WASHINGTON – Donald Trump is bringing up his long history of blaming others for what he himself is guilty of, now accusing Democrats of staging a “coup” against President Joe Biden by persuading him to end his re-election bid.
“It’s really a threat to democracy. It was a coup by people who wanted him out,” Trump said Thursday during a lengthy monologue at the start of a news conference he held at his country club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Three days earlier, he had told billionaire Elon Musk in a conversation they had on his X website: “This was a coup for the president of the United States… He didn’t want to leave, and they said, ‘We can. do it the nice way or we can do it the hard way.’”
Musk agreed and went even further, invoking violent images to describe what happened. “They just took him out behind the shed and basically shot him,” Musk said.
Trump campaign aides did not respond to HuffPost’s inquiries about Trump’s use of the word “coup,” a word echoed by top campaign officials.
“They’re trying to fight a coup right now,” Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita said on July 16 at a forum at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee — five days before Biden actually announced he was ending his campaign.
In fact, public pressure from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democratic leaders in no way constitutes a “coup.” However, this word accurately describes what Trump himself was trying to do before January 6, 2021.
Using the threat of violence and subsequent actual violence to force members of Congress and his vice president to grant him a second term despite having lost the 2020 election is a textbook example of an autogolpe or “coup”. where a sitting political leader tries to stay in power illegally.
Harry Dunn, a former Capitol police officer who defended the U.S. Capitol and lawmakers on the day Trump sent a group of his followers to prevent Biden from certifying the election victory, said the word “coup” was used to describe how Democrats convinced the president that the president could not accept Biden’s victory. running for re-election is insulting.
“There is no way Trump’s coup attempt on Jan. 6 can be equated with President Biden withdrawing from the race. I was there that day. I know what happened,” Dunn said. “It shows how out of touch the former president and his friend Elon Musk are. This is dangerous language.”
Since his first campaign in 2015, however, Trump has regularly blamed others for what he himself has done — and in the process brought the psychological term for the art of “projection” into the vernacular.
In the first debate of the 2016 election, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton highlighted Trump’s many public statements praising Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his willingness to accept Putin’s help in the election. He called him Putin’s “puppet”.
Trump’s response: “No dummy. No dummy. You’re a dummy.”
Earlier that year, in anticipation of his campaign-ending defeat in the Indiana Republican primary, Texas Senator Ted Cruz delivered a 12-minute televised speech against Trump, describing his reflexive return to all accusations.
“This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie,” Cruz said. “In a formula that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everyone else of lying. … Whatever he does, he blames everyone else.”
He knows he’s been beaten for trying to subvert the democratic process, so he wants to make the same charge against the Democrats.David Axelrod, former adviser to Barack Obama
For the past three years, Trump has claimed that Biden ordered several federal and state charges against him from the White House for his coup attempt and other actions. Trump, who has been convicted of the crime since May, has no evidence to support those claims — but there is extensive evidence that Trump tried to get the Justice Department to indict both Clinton and Biden.
David Axelrod, a Democratic consultant who helped Barack Obama win the White House in 2008, said Trump’s lies about a “coup” to oust Biden could well be setting the stage for him to challenge the election loss in November.
“I think it’s to set the predicate that there’s something untoward or illegal about the election, and that’s reinforced if he loses,” he said. “But it’s also something that Trump does all the time. It’s a projection. He knows he’s been beaten for trying to subvert the democratic process, so he wants to make the same charge against the Democrats.
Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said Trump may simply be trying to appeal to die-hard Biden supporters. “He’s trying to win over voters who sympathized with Biden and believed he got a raw deal. It’s a bank shot at long odds,” Newhouse said.
Former top GOP strategist Stuart Stevens, meanwhile, believes people have already wasted too much time parsing Trump’s language on the issue, and joked that Trump’s “coup” analysis was just as likely the result of other factors. “This has nothing to do with political strategy and everything to do with pharmacology and psychosis,” he said.
