If this is a coup, then every pope is elected in a coup - Washington Examiner

In the space of a week, people tried to take out both candidates for the presidency of the United States. On Saturday, July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks tried and failed to assassinate former President Donald Trump with a bullet at a rally in Pennsylvania. On Sunday, July 21, a statement on President Joe Biden’s X account announced that he would not seek renomination but would complete his term as president. Shortly afterward, a second statement endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.

The president was not seen in public from Wednesday, July 17, to Tuesday, July 23. His team said he had a mild case of COVID. On Wednesday, July 24, he delivered a 10-minute address from the Oval Office. Biden confirmed that he would not run again but did not tell the public why he was quitting, or how he had reached his decision, or what had changed since July 12, when he had told a rally in Detroit, “I am running and we’re going to win.”

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the Republican nominee for vice president, calls this a “coup.” You can see what he means, but it isn’t. The primary meaning of “coup,” the OED says, is a “sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government.” This is not what is happening. The leaders of a political party’s major factions, Nancy Pelosi’s Californians, Barack Obama’s Chicago-on-the-Potomac, decided to run a different candidate in November. The government remains in place. No laws have been broken. If this is a coup, then every pope is elected in a coup.

Habemus candidatum. The media equivalent of a puff of white smoke from the Vatican chimney indicates that the factions of the Democrats’ secret conclave have reached consensus. We are so accustomed to the corporatist fusion of political parties with government that we mistake one for the other. Government is bound by law. Political parties are free to make the rules up as they go. In 2016, making the Republican nomination process more democratic allowed party members to pick Trump over the heads of the party’s leaders. In 2024, making the Democratic nomination process less democratic allows the party’s leaders to pick a new nominee over the heads of the party members. Who knew that the “smoke-filled room” is still open for business?

This is an insult to the Democrats who endorsed Biden in an uncontested primary, but they should be used to being taken for fools by now. It meets the secondary definition of “coup”: “an instance of successfully achieving something difficult” — providing, that is, the new consensus around Harris was what the plotters wanted. It’s rumored that Biden, or whoever operates the presidential X account, endorsed Harris to spite his assassins. Or perhaps the assassins had no choice. The 2020 voters elected Biden in the knowledge that, should the presidential brain turn to porridge, Harris would take over. Anyway, the donors seem fine with her as the nominee. All perfectly legal, all perfectly revolting.

We complain that nothing works in America, that the government is ossified and the infrastructure collapsing, but the media-industrial complex is running in perfect order. For four years, most of the media lied to us about Biden’s physical and mental health — right up to the moment when they broke the news that he was a vegetable. The pivot from telling us “Harris is a hopeless candidate” to “Harris will save America” was breathtaking. Of course, it’s all lies. Anyone who believes it, let alone votes for it, gets what they deserve.

Perhaps the government is working better than we think. A president, barely there on a good day, goes AWOL for the best part of a week. The system runs on regardless. Like the media’s surreal pivot, this is a kind of transparency. All you have to do is look, if you can stomach it. The presidency was created with the powers of an elected monarch. It has become a symbol. Charles III takes a long weekend all the time.

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Swap one symbol, and it gets easier to keep swapping them. Rome had four emperors in A.D. 69. Britain had three prime ministers in 2022. I suspect that we have seen only the first step of Biden’s managed withdrawal. If Harris is the nominee now, it’s logical that she should go to the DNC in Chicago as the president. If she isn’t by then, she might not be the nominee by November. Again, all perfectly legal and all perfectly revolting.

In “Federalist No. 10,” James Madison defined a faction as a small group “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” That was in 1787. Today, both parties claim to believe their passions and interests are identical to those of all people. It is transparently obvious that they are lying. This is the only transparency we will ever get. Soon, there will be nothing to see.