Coup-Attempting Trump Now Falsely Accusing Democrats Of Conducting One Against Biden
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is taking his long history of accusing others of doing what he himself is guilty of to new heights, now charging Democrats of perpetrating a “coup” against President Joe Biden by persuading him to end his reelection effort.
“It really is a threat to democracy. It was a coup by people that wanted him out,” Trump said Thursday during a lengthy monologue at the start of a news conference he staged at his country club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Three days earlier, he had told billionaire Elon Musk during a discussion they held on his “X” website: “This was a coup of a 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 imagery to describe what had happened. “They just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him,” Musk said.
Trump’s campaign aides did not respond to HuffPost’s queries about Trump’s use of the word “coup” — a word top officials in his campaign have been echoing.
“They’re trying to fight off a coup right now,” Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita said at a July 16 forum at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee — five days before Biden actually announced that he was ending his campaign.
In fact, public pressure by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democratic leaders in no way constitutes a “coup.” That word, though, does accurately describe what Trump himself tried to do leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021.
Using the threat of violence followed by actual violence to coerce members of Congress and his own vice president into awarding him a second term, even though he had lost the 2020 election, is a textbook example of