truth Social and repeatedly, falsely, described President Biden’s decision to quit the race with one fraught word: coup.
“The Democrats staged the first ever ‘Coup’ in America,” Trump wrote Monday afternoon. “Sorry Joe, you’re losing to Trump, BIG, and you can’t beat him — You’re Fired.”
On Tuesday, Trump went further, asserting violence by “Comrade Kamala Harris” and her fellow Democrats.
“That was a coup. It was a vicious, violent overthrow of a president of the United States,” he said during a news conference at the sheriff’s office in Livingston County, Mich., with uniformed deputies standing behind him.
The word “coup” — and the false implication that Democrats illegally pushed Biden out of the race last month in order 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 his new opponent and her rise in the polls.
Asked about Trump’s coup claims on Monday, President Biden told CNN: “I think he has a problem.”
Trump’s use of the word is not new. The former president previously claimed that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III‘s investigation into whether Trump’s campaign illegally coordinated with Russia during the 2016 campaign was “an attempted coup.” He said the same of his first impeachment in 2019.
But in using “coup” to describe Biden’s voluntary decision to leave 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 anything the Democrats are doing to something violent, what it does is justify the use of violence on [Trump’s] end as well.”
Zaks said the word will deeply resonate with Trump’s most ardent supporters, like 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,” she said, on the heels of last month’s assassination attempt, which Trump said he survived because he “had God on my side.”
In a lengthy, emotional speech Monday night, Biden — speaking to an arena filled with Democrats chanting, “We love Joe!” and “Thank you, Joe!” — wholeheartedly endorsed Harris and said it has “been the honor of my lifetime to serve as your president. I love the job, but I love my country more.”
The president said of Trump: “Think of the message he sends around the world when he talks about America being a failing nation. He says, ‘We’re losing.’ He’s the loser. He’s dead wrong. … America’s winning.”
Earlier that day, in a speech at a manufacturing company in York, Pa., 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 “did an overthrow, or a coup, on Joe Biden.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), campaigning for the president at Trump Hotel & Tower Chicago on Monday, repeated the false claim.
“They’re gonna formally kick the president to the side of the road tonight,” Johnson said of the first night of the Democratic convention. “Their coup is complete. Their nominee will be somebody who did not get one vote in the primary. They call this defending democracy?”
Trump, who is scheduled to give daily remarks during a tour of battleground states this week, posted to his Truth Social account dozens of times during the leadup to the Democrats’ convention.
He blasted the 2024 party platform that Democratic delegates voted on Monday night to approve. The 92-page document was not updated to reflect Biden dropping out of the race and makes multiple references to his “second term.”
“The Democrats accidentally put forward the Biden Platform,” Trump posted. “His name is mentioned … and yet they threw him out of Office, it was a vicious COUP. Such a foolish thing to miss, but the Fake News Media refuses to cover it. If I had made such a mistake, it would be the biggest story in America!”
In a Truth post Sunday, he wrote that Harris “should have never been Vice President, and had to stage a COUP of Joe Biden, with her America-hating friends, Barrack [sic] Hussein Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and the rest.”
If Harris wins, he added, America will turn into “a Communist, Crime Ridden Garbage Dump.”
