Trump remains fixated with Biden weeks after he dropped out of the race

During an interview released Tuesday, Trump brought up Biden’s withdrawal from the race two separate times.

Donald Trump is no longer running against President Joe Biden.

That’s been the case for the more than six weeks since Biden bowed to Democratic pressure and withdrew from the race, weeks after his June 27 debate performance amplified long-standing fears among his own party that he could not defeat the former president.

Democrats have eagerly and swiftly moved on, turning their attention toward Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign and the sudden burst of enthusiasm that the ticket swap generated within the party’s base.

But in recent interviews, speeches, and on social media, Trump has regularly returned to the topic of Biden’s sudden withdrawal, describing it as a “coup” while expressing disbelief that the events of late July ever came to pass.

“You know we were up massively by Biden. How would you like to be me?” Trump said at a rally in Michigan last week. “I spent $100 million dollars on fighting him. We weren’t fighting anyone else. We weren’t fighting a vice president. We didn’t even know who the hell she was, and then all of a sudden they say, ‘Joe, you’re losing badly, you got to get out.'”

In an interview released on Tuesday, the podcaster Lex Fridman asked Trump if he would like to see Harris sit for more interviews. “I don’t know,” the former president said. “I can’t believe the whole thing is happening.”

Minutes later, he returned to the topic again in the midst of a meandering response to a question from Fridman about how he would negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, painting a portrait of a world ablaze as Biden stands by.

“He sort of checked out,” Trump said of Biden. “Hey look, you know, you can’t blame him. That was a coup. They took it over.”

The notion that Biden’s decision was a “coup,” though often repeated by Republicans, ultimately doesn’t hold up. If anything, the tortured three weeks that Democratic officials spent trying to convince Biden to drop out illustrated the weakness of modern American political parties and the ability of one person to resist the will of the party’s base.

“You know, there was a coup,” Trump said at a Wisconsin event last week with former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, going on to note Biden’s performance in this year’s relatively uncompetitive Democratic presidential primary. “I’m not a fan of his. He was the worst president. But think of this: He got 14 million votes.”

The previous week, Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that Biden was exhibiting “ANGER at being humiliated by the Democrats” during his speech at the party’s convention. “I don’t know why he gave up, I don’t know why he quit,” Trump wrote.

It’s a dynamic that’s led some Democrats to question whether Trump is personally upset by Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race. Reporting suggests that Trump’s 2024 campaign — a much more disciplined and organized operation than either of his previous campaigns — was designed specifically to beat Biden.

Trump’s campaign, of course, won’t say such things publicly. “It is important to remind voters of what happened with Biden,” Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign spokesman, said in a statement for this story. “There was a political coup by the Democrats to force him out of the race.”

But privately, the tone is a little different. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, told donors that Harris’ ascent was a “political sucker punch” days after she launched her campaign, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post.

“The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden,” Vance said at a fundraiser, according to the recording. “Because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger.”