The people most upset by efforts to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, after Biden and his immediate family, are in the Trump campaign. Donald Trump’s strategy is built around around portraying him as strong and virile, in counterpose to President Biden’s image as old and weak. This strategy importantly concedes most of Trump’s flaws, while subsuming them into a rubric of strength. “Trump, whatever his countless liabilities as a candidate, would be cast as the dauntless and forceful alpha, while Biden would be painted as the pitiable old heel,” reports Tim Alberta.
Naturally, having to face a different candidate, one who is consistently able to speak contemporaneously in complete sentences, rankles the Trumpists. And in keeping with the general MAGA precept that any political action that impedes Trump’s objectives is an elite coup, they are complaining that replacing Biden would be undemocratic.
Some of this backlash manifests as a resentment of the news media for jumping on the Biden health story now, after failing to treat Biden as a near-invalid since 2020, as conservatives prefer to do. Jason Willick, a conservative columnist at the Washington Post, claims the media’s “reversal” has been “so sudden, so violent, so herd-like in its uniformity” that “part of me wants to see Biden overpower the noisy hysterics who closed ranks around him out of fear and are now fleeing for the same reason.”
In truth, as Cathy Young documents, the mainstream media has covered Biden’s age closely all along, frequently infuriating Biden in the process. It’s true that both the tone and the frequency of this coverage intensified dramatically after the debate. But the obvious cause is public confirmation of what could only be imputed before. Media coverage of Biden’s health got harsher after he experienced a health emergency in public for the same reason media coverage of Al Qaeda got harsher after 9/11. When major public events take place, the news media often responds with saturation coverage.
And now that conservatives believe Biden is the victim of an unfair cabal, they are trying to formulate arguments for why fairness demands he retain the nomination. The argument formulation process is very much in its embryonic stages — at the moment, they have irritable mental gestures rather than any proper reasons.
“To replace Biden on the November ballot would require the DNC to disregard its primary voters who selected the president as their candidate of choice, and that is after the party purposefully kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. off the primary ballot,” writes Margot Cleveland in the Federalist, “It would be one thing to put aside the outcome of the primary because the party concluded Biden can’t serve as commander-in-chief. But no Democrats seem to be taking that position. All they care about is beating Trump.”
Likewise, Trump defender Batya Unger-Sargon complains in Compact:
The same Democratic elites who, in the name of “defending democracy,” have tried to bar Trump from the ballot, from the presidency, from walking the streets as a free man, are now engaged in a coup attempt against Biden, a duly elected president who won 3,896 delegates in a primary contest, albeit an artificially truncated one. …
You don’t have to love Biden to demand he stay on the ticket as a matter of democratic principle. The elites are doing nothing short of trying to stage a coup against a duly elected president and major-party nominee.
Obviously the registered preference of voters in primaries (albeit with no effective competition) carries a lot of weight. But the explicit rationale for replacing Biden is that his health has deteriorated significantly since the primaries, and certainly since last summer, which was the effective deadline for organizing a legitimate primary challenge.
Nobody would complain about replacing Biden if he died, and presumably few would complain if he fell into a coma. A party has to have some latitude to reconsider its nomination in the event of a health crisis. Parties are necessarily open, but democracy occurs between the parties, not within them.
Now Republicans may deny Biden’s health has deteriorated since 2020, despite clear evidence it has:
And if you accept the Republican belief that Biden has been a vegetable all along, including in 2020, then why can’t Democrats do something about it now? Once they nominate a totally incapacitated person as president (as Republicans claim), they cannot change course? Is “no backsies” a principle of political competition?
So the principle we are left with, as always, is that Trump is entitled to win, and anything that prevents that is cheating.
