Tag: 2024 election

Disunity Ticket

Mike Rothschild

If you believe a small, mostly-Trump worshipping part of social media, dead bear-planting antivaxxer and brain worm guardian Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Donald Trump represents a massive blow to the Democrat [sic] Party establishment that will propel Trump to victory as part of a historical unity ticket when all of Kennedy’s voters embrace Trump and vote for him.

If you believe pretty much everyone else who knows anything about polling, elections, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump, or brain worms; then Kennedy dropping out will have almost no effect on the race. It might even hurt Trump in the long term by saddling him with Kennedy’s considerable baggage.

I’m certainly not an expert on presidential polling, but I am something of an expert on brain worms and antivaxxers. So I can safely say that the real effect of RFK Jr. dropping out is almost certainly going to be closer to zero than the 50 STATE LANDSLIDE being predicted on MAGA social media. Numerous polling firms have already given pretty good reasons why Kennedy’s departure won’t boost Trump much, if it all.

Trying to apply trends in niche social media groups to the population as a whole is always tricky. Most people, Democrats and Republicans alike, think Kennedy is an irrelevant weirdo, to the point where the Harris campaign wanted nothing to do with him. There might be some crossover between the two in the health freedom/Tucker Carlson community, full of people who think vaccines are poison, seed oils are worse than Hitler, an all meat diet will keep you alive forever, skin cancer isn’t real, and the medical establishment’s job is to keep you fat and sick. Some might even believe Trump is going to declassify all the files about the assassinations of both JFK and RFK – though, of course, Trump could have blown the doors off the “deep state” conspiracy any time while he was already president, and never did.

The “Make America Healthy Again” crowd is loud, but small – and while they might like both Trump and RFK, they were already overwhelmingly going for Trump. And again, most other people think these folks are creepy weirdos who are obsessed with meat, genitals, seed oils, and assassinations.

So I wanted to focus specifically on the conspiracist community’s reaction to Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump, and why a Trump/Kennedy marriage is much more likely to end in disaster than in triumph. Putting the two together might seem like a thumb in the eye of the Democratic Party establishment, but in reality, Trump and Kennedy are a poor fit, with fan bases that want different things and don’t especially like or trust each other. And Trump and Kennedy themselves were sniping at one another on social media as recently as a few weeks ago. So here’s why a Trump/Kennedy match is more likely to be a disunity ticket than a magical rocket ride for Team Humanity:

Kennedy’s campaign was already toast: Joe Biden dropping out and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris had already taken almost all the wind out of Kennedy’s sailboat, picking up scores of disaffected Democrats who mistakenly believed Robert F. Kennedy’s son was the next great Democratic standard bearer. Kennedy’s polling cratered, and Harris’s rose almost exactly as much. Beyond that, Kennedy’s campaign was broke, and had struggled to attract anything but negative attention for his bizarre antics. There’s just simply not many people in his camp to actually flip from him to Trump, and as we’re about to see, most aren’t going to do it anyway.

Most RFK Jr. voters supported him because he WASN’T Trump: the biggest reason so many people got behind Kennedy in the first place is that he was supposedly fighting back against the idea of the “uniparty” – a Democratic and Republican establishment that had total control over elections, politics, and governing. While he was nominally a Democrat and was trying to get into Democratic primaries, he was much more anti-establishment (or as least as anti-establishment as a Kennedy can be) in general, not conforming to the rigid doctrine of either party and making no secret of his displeasure with what used to be the part of his father and uncle.

And his supporters have acted accordingly – RFK Facebook groups and Reddit threads have been full of Kennedy voters declaring how they feel betrayed, lied to, used, and incredibly confused. Many are already saying they’ll still vote for him (which he had asked voters to do in states where the winner is all but assured), while others are declaring they’ll vote for other third-party candidates, or just not vote. And every single influencer who has proclaimed Trump/Kennedy to be a “unity ticket” was already a Trump supporter, and is basically wishcasting. A few are saying they’ll go over to Trump, but it’s hard to tell if they weren’t already going to vote for Trump anyway, they just liked what RFK had to say about vaccines. Speaking of which…

Operation Warp Speed should be a red line: This, at least to me as someone who follows the “health freedom” community, should be the ultimate deal breaker. Donald Trump has claimed he is the “father of the COVID vaccine,” and has taken credit for the speedy development and availability of COVID vaccines just a year into the pandemic. Truth be told, it’s the only thing he got right about COVID, and it’s probably just because it had a cool name.

