The GOP has a strange concept of coups.
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MAGA Republicans should know what a coup is. After all, they tried one not even four years ago. However, many of them still seem to struggle with the concept.
Like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
On Sunday, the lawmaker proved that when she offered a strange reaction to an out-of-context quote from President Joe Biden in which he explained why he dropped out of the race against Donald Trump.
In an interview on CBS, Biden said that House and Senate Democrats expressed their concerns that he would hurt them in the upcoming election. That’s a fair assessment, seeing how he had a disastrous debate, a majority of voters thought he was too old to do the job, and Trump was ahead in virtually all polls.
Also, Biden’s response pretty accurately describes how people make decisions.
Essentially, here is what he said: “I thought I should do one thing, but then I talked to some friends who presented me with arguments for why they felt I was wrong, and, in the end, I changed my mind and did what was best for everybody.”
Well, everybody other than Republicans. Ahead of Biden’s decision, they felt that they were cruising to an election victory that now seems to be slipping away from them.
That’s what this is really all about. By doing the right thing for his country, the president deprived Trump of his preferred opponent.
Biden said as much, noting that the critical issue for him was maintaining democracy.
“I thought it was important,” he stated. “Because, although it’s a great honor being president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do what [is] the most important thing you can do, and that is, we must, we must, we must defeat Trump.”
And Republicans have a hard time dealing with that.
As a result, they have come up with the brilliant idea of calling this perfectly normal event a “coup” (to be fair, a big reason is also that their actual coup failed, and they now want to make it sound as though everybody is doing it all the time).
To sell that idea to their voters, they took only the part of Biden’s interview in which he talked about Democratic leaders expressing their concerns to him while leaving out all that democracy stuff.
“Democrats have already cheated in the 2024 election,” she tweeted. “Democrats literally destroyed Democracy by forcing Joe Biden out of the Presidential race after he received 14+ million Democrat primary votes. They waged a coup against him then installed Kamala Harris who received zero votes.”
Well, somebody bowing out of a race they seem unlikely to win is not “literally destroying democracy.”
Also, it would be really interesting to hear Greene explain this “coup” to somebody.
“There was a coup in my country against President Joe Biden!”
“Wow, so he was toppled and is no longer in power?”
“Oh no, he is still president. He just didn’t want to run again because he would have been 86 at the end of his term and that really hurt his candidacy. He was concerned that the man he beat four years ago and who kept him out of power would win.”
“That makes sense. So that guy attempted another coup then?”
“Oh no. That guy is my hero. It was Biden’s second-in-command, whom he endorsed and for whom he will campaign, who”
“Are you sure you know how coups work?”
Sadly, Republicans do not. They have proven that in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and they are proving it again now.
