Was Biden dropping out of the race a ‘coup’? Experts explain

Democratic elected officials and party insiders for weeks pressured President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race after his widely panned performance in a June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump.

Biden bowed to the pressure July 21, writing in a letter that he was leaving the race. In a social media post that day, Biden also said he was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee.

Democrats quickly rallied behind Harris, and The Associated Press later reported she had secured enough delegates to be the party’s nominee. Republicans described party efforts to replace Biden on the ticket this late in the campaign as a "coup" against the president. The general election is Nov. 5.

"So, the people who have been lecturing us about democracy just orchestrated a coup against the President of the United States of America," a July 21 X post said.

"Joe Biden is out and the Democrats have orchestrated a coup. Where is Joe Biden and who is running this country?" another X post said.

High-profile Republicans, including the top of the party, echoed the criticism.

Fox News host Jesse Watters, in a joint interview July 21 with Trump and vice presidential nominee JD Vance, asked them, "Is it a coup against Joe Biden?"

Trump responded, "Sort of, yeah," before Vance interjected and said, "I think it is."

Vance said Democrats should replace Biden using the Constitution’s 25th Amendment, which provides procedures for replacing a president because of death, removal, resignation or incapacitation.

"If Joe Biden can’t run as president, he can’t serve as president. If they want to take him down because he’s mentally incapable of serving, invoke the 25th Amendment," Vance said.

Other high-profile conservatives also called the Biden move a coup, including RNC Research, an X account managed by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., wrote in a July 21 X post that "Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes. Donald Trump took a bullet for democracy."

Biden faced no major Democrats in the primary elections — only Minnesota U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips, author Marianne Williamson and businessman Jason Palmer challenged him — and he sewed up the nomination in March.

Acknowledging that critics may be using the word "coup" as a rhetorical figure of speech to characterize what Democrats did, we wanted to explore whether Biden’s situation meets the literal definition of the term. Four history and political science experts who have studied coups and political instability told PolitiFact that it does not. 

Biden leaving the ticket may be unusual — no major presidential candidate has dropped out of the race this close to Election Day. And the move has been subject to criticism about whether it ignored the will of millions of Democratic primary voters who cast ballots for Biden as president, not Harris. 

But it doesn’t meet the definition of a coup, experts said. That’s because Biden remains president until his term expires Jan. 20, and he wasn’t removed from the ballot by threat of violence or because of illegality. Replacing Biden on the ballot is not illegal.

"(Biden) was certainly pressured and persuaded — but by arguments, not at the point of a gun," Syracuse University associate political science professor Matt Cleary said.

He said it’s fair to ask questions about how this came about — including whether Democrats hid Biden’s cognitive decline and whether the party followed its own internal rules when selecting the nominee.

"But calling Biden’s decision a ‘coup’ does not clarify anything about all of this. It does not accurately reflect any part of what has happened here," he said.

The word "coup" has several definitions, but in this context it’s short for "coup d’etat," a French term that means the overthrow of the government.

In 2018, PolitiFact rated Pants on Fire Trump’s claim that the Russia investigation was an attempted coup against him. And in 2021 we wrote about whether the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol could be considered a coup — an academic group we talked with said yes.

The University of Illinois’ Cline Center for Advanced Social Research’s Coup D’etat Project defined a coup d’etat as the "sudden and irregular (i.e., illegal or extralegal) removal, or displacement, of the executive authority of an independent government."

The project’s codebook lists five criteria to meet the definition of a coup, Cline Center Director Scott Althaus told PolitiFact in an email. Among them is "irregular means." The codebook said that means initiators must use irregular means — typically by the threat or use of coercion or force — to remove someone from power.

The codebook says that "constitutionally legitimate leadership changes," including "resignations triggered by a loss of popular support" are regular removals and not considered coup events.

"To be considered a coup event, a resignation of a chief executive would need to be connected to threat or use of coercion or force that is illegal or extra-legal," Althaus said. "Social pressure from fellow co-partisans fails to satisfy this criterion."

Three other experts told PolitiFact that what the Democrats did does not meet the definition of a coup.

Erica De Bruin, a Hamilton College associate government professor and author of "How to Prevent Coups d'État: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival," said a fundamental feature of coups that’s missing here is a threat of violence.

"It is also not illegal to put political pressure on an incumbent leader not to run again," De Bruin said. "And Democratic party leaders did not seek to remove Biden from power outside of the regular electoral process, but to convince him to end his campaign for a second term."

New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat agreed with De Bruin.

"A coup is an attempt to unseat a sitting leader and impose, immediately, and usually with violence, a new leader and government. Even an old-fashioned ‘palace coup’ meant assassinating the sitting leader or driving them into exile," Ben-Ghiat, the author of "Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present," which is partly about military coups, said. "So this is not a coup. The reason the Republicans are using this language is they are trying to present Biden and the Democrats as the authoritarians."

Cleary said journalists and partisans on both sides are guilty of misusing the term "coup" and exaggerating each other’s actions, such as "attacks on democracy" and "existential threats."

"To have an incumbent president decide not to run for reelection, especially this late in the electoral calendar, is very unusual. But it is most certainly not a coup," he said.

Cleary said Democrats will likely follow party rules when choosing a nominee at their upcoming convention in August, so there is nothing "extralegal" about replacing Biden on the ticket. Nor was there anything stealthy about replacing Biden, another common element of a coup. It’s been discussed openly for weeks in public, Cleary said.

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