Kennedy, on the other hand, has made a career out of selling false and dangerous claims about inoculations, and called the COVID shot “the deadliest vaccine ever created,” among other insane conspiracy theories about the virus being “engineered” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Kennedy-funded activist groups were taking vaccine challenges to the Supreme Court as recently as June. The vaccine was becoming a sticking point for Trump supporters who ALSO believe it’s a poison death shot, as evidenced by the many times people like Alex Jones twisted themselves into knots defending Trump while “being concerned” about the shot.

Kennedy is already touting Trump as the candidate who can “make America healthy again.” Given that Trump is one of the most physically unhealthy presidents in American history, that seems unlikely. But ultimately, this should strangle any sort of Trump/Kennedy union. If you back Operation Warp Speed, you can’t support Kennedy, and if you support Kennedy, you can’t back Operation Warp Speed. We all know conspiracy theorists excel at finding space in these sorts of logical nightmares, but if Trump is behind a genocide jab, and Kennedy endorses Trump, what does that say about Kennedy? Nothing good, I’d imagine.

Kennedy has nothing to offer Trump except baggage: given that Kennedy has no real base of supporters other than people who mostly already hate both parties and won’t vote, what value add does he represent? It gets him a little bit of media coverage, and maybe a fraction of his voters, but the cost is going to be high: Trump is now saddled with a ton of baggage he’s not going to want, related to Kennedy’s past drug use, erratic behavior, insane statement, and conspiracy theories. Any major right-wing influencer who had expressed support for Kennedy, most notably Joe Rogan, has already been batted down by angry MAGA believers and browbeaten into submission.

And Trump endorsing Kennedy on social media is raising some really uncomfortable questions about the Vice Presidential candidate he already picked, who has a massive train of weird baggage himself. There’s pretty much no chance Trump admits the Vance pick is a disaster and drops him, and Kennedy would be a massive drag as a VP for Trump anyway, putting an unstable weirdo front and center in a race where there already too many unstable weirdos. So what are we even doing here?

Ultimately, listen to what Kennedy supporters are telling us – they almost entirely hate both parties, hate Big Pharma, hate the vaccine, and hate how a few groups control the media and politics. There’s nothing antiestablishment about Trump at all, other than the fact that Trump supporters think everyone hates them. Maybe Kennedy brings a few people over with his new message of “Make America Healthy Again,” though even that’s as cynical and see-through as it gets. And any Kennedy supporter who believes that Trump would “pay back” Kennedy for his support with a cabinet post is kidding themselves.

So no, there won’t be a “unity ticket” running on making seed oils illegal and nut-sunning mandatory. Trump will trot Kennedy out as a prop a few times, then the uncomfortable questions will start coming, and Trump will pretend he’s never met Kennedy. And the final act of a long, strange, and increasingly tragic story will have been written.

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There is No Couch

Mike Rothschild

JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio and Republican nominee for vice president in 2024 did not have sex with a couch and write about it in his book.

Moving past the idea that this is a sentence one has to write in the year 2024, we can start to talk about why anyone thinks he did, why some conservatives and journalists are getting upset about it, and what it all means for the strangest election of all time, or at least the strangest since the election or 2020.

In mid-July (or maybe it was sometime in 1887, it feels like it’s been that long), a Twitter user who goes by @RickRudesCalves tweeted the following:

“can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

Other than being named after the leg muscles of the late WWE Intercontinental Champion Rick Rude, there’s not much to go on about who this user is. They’ve chosen to stay anonymous, and there’s no reason to violate that. As for the tweet itself, Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy contains no such passage. People went through the book, quickly found that the reference to the latex glove wasn’t in it, and that should have been that.

But here we are nearly two weeks later, and the Vance/Couch story is pretty much everywhere. It’s been referenced on late night TV, It’s the fodder for more memes and jokes on social media than anyone could possibly count. It’s even jumped the firebreak of normie political speeches, something usually reserved for Trumpian insanity like QAnon, with Democratic vice presidential candidate, MN Governor Tim Walz dropping a “get off the couch” reference in his introductory speech at his first rally for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. When the crowd laughed, he exclaimed “see what I did there!”

