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MAGA Internet’s Response to Biden Dropping Out Is Dumber Than You Could Have Predicted
Reading Time: 5 minutesPolitics makes for some strange (and cursed) bedfellows., Biden resigns: How the president’s announcement broke the brains of the online right.
As soon as President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he was no longer running for reelection and would endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris, to contest on behalf of the Democratic Party, the takes (and memes) immediately took flight. My colleague Molly Olmstead tracked the Republicans’ most eager talking points: that this whole mess proved Democrats’ unfitness to serve, and that the real election-denying antidemocratic hypocrites were the party leaders overturning the will of Democratic primary voters.
It’s not too surprising to see such rhetoric from Donald Trump’s most fervent loyalists, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson and Sen. Josh Hawley. Or even from prominent reactionaries like Elon Musk and Dave Portnoy. But these takes did not just fall out of the coconut tree—they’d been promulgated for nearly a month straight by the likes of GOP fundraiser and Republican National Convention speaker David Sacks, who’d referred to the Dems’ post-debate panic over Biden’s electoral viability as ‘THE DEMOCRATS’ INSURRECTION AGAINST JOE BIDEN‘ on June 30. It was never a coherent thesis, mashing Sacks’ concern-trolling over Democratic voters’ ‘choice‘ with his contention that the party had functionally rigged challengers like RFK Jr. and Rep. Dean Phillips out of the game. (Reminder: Both challengers were so unpopular nationally that Phillips couldn’t even surpass the number of Gaza protest votes cast in his home state.) But it was a convenient one, furthered throughout July by the likes of allegedly democracy-concerned liars Mike Cernovich and Collin Rugg.
It had also been parroted by conservative media—both the hardcore-Trumpy variety and the more ‘traditional’ types. Right after the debate, the website American Thinker claimed it was ‘orchestrated sabotage of Biden by the Democrat party,’ a take that Laura Loomer reiterated this Sunday. National Review labeled the Dems’ cold feet around Biden a ‘coup‘ just earlier this month, while the Washington Times declared that those very Dems ‘have no respect for the Americans who awarded him the Democratic nomination.’
Here’s where it all gets much weirder, however. The right-wing tinfoil geeks who’ve been crying coup now have found themselves teaming up with some strange partners who all but agree with them: the Biden loyalists who stuck by him throughout the past month and resisted every single call for the president to reconsider his electoral position.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, the ex-progressive who previously used cherry-picked polling to mock anyone calling for Biden’s dropout, dug down on Sunday by evoking the image of ‘blades in our president’s back‘ and stating, ‘People pushed out an honorable man, loving father and a great president before an absolute sleazeball like [New Jersey Sen.] Menendez.’ This was not only an inaccurate point—Democratic leaders had been calling for Sen. Bob Menendez’s resignation even prior to last Tuesday, when the senator was convicted on corruption charges in federal court—but one tailor-made to appeal to Sacks, who commended Fetterman’s Sunday statement. (Fetterman ended up endorsing Harris on Monday.)
The same was true for Ron Klain, the former Biden chief of staff who decried the ‘major Democratic donors‘ hoping that Biden would step aside (also to Sacks’ approval) and only endorsed Harris on Sunday after shaking his fist at ‘the donors and electeds [who] pushed out the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump.’ Liberal techie Christopher Bouzy went so far as to echo the right wing’s comparisons between the 2021 Capitol insurrection and the Sunday announcement, tweeting: ‘What Democrats are doing to Biden & Harris is no different than what Republicans tried to do on Jan 6. The only difference is no one is storming the Capitol Building.’ (Even if that were true, that’s … quite the difference!)
The staunchly blue Palmer Report followed suit on X, saying that ‘the media managed to force Biden out.’ This stance was reminiscent of other commentators who seem to think that white party brokers and major newspapers ‘hounded [Biden] out of office‘ and fomented ‘a mass hysteria event‘ by noting what we all could see for ourselves on the debate stage: that the presidency has aged Biden quite a bit and he can no longer speak extemporaneously or communicate effectively, even on key issues like abortion. Another Biden supporter got ample traction on X by implying that the billionaire troll (and Sacks buddy) Bill Ackman was behind the push to oust Biden because of his prior, brief support for Dean Phillips’ flop candidacy.
