Swords Around the Throne
By Todd Davis
The Internal Coup on President Biden
Democrats orchestrated a palace coup removing President Joe Biden. In a summer of remarkable political events, which included an assassination attempt on Republican nominee Donald Trump, a slow-moving coup initiated by the party that claims to be the “defenders of Democracy” has to be the most shocking political event of this century.
And make no mistake, the removal of Joe Biden was a coup. Biden did not want to go. He resisted and fought against attempts to remove him for weeks. In the end, he could not resist the coalescing power of money and media; the two factors that make all the difference in American politics. Joe Biden had to leave or he would have been destroyed by those who claimed, only a month ago, that he was the best man to lead America over the next four years. How did we get here?
Decisive Debate
Trump and Biden held a debate that proved decisive in light of unfolding events. Biden’s performance was described in varying degrees of language that is anathema to a political candidate; trainwreck, mentally incompetent, slack-jawed, feeble. His performance was so bad that immediately after the debate, friendly media outlets like CNN turned on Biden pointing out the President’s infirmity as it could no longer be hidden from the American public. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen.
Did the media take a moment of self-reflection to review that this was the same man they had been running cover for and loudly denouncing any impingement on Biden’s mental acuity as right-wing propaganda? Of course not. Without missing a beat, the media began floating the idea of replacing Joe Biden. Many felt there was no way Biden could recover from this showdown with Trump. The images were too extreme, strength vs weakness, leadership vs lethargy.
Damage Control
The Biden campaign tried to run damage control by scheduling an ABC interview with Lester Holt. Holt, not exactly a hostile journalist, was the chance for Biden to reassure his voters and independents that he could defeat Trump. Instead of alleviating fears Biden did just enough to remain a viable candidate while still demonstrating that didn’t understand how poorly he fared in the spotlight next to Trump. He continued to come off as cranky and old. Biden is the type of senior citizen no one in the neighborhood likes, yelling, pontificating, and dwelling in a reality that existed decades prior.
Biden had another high-profile opportunity at the NATO summit in July to convince his party and the media (we won’t mention his voters because as we will see voting has little to do with how the Democrats have chosen their nominee) that he could function, in some way, as President of the United States and a candidate that could beat Donald Trump. That didn’t go well. To say the least.
The President introduced Ukrainian part-time dictator and part-time Western darling Zelensky as Vladimir Putin then followed that up by introducing his Vice President, Kamala Harris, as Donald Trump. A sequence so bizarre and awkward that it felt like a Saturday Night Live skit, this likely sealed Biden’s fate in the eyes of the Democratic Party power brokers. Only a day before, George Clooney published an opinion editorial in the New York Times calling for Biden to step down from his presidential run. Clooney, who was only too happy to hold an event raising tens of millions in campaign donations for Biden a month earlier, had turned on the President. What does it matter what an actor who hasn’t had a movie of note in a decade thinks some might ask? More than appears on the surface because Clooney represents the donor class; the real power behind the throne.
The Magic Bullet
A bullet decided Biden’s fate within the Democratic Party. A bullet meant for Donald Trump. During a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks managed to avoid local law enforcement and the Secret Service and get off multiple rounds from an elevated vantage point 150 yards away from the former president. One of the shots hit Trump in the ear causing him to take cover behind the bulletproof facade around the stage. After the counter sniper team neutralized Crooks, Trump rose to his feet, telling the agents around him to “Wait!” then urged the crowd to,
Fight! Fight! Fight!
Trump, bleeding and defiant, raised his fist in the air underneath Old Glory, a photograph that will be remembered as one of the most iconic in American history. If the Marines raising the flag over Mount Suribachi was the defining image of the greatest generation, Trump with a raised fist under the flag will define this one.
For Biden, this series of events represented a worst-case scenario politically. Trump, bloody and unbowed after an attempted assassination played into the campaign differences; Trump was strong and Biden was weak. Accentuating this days later during the Republican National Convention there was a split screen of Trump striding into the arena like a professional wrestler and Biden hobbling down the steps of Air Force One, supposedly sidelined by Covid. The bullet didn’t take out Trump, but the chain reaction it set off fatally wounded Biden’s campaign.
Covid and the Coup
Mere days after the attempt on Trump’s life, Republicans gathered in Milwaukee for their convention. This was the final straw for those looking to keep Trump out of power. The RNC was inclusive, diverse, and unified. Republicans were asking for your vote regardless of your color, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation. While past RNCs looked like a bunch of old white men, this one featured speakers like Amber Rose, a Black female social media influencer with over 20 million followers. If it wasn’t clear before, now there is no doubt that this was no longer the party of Willard Romney and John McCain. This was the MAGA party. The party of Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Amber Rose.
For Democrats, those in power anyway, this was all too much. It had become obvious to even the most partisan; Joe Biden had no chance to beat Donald Trump. And Democrats weren’t going to let anything as inconvenient as the political process and millions of voters who cast their choice for Joe Biden in the primary to hold them back. Biden would have to be replaced, whether he wanted to go or not.
Joe Biden didn’t want to go. He repeatedly said so privately and publicly. Lower-ranking Democratic politicians openly called for him to leave the race. Hints were dropped by Barack Obama, Hakeem Jefferies, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, who went to the White House and tried to convince Biden his reelection wasn’t going to happen. High-dollar donors, the blood that sustains a political party, demanded that Biden be removed and refused to donate any further money to his campaign. Reports circulated that Biden had only managed to pull in 25% of his finance goals for July.