We did.

Vance hasn’t responded to the couch allegation, except when he sort of did by making a remark about his wife making him sleep on the sofa if he asked her to come up and speak at a rally, which did nothing to defuse the joke because it was neither a denial nor him leaning into it and defanging it. Also, he used the word “sofa” not “couch,” thereby muddying up the wording of the joke, and proving again that MAGA people don’t know anything about comedy.

The Vance/couch meme has gone on for so long and gotten so far that even journalists and more respectable pundits have said it’s time to retire it, that it’s not funny, that passing it around is akin to spreading misinformation, and that it’s generally beneath the dignity of a presidential election to be discussing a candidate having sex with a couch.

The problem with approaching the Vance/couch story as an actual story is that the Vance/couch story isn’t a story. It’s a joke, intended by its creator to be a joke, and passed around as a joke. Imbuing it with serious solemnity as a piece of a disinformation to be batted down actually makes it funnier. Not only is there a viral joke about the potential vice president fucking a couch, people are actually taking it seriously as something that has to specifically be refuted. Other than maybe the first day when the joke was going viral and it wasn’t clear if the passage was in Hillbilly Elegy, nobody making jokes or sharing memes about it actually thinks he did it. It doesn’t even matter at this point, because the joke is out there, it’s still funny, and getting upset about it only makes in funnier.

But why did it go viral if the people spreading it knew it wasn’t true?

Again, I’ll go back it’s funny. The joke works, and the jokes about the joke work.

But more than that, it works because it fits in with what people believe about JD Vance. Because JD Vance is a weird, creepy, vaguely bizarre human being. He’s endorsed tracking women’s periods to determine if they’d have abortions. He completely flipped on his feelings toward Trump, going from calling him “America’s Hitler” in 2016 to serving as his #2 man on the campaign trail. He’s deeply linked to techno-libertarian weirdo Peter Thiel, who is hellbent on making the world less free and democratic. He’s said multiple times that women who don’t have children should have the power of their vote diluted. He wrote a memoir that was self-serving and full of omissions, about a life he doesn’t seem to have lived. He made a bizarre remark about his wife, who is Indian-American as being a good mother even though she “obviously isn’t a white person.” He’s good friends with a strange collection of racist weirdos and white nationalists, and has endorsed the explicitly racist and antisemitic Great Replacement theory.

And his newest thing seems to be following Vice President Harris around on the campaign trail, giving speeches in cities where she’s holding rallies, to the point of approaching Air Force Two and maybe trying to get on it in Wisconsin. The word you’re looking for there is “stalking.”

This is all very weird, creepy stuff that most normal people find repellent. It’s also the affect of a person who maybe, just maybe, would have sex with a couch and write about it proudly in his memoir.

Again, it’s not believable because it’s true. It’s believable because it seems like it could be true about this particular person, based on what you already believe about them. And the people getting upset about the joke, calling it dehumanizing or disinformation, or just grumping about “decorum” are not only missing the point, they are actively making the joke more alive and vital.

What’s worse than being the subject of a joke about fucking a couch? Being upset that someone else is the subject of a joke about fucking a couch.

Right wing social media has been full of such rumors and myths and conspiracy theories for years. They range from disgusting conspiracy theories like the Sandy Hook shooting being a hoax to transphobic nonsense like Michelle Obama secretly being a man. Many of the same people who extol Trump have spread these rumors as fact, maybe because they believe them, or maybe because enough other people believe them that it’s advantageous to spread them. They’ve been dining off this memetic warfare for years, and now that it’s being volleyed back to them, they can’t handle it.

With the shoe on the other foot, and the Trump campaign unable to shake the label “weird,” these same guys are melting down, flailing in every direction looking for their own version of the couch joke, and failing every time because none of them are funny.

They’re calling Walz “Tampon Tim” because as governor of Minnesota, he signed a law mandating free menstrual supplies in public school. That’s a knee-slapper, for sure. They’re spreading insane conspiracy theories about Harris’s rally crowds being CGI, or echoing Trump’s unhinged claims that President Biden wants to “take back” his candidacy. They’re making up nonsensical nicknames for Kamala Harris that literally nobody other than Donald Trump thinks are funny. And Donald Trump doesn’t think anything is funny.

