Trump remains fixated on Biden, weeks after dropping out

But in recent interviews, speeches and on social media, Trump has regularly returned to the subject of Biden’s sudden withdrawal, describing it as a “coup” while expressing disbelief that the events of late July had place ever.

“You know we woke up massively to Biden. How would you like to be me?” Trump said at a rally in Michigan last week. “I spent $100 million to fight him. We didn’t fight anyone else. We didn’t fight a vice president. I didn’t even know who the hell she was, and then all of a sudden they said, “Joe, you’re losing badly, you’ve got to get out.”

In an interview released Tuesday, podcaster Lex Fridman asked Trump if he would like to see Harris sit for more interviews. “I don’t know,” the former president. “I can’t believe this whole thing is happening.”

Minutes later, he returned to the topic again amid a meandering response to a question from Fridman about how he would negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, painting a portrait of a world on fire as Biden stood by.

“He kind of checked out,” Trump said of Biden. “Hey, look, you know, you can’t blame him. It was a coup. They took it over.”

The idea that Biden’s decision was a “coup,” though often repeated by Republicans, ultimately does not hold up. In any case, the three tortured weeks that Democratic officials spent trying to convince Biden to drop out illustrated the weakness of modern American political parties and the ability of one person to resist the will of the party’s base.

“You know, it was a coup,” Trump said at an event in Wisconsin last week with former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, further noting Biden’s performance in this year’s relatively uncompetitive Democratic presidential primary. “I’m not a fan of his. He was the worst president. But think about this: he got 14 million votes.”

The previous week, Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that Biden showed “anger at being humiliated by Democrats” during his speech at the party convention. “I don’t know why he quit, I don’t know why he quit,” Trump wrote.

It’s a dynamic that has led some Democrats to wonder if Trump is personally upset by Biden’s decision to drop out of the race. After all, the reporting suggests that Trump’s 2024 campaign — a far more disciplined and organized operation than any of his previous campaigns — was designed specifically to defeat Biden.

The Trump campaign, of course, won’t say such things publicly. “It’s important to remind voters what happened to Biden,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement for this story. “There was a political coup by the Democrats to force him out of the race.”

But in private, the tone is apparently different. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, told donors that Harris’ rise was a “political punch” days after he launched his campaign, according to a tape obtained by the Washington Post.

“The bad news is that Kamala Harris doesn’t have the same baggage as Joe Biden,” Vance said at a fundraiser, according to the recording. “Because whatever we have to say, Kamala is much younger.”