This bizarre theorizing managed to bring together an odd collective of folks in our polarized society. Tucker Carlson pal and foreign-policy conspirator Michael Tracey could find comity with the #Resistance’s antagonism toward journalists in braying ‘that the Democratic Party is fundamentally captive to ‘elite’ consensus (media, operatives, donors, etc.),’ only weeks after fearmongering that ‘Dem pundits are instructing Dem officials to secretly anoint a new presidential nominee with zero voter input.’
David Sacks’ All-In podcast co-host—and supposed political ‘moderate’—Jason Calacanis added a dash of targeted conspiracism by zooming in on Alexander Soros (son of big-time Dem donor George Soros) and his endorsement of Harris, asking, ‘Who put you in charge Nepo baby?!‘ Former Trump administration underling Ric Grenell found common ground with John Fetterman and Ron Klain by denouncing ‘calls for elites to dump Joe Biden and ignore the will of millions of Democrat voters.’
What a way to unite the country. Well, except for the fact that Biden’s gradual, monthlong choice to exit the presidential race after that debate was, in fact, a decision taken by listening to the voters. Yes, including those millions of Americans who’d cast their ballots for Biden in the 2020 primary.
For one, it’s telling that many of the most electorally vulnerable Democrats who’d been calling for Biden to step down—among them Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, Michigan Rep. Hillary Scholten, and New York Rep. Pat Ryan—explicitly cited concerns they’d heard from their own state’s voters in the statements explaining their 180 on Biden. For another, an Associated Press poll taken before the Trump assassination attempt found that two-thirds of Democrats surveyed thought Biden should drop out, with only a few having confidence in Biden’s mental acuity. (Even in February, only 40 percent of Dems thought Biden was up to snuff, and they’d already been rather concerned about his age by that point.) The Biden campaign touted strength from small-dollar donors as wealthier donors grew skittish—but the more than $50 million Kamala Harris raised from swing-state small donors on Sunday itself, per the Dem fundraising platform ActBlue, far outstripped the $38 million in small donations Biden claimed to have raised after the debate.
The Never Trump pollster Sarah Longwell tweeted out a thread aggregating the results of 14 focus groups she’d held since the debate—including swing voters, Black Democrats, and Hillary Clinton backers—and found that pretty much every group was scared of Trump, but nervous enough about Biden’s debate performance that they found it hard to image him persisting in the campaign. This, more than anything else, was the key sticking point that exposed Biden’s poor approval among Americans most often inclined to vote blue no matter who, especially Black and young voters. Yes, several of those Dem voters probably cast ballots for Biden in the primary. But that was also a low-turnout, uncompetitive primary, unlike the crowded field over which Biden had triumphed in 2020.
There’s also the timing: All those primary votes were cast before that debate. We’re talking about two completely different electoral vibes here. How else were voters supposed to register their dissent, other than by calling their elected representatives, responding to institutional surveys, withholding their donations, and posting online?
There were fair concerns expressed by Biden-loyal progressives like AOC that the donors who were pushing for Biden to step down also wanted to betray Harris and throw the process to an ‘open convention,’ over fears that America wouldn’t vote for a Black woman candidate (at least, one not named Michelle Obama). Indeed, had more prominent Dems, delegates, and state party leaders not immediately taken to Harris on Sunday, there would have been ample reason to doubt those donors’ and electeds’ intentions all along.
But if those big-money types are going to try to bigfoot that enthusiasm rush from small donors, Dem loyalists, and the 40,000 Black women who joined a Zoom call Sunday to organize for Harris? That would absolutely be a coup of sorts. But thankfully, we’re not there yet. Biden stepped down, and Harris stepped up—and it’s because Democratic voters made it clear that’s what they wanted.
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