The couch cope has gotten so bad that it’s led to a pathetic attempt by right wing influencers to create a “Vance/Couch” meme for Walz, with the former president’s equally weird son spreading a limp rumor that the governor was caught drinking horse semen. It didn’t catch on, and the entire attempt smacks of “I know you are but what am I.”

You can’t make something like the Vance/couch joke happen. It has to happen on its own, with a unique combination of humor, virality, and believability. The couch joke was funny, it was written with a fake citation that gave it depth, and most importantly, it was about a guy who you could totally see doing it. And Vance’s lame attempts to run with the joke or the label of “weird” are only making it worse.

Because there is no couch. There is only a very creepy vice presidential candidate who you can totally see bragging about going to pound town with a couch.

The jokes and memes should not let up. Democrats should do more of them, bigger, and bolder. People upset about the joke should stop whining about it, because it makes the joke funnier. And JD Vance, stay the hell away from my sectional.

“You Won’t Have to Vote Again”

Mike Rothschild

As somebody once said, trying to psychoanalyze Donald Trump is like trying to teach hamsters to sing an aria – it will never work and isn’t worth your time.

Sometimes the random stuff he says is really dumb and doesn’t demand analysis to figure out what he’s “really” saying, because he’s saying nothing. Something about sharks and windmills and electric boats, etc. It’s just words that tumble out of an old man’s mouth.

And sometimes the random stuff he says is bone chilling and portentous for an apocalyptic future where America is no longer a free country. Witness Trump’s bizarre and insane comments on July 26th, made when speaking to a summit of Evangelical Christian voters in Florida.

“You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Immediately, Democratic activists and journalists claimed that Trump was telegraphing his intention to make himself president for life and do away with elections, either in principle or entirely, after he wins. “You won’t have to vote anymore…because we won’t have voting anymore, you’ll just have Trump and the people Trump picks to succeed him.”

Not all news outlets saw it that way, of course, leaning into the “he just says stuff” narrative that so many have been relying on for so long. For them, Trump’s remarks were more in line with “You won’t have to vote anymore…because it will be so perfect that Evangelicals will have everything they want.”

Obviously, what Trump meant here is not clear, and really hinges on the exact meaning of the words “have to.” Did he mean “get to” or “need to?” Given that we’re talking about the idea of a dictatorship vs. a democracy, that seems important…right?

It would for any other candidate. But again, hamsters and arias. Trying to figure out what Trump means is usually impossible, because it’s likely he doesn’t know. In this case, however, there is a very good argument to be made Trump shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt about these remarks, because he has already made countless references to him being in office longer than two terms.

Over and over, Trump has publicly endorsed the idea of contravening the 22nd Amendment and running for a third term in office. How would that work, legally? Obviously, he doesn’t know or care. It’s just something he talks about. A lot.

In May, he wondered out loud at the NRA conference, “I don’t know, are we going to be considered three term or two term?” if he won again in 2024. Naturally, his enablers laughed it off as masterful trolling of the overly sensitive media. And maybe it is just trolling and trying to wind up the media to get attention – except he’s been making such comments for years, going all the way back to the last weeks of the the 2020 election.

At a Minnesota rally in August, he “joked” that he wouldn’t come back to the state if he lost it to Joe Biden, “Not for term three, four, five or six.” The next day, he declared that “we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.” And he said it again a month later, telling Nevada rallygoers that should he win in 2020, he’d “negotiate” another term, which he was “entitled to.”

Trump has also expressed his approval of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping awarding himself that country’s presidency for life, talked of being awarded “extra time” in office, and made numerous other allusions to somehow getting or being given more years as president than he’s legally entitled to.

His supporters have done the same. In just a few examples of the unhinged drive that “small government conservatives” have for making Donald Trump their god king, disgraced televangelist spawn Jerry Falwell, Jr. tweeted in 2019 that “I now support reparations — Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup,” a statement Trump tweeted his agreement to. Steve Bannon has claimed, probably rightly, that his audience would be fine with Trump serving a third and even fourth term and then passing the baton off to his sons in the kind of American monarchy that people like Steve Bannon used to oppose. And The American Conservative ran an op-ed just this month that Trump should be able to run for a third term if he wins in 2024 because he’s really popular. That’s the argument.

