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 an autogolpe, or “self-coup,” in which a sitting political leader attempts to stay in power illegally.
Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer who defended the U.S. Capitol and lawmakers the day Trump sent a mob of his followers there to block certification of Biden’s election victory, said the use of the word “coup” to describe how Democrats convinced the president not to run for reelection is offensive.
“Under no circumstances can one equate Trump’s attempted coup on January 6th to President Biden withdrawing from the race. I was there that day. I know what happened,” Dunn said. “It shows how out of touch with reality the former president and his buddy Elon Musk are. This is dangerous language.”
Trump, though, since he began his first campaign in 2015, has regularly accused others of doing what he himself has done — and in the process brought the psychology term of art “projection” into the vernacular.
During the first general election debate in 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton pointed out Trump’s many public statements praising Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his willingness to accept Putin’s help in the election. She called him Putin’s “puppet.”
Trump’s response: “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.”
Earlier that year, anticipating his campaign-ending loss in the Indiana Republican primary, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz delivered a 12-minute televised diatribe against Trump, describing his reflexive comeback to any accusation.
“This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies,” Cruz said. “In a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying. … Whatever he does, he accuses everyone else of doing.”
“He knows he has been assailed for trying to subvert the democratic process, so he wants to make the same charge against Democrats.”
– David Axelrod, former adviser to Barack Obama
For the past three years, Trump has claimed that the various federal and state-level prosecutions against him for his coup attempt and other actions were ordered by Biden from the White House. Trump, who is, as of May, a convicted felon, has no evidence for those claims — but there is extensive evidence that Trump tried to get the Department of Justice to prosecute both Clinton and Biden.
David Axelrod, the Democratic consultant who helped Barack Obama win the White House in 2008, said Trump’s lies about a “coup” to remove Biden could well be him laying the groundwork for challenging an election loss in November.
“I think it is to set up the predicate that there is something untoward or illegitimate about the election, and will be amplified if he loses,” he said. “But it also is the thing that Trump always does. It’s projection. He knows he has been assailed for trying to subvert the democratic process, so he wants to make the same charge against Democrats.”
Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said it could simply be Trump trying to attract hard-core Biden supporters. “He’s trying to win over voters who were sympathetic to Biden and believe he got a raw deal. It’s a bank shot with long odds,” Newhouse said.
Former top GOP strategist Stuart Stevens, meanwhile, thinks people have already wasted too much time parsing Trump’s language on the matter, 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.