Then Covid happened. Again. Biden was taken off the campaign trail with a case of Covid, his third. That’s the cover anyway, I don’t think anyone believes Biden has Covid. Democrats wanted him out of the way, needed him out of the way, to make the change. Biden’s days were numbered; he wasn’t going to survive the weekend.
And he didn’t.
Are Tweets Historical Documents?
Biden dropped out. On Sunday, July 21st. Via tweet. Or at least someone tweeted out from Joe Biden’s X account that he was withdrawing from the race and not seeking reelection. We know it wasn’t Joe Biden because there is no chance Biden has ever sent a tweet. Isn’t this the most important tweet, from a historical view, of all time? How exactly do you capture this and archive this document for future Americans? Screenshot in the presidential library?
Regardless, Biden is gone and because this was a coup, it took about 15 seconds for Democrats to fall in line behind Kamala Harris. The millions of voters who selected Joe Biden in the primary? They don’t get a say. Nancy Pelosi, the conductor of this coup, enforced the wishes of Wall Street money, big corporations like Disney, and Hollywood oligarchs to line up behind Harris. Within 48 hours of announcing Harris as the Democratic nominee, $100 million flooded into Harris’ campaign war chest. Where did that money come from? How did it get transferred so quickly? These funds were lined up days ago, waiting for the moment Biden was deposed.
Money. It’s all about the money. Joe Biden was forced out through a combination of carrots and sticks. Go now, with some dignity or we are going to embarrass you. We might 25th Amendment you. What if we release that interview where it was determined you were too feeble-minded to stand trial for holding classified documents? Perhaps most importantly, we are cutting off your campaign funds. Those donors you thought you had? They are gone. A sitting president, democratically chosen by voters, was replaced by nebulous figures with nine-figure bank accounts. He was strong-armed by the party figureheads, Nancy and her hatchet squad. In America, we’ve never seen anything like this before.
Ask No Questions, Hear No Lies
What is more disturbing, the coup, or the fact that we will never get any answers to the questions surrounding it? After three weeks of somewhat fair presidential coverage, the media is back in the bag for the Democrats. It has less than zero desire to probe what happened in the corridors of the White House. The narrative already hit overdrive on promoting Kamala as the greatest DEI hire in the history of DEI hires while attempting to scrub inconvenient facts from her record; her failure at the border, her failure in Ukraine, her failure as a presidential candidate when she had to face voters instead of rigged delegates. Remember, Kamala never even made it to Iowa, the first state to vote, the last time America had a look at her.
Sadly, this sums up the entire Biden Administration. No one ever did a deep dive into why everyone dropped out of the race, rigging the results in the 2020 Democratic Primary so Joe Biden would beat Bernie Sanders. What was promised and to whom? A half dozen documentaries have been made about the so-called January 6th “insurrection” but not one person has made one on the events leading to Biden’s first nomination. Is anyone going to cover the events preceding and following the coup of Biden three and a half years later? Spoiler alert – no.
More and more, the Democratic party and the apparatus surrounding it have taken on the attributes of a religion. Had the assassin’s bullet taken President Trump’s life, there is no way Republican politicians would have simply been allowed to choose Nikki Haley. The Republican base, you know, the voters, would not have stood for it. There would have been ugly drag-out fights, much like there was over funding for Ukraine because that is how democracy works.
No such guardrails or obstructions exist within the Democratic Party. Everyone must believe the same thing, like a religious creed. Every Democrat must agree with the party platform. Any deviation will get you canceled. The ramifications are momentous in a political system that has only two parties; it is how the labor left and the anti-war left have been destroyed and replaced by the Alphabet mafia and forever-war neoliberalism. America needed people like RFK Jr. in the Democratic Party. They no longer have a political harbor.
Lying to the End
Biden eventually spoke to the country on July 24th, or at least that is when his farewell address was broadcast. Almost certainly prerecorded, (take 12, Mr. President) Biden stayed true to form until the end lying to America, gaslighting a nation he promised to unite and instead divided to such an extent it’s hard to imagine us ever becoming whole again. He promulgated the lie he told in his debate with Donald Trump that no American serviceman had died under his watch by saying he is the first American president in decades to leave office in peace. Mr. Biden, you are lying. We have never been closer to nuclear war than we are now. Biden has pushed NATO into a war with Russia that has gotten hundreds of thousands killed, including dozens of Americans serving as either volunteers or special advisors. Biden has sustained the Israeli War in Gaza, a war that now more resembles ethnic cleansing than it does a hot conflict between adversaries.
It is the audacity of these lies that infuriates the public. Biden’s claim that he shored up the border. Can we find anyone in America who believes that? Biden claims he presided over a historically robust economy. No one who shops for their own grocers believes that. Among his many failures, Biden Inflation will be the one that is likely remembered the longest.
Biden will be briefly canonized by the media; Saint Biden making a sacrifice for big D democracy. That is until Harris has to face the pressures of campaigning, then Biden will be thrown under the bus as the architect of the many Democratic policy decisions that have crippled the United States. Border Invasion? Oh, that was Joe Biden. Inflation? Joe, again. Blame Joe, what could Kamala do about it?
Joe Biden has been removed from office, so who is running the country? Who ran it for the last three years? America is a rich nation loaded with natural resources, undeveloped land, and some of the best, most generous people on the planet. We can survive three years of Joe Biden. We can survive a coup of Joe Biden. We can even survive a Kamala Harris presidency if it comes to that. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Empires can only endure so many dishonest, incompetent leaders before they are destroyed from within. Decades from now, historians will point to one turbulent month in July when everything changed in America. A coup was perpetuated on the presidency. And nothing was ever the same again.