Obviously, all of this is insane and meaningless. Trump still claims he won the 2020 election (except when he agrees that he lost it) so winning in 2024 would be a “third term” under this entirely non-existent umbrella. There is nobody who can give a president “extra time” or a “redo” or with whom he can “negotiate” more time in office. It should also be noted that other two-term presidents have spoken of hypothetical third terms, including Barack Obama in 2016. Trump has also given interviews where he said he wasn’t interested in a third term, which, again, doesn’t matter because he’s not eligible for one.

And yet…he keeps talking about it. Even if it’s “just trolling” or a “joke,” Trump continues to publicly signal that if he were to win again, he would pull some lever that gave him extra time in office. And given how the Supreme Court has gone off the rails over the last few years, we might find out the 22nd Amendment isn’t quite as clear as we’d like it to be.

But even more than those hypotheticals, Trump has already attempted legal maneuvering to award himself an extra term in office. It was January 6th, 2021 – when a cadre of advisors and influencers followed Donald Trump’s lead and organized a coup attempt to nullify and overturn the results of the 2020 election. Just like Trump’s claims that he was “entitled” to “extra years” in office, he claimed he was entitled to take office again despite losing the election – and his enablers did everything they could to come up with a legal and political framework to make it happen. People died, and America had its first ever election without a peaceful transfer of power.

It’s only absurd and insane until it happens.

So whatever Trump meant by “you won’t have to vote again,” it can’t be decontextualized or swept away. It has to be looked at as yet another reference to our electoral system being thrown out or permanently altered to give one man total control over the government. At some point, there just have to be too many remarks about extra years and third terms and redos and negotiations and being president for life to laugh this off. It’s not a joke, and if it’s meant to be one, it’s not funny.

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Does Donald Trump Actually Think Hannibal Lecter is Real?

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

One of Donald Trump’s signature bits of weirdness in 2024 has been repeated references to the serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter and comparing him to the plight of undocumented migrants crossing the US/Mexico border.

In speeches going back at least to January, Trump has referred to the liver-eating menace – who is fictional – as “legendary,” “the late, great,” “a wonderful man,”

So why is the former (and maybe future?!?) President of the United States talking about a fictional character as if he were real, and about a truly monstrous character being a “wonderful” and “great” guy?

Psychoanalyzing Trump is like trying to get squirrels to sing an aria – impossible and not worth the time. But there are questions here that can be answered through research, and maybe by answering them, we can get at least closer to an answer to the question that can’t actually be answered – what the hell is going with this?

Does Donald Trump think Hannibal Lecter is real?

It’s fairly clear from the context of Trump’s most reported-on reference to the cannibalistic murderer that the former president knows Hannibal Lecter is a character in a movie. During a lengthy ramble at a campaign event in New Jersey in May, Trump went on extended riff about Lecter specifically being a character from The Silence of the Lambs.

“Silence of the Lambs. Has anyone ever seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? “Excuse me. I’m about to have a friend for dinner,” as this poor doctor walked by. “I’m about to have a friend for dinner.” But Hannibal Lecter. Congrats. The late, great Hannibal Lecter…”

Despite being unfollowable and bizarre, this makes it pretty clear that Trump knows Lecter was a character in a movie, and Trump is known for making copious references to movies and music in his speeches – though his pop culture knowledge pretty much has a hard out in the early 90s. He even references Lecter’s final line in the movie, though it should be noted that Lecter is not actually dead at the end of the movie. Hardly the worst of Trump’s factual abuses.

What does Hannibal Lecter have to do with undocumented immigrants at all?

Nothing really, which is why the reference is so baffling. At first, it seemed like the reference stemmed from Trump confusing asylum seekers – ie, people crossing the border because they are fleeing violence and persecution, and are hoping to be allowed into the country for their safety – with asylums for the insane. This is likely a reference to FBI agent Clarice Starling visiting Hannibal Lecter at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and engineering his release. But none of these things or places are real. And insane asylums in general no longer exist in the United States, nor in much of the rest of the world – though Trump has long called for reopening asylums and institutionalizing more people.

Later, Trump would clarify this bizarre story with his remarks at the Republican National Convention, claiming,

“They’re coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. You know the press is always on me cause I say this. Has anyone seen ‘Silence of the Lambs’?” 

Trump is essentially creating a narrative that other countries are dumping their mentally incapacitated felons on us, which is essentially the same rap that Trump used all the way back in 2015 by kicking off his campaign with the false claim that Mexico was sending rapists and killers in the US. Trump has been making the specific insane asylum claim since at least 2023, and nobody has ever found any evidence this is true. Trump has claimed these are “real stories” but never offers proof to support them, because of course he doesn’t.

Is this the first fictional person Donald Trump has talked about as if they were real?

Not at all! Trump constantly talks about people who may or may not exist with the absolute certainty that they do exist, even if nobody can find them. Trump tells so many stories about burly, tough, great men that probably aren’t real coming up to him with tears in their eyes exclaiming “sir!” and regaling him with how great he is that they even have a name – “sir stories.”

Trump has even told stories about specific people who likely don’t exist. One actually has a name – Jim, a “very, very substantial guy” who used to “go to Paris every year with his wife” but no longer goes to Paris because “Paris is no longer Paris.” When Trump started talking about “Jim who no longer goes to Paris” in 2017, multiple journalists went on a fairly substantial hunt for who he was talking about, but nobody could figure it out. Later that year, Trump claimed he was no longer listening to Jim’s badmouthing of Paris, though, again, it’s not clear who exactly Jim was or whether Jim was real.

This type of easy conflation of real and fake doesn’t stop at people. Trump’s New Jersey golf course has a monument to a horrifying Civil War battle called the “River of Blood” that supposedly took place there, though no historical record or expert can confirm that such a battle ever took place. And Trump consistently brags of his winning the state of Michigan’s “Man of the Year” award some time before 2016, though, again, this award does not exist.

Why is he doing this?

We can’t really know why Trump has picked out Hannibal Lecter specifically, but we have established that Trump doesn’t actually think Lecter is real, that he’s linked Lecter to undocumented immigration through an “asylum” connection that’s not real, and that he’s done this kind of conflation before.

But none of those are reasons why he does it. The real reason might be that Trump doesn’t know what the word “asylum” means, and that would make sense.

But there’s another reason why, and it actually lies in Trump’s comments about his comments on Lecter: that the media “goes crazy” when he does it. A former president and current nominee talking about a fictional serial killer as if he were a real and great guy is newsworthy, and Trump knows it. He knows that it will be written about and get the “lying fake news media” all lathered up. And it’s not as if his supporters care, they love this kind of attention for Trump as much as Trump loves it.

So whether Trump thinks Hannibal Lecter is real, wonderful, and deserving of the Michigan Man of the Year award isn’t the point. We can’t really know if he thinks this is all real or not. The bigger point is that this is just another bizarre and awful and racist thing that Trump talks about, and that Trump knows the media will talk about him talking about. Like so much of Trumpworld, the details don’t matter – only the coverage.

Jim who doesn’t go to Paris anymore would agree. If he existed.

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It’s Not a Coup

Mike Rothschild

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The denunciations and conspiracy theories came fast after President Biden announced he was stepping aside from the 2024 election and endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris.

Democratic activists and pro-Biden influencers decried the decision as a coup by monied donors and media figures, disenfranchising the millions of people who had voted for Biden in the 2024 primary. It was nothing less than a mass negation of the 81 million voices who had chosen Biden in 2020, a stab in the back of the most impactful president in a generation, and a seizing of power that went against the very foundations of representative democracy.

Kidding! That was all MAGA-worshipping Republicans who are suddenly very concerned about the sanctity of Democratic voters and stopping insurrections against duly elected presidents.

Yes, the same people who have spent nearly four years claiming Joe Biden was illegitimately elected by 81 million non-existent people are suddenly very angry about the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election. Conspiracy theory influencers and MAGA mouthpieces who constantly call Democrats pedophiles and demons who must be cleansed from the earth are deeply upset that Democratic primary voters aren’t being listened to and nurtured in their “betrayal.” And those voices who were the loudest in supporting an actual attempt at a coup – the January 6th insurrection, where people died and the Vice President was nearly murdered – are now convinced that Biden stepping down of his own volition is a coup that is somehow worse than that actual insurrection (which, of course, was totally fake.)

Like this dude, a Silicon Valley billionaire weirdo who’s close friends with fellow Silicon Valley billionaire weirdo Elon Musk, might be more convincing in his attempt to apply a “Stab in the Back Myth” to Biden if he hadn’t just spoken at the Republican National Convention claiming that, among other things, Biden “provoked” Russia into invading Ukraine.

How can a person believe that January 6th wasn’t a real insurrection, but Joe Biden being convinced to step aside was? Isn’t this just hypocrisy of the highest order? Or are they really concerned for the future of democracy and feeling like what the Democrats did to him was wrong, even if they don’t like him?

If you’re confused, that’s the point. They don’t actually mean any of this, and none of it is meant to make sense.

The concern, the fear for the future of democracy, the outrage on behalf of Biden voters: it’s all an act. Not a single MAGA influencer or politician actually thinks the nomination was “stolen” from Biden, nor do they care even one bit about the potential disenfranchisement of Democrats. They would rather see Democratic primary voters lined up and shot than be taken seriously in their grievances. Do you seriously believe that people utterly obsessed with passing laws to make voting harder and more exclusive actually care about making votes count?

The people who would literally die to support a president who would never willingly give up power are pretending to decry a president willingly giving up power.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible for people to hold two contradictory beliefs – that Joe Biden is a fake president whose real election is being overturned. That sort of cognitive dissonance is common among conspiracy theorists, with one of the most famous examples being a survey of 9/11 truthers who answered yes to believing both that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when US Special Forces killed him in 2011, and that he’s still alive. Ultimately, the details of conspiracist belief can contradict each other because they’re all made up. Barack Obama could be an incompetent bumbling idiot while also being an evil genius who spent decades pretending to be American with nobody figuring out because both beliefs are fictional, and based on nothing other than wishful thinking.

The Trump supporters claiming that the Democrats ousted Biden in a coup, on the other hand, don’t believe any of it. Their outrage stems not at all from sympathy for pro-Biden Democrats and entirely from wanting Biden to stay in the race. Trump was outpolling Biden in numerous critical swing states, and had driven the Democratic electorate into a kind of apathy that almost certainly portended another Trump victory, and what would then likely be his complete takeover of American society.

With Biden out and Harris presumably in, these people are going to have to completely revamp their approach to winning what had been a moribund election that had seemingly been dragging on for years.

They were adamant that Biden stay in the race because they believed he’d lose. And now that he’s out of the race, they’re pretending those beliefs stemmed from genuine concern for the democratic process, rather than owning the libs and pleasing Trump. In fact, Republicans care so little for Biden’s actual presidency that many are demanding he resign right now rather than play out the last five months of his term.

Yes, the people who still think Biden isn’t the real president want Biden to end his fake presidency because he won’t get the opportunity to be real president again.

This is pure insanity that is not designed to cohere on any level. In fact, there is nothing undemocratic about a candidate making a decision to step back. He can’t be forced to run for president, and if he’s changed his mind, then he can do that for whatever reason.

The only thing anyone needs to know about the right-wing outcry of a “coup” is that it’s meaningless and designed to drive a wedge between Democrats who are now, ironically, more united than at any time during the last year. Republicans are panicking, and it’s transparently obvious.

Nobody knows what happens next, how Harris will do against Trump, or what other surprises this utterly insane election cycle has in store. But one thing we can all agree on is that people who cheered January 6th and called Biden’s stepping aside a coup are hypocrites who can safely be ignored. They are lying to their followers and trying to drive Democrats to distraction with their trolling.

The featured picture of this piece is of the coup of 18 Brumaire, the bloodless revolution of 1799 that ended the French Revolution and brought Napoleon to power as a dictator. That was a seizure of power in a non-violent way that soon led to two decades of brutal war all over Europe.

Joe Biden walking away is a candidate for office deciding he didn’t want to be a candidate for office anymore. It wasn’t a stab in the back, it wasn’t an abrogation of voter wishes, and it definitely wasn’t a coup.

But they know that already.