MAGA Melts Down Over Mike Pence’s Very Normal Announcement on Biden

On Monday, Mike Pence praised Biden’s decision to end his presidential bid and called for national unity. Despite the normalcy of Pence’s rhetoric, MAGA posters immediately began blasting the former vice president for his supposed traitorousness.

“President Joe Biden made the right decision for our country and I thank him for putting the interests of our Nation ahead of his own,” Pence wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “After the assassination attempt on President Trump and President Biden’s decision to end his campaign, now is a time for leaders in both parties to project calm and send a message of strength and resolve to America’s friends and enemies alike that, whatever the state of our politics, the American people are strong and our American military stands ready to defend our freedom and our vital national interests anywhere in the world.”

The statement was a tame call for national unity (albeit with some jingoism peppered in). Pence biographer Tom LoBianco called it “remarkably normal given the tone of things.”

But Pence has been persona non grata in Trump world since his refusal to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and his post was flooded with replies deeming his banal call for civility further proof of his turncoat status.

The conservative interest group the Association of Mature American Citizens posted, “Praising Biden, pathetic.” Conservative commentator Joey Mannarino said, “This is why we consider you a traitor, Mike. Fuck off.” Various other MAGA accounts left comments like, “Judas Pence has spoken,” “You knew what was at risk by certifying a stolen election yet you did it anyway,” “We are only in this mess because of you, so shut the fuck up,” and so on.

The MAGA outrage over Pence’s quite ordinary statement reveals his own party’s limited appetite for the unity he espouses.

Republicans may be starting to second-guess their party’s pick for vice president.

Much of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, including the decision to tap Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, was structured around attacks on President Joe Biden. But then Biden announced Sunday that he was withdrawing from the presidential race altogether.

Trump campaign officials acknowledged that Trump selected the inexperienced Vance, charged with all his techno-authoritarian ideas, to boost support among their own base, not extend a hand to swing voters, according to The Atlantic. Vance was a symbol of the Trump team’s assuredness that they would win in 2024. Come Sunday, that assuredness appears to be shrinking.

“Most striking thing I heard from Trump allies yesterday was the second-guessing of JD Vance—a selection, they acknowledged, that was [born] of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter,” Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta, who had written the piece about the panicking Trump campaign, posted on X (formerly Twitter).

Trump decried Biden’s decision to drop out in a post on Truth Social, writing that his team would have to “start all over again” and asking to be reimbursed for the cost. At the same time, Vance has set straight to work, calling for Biden to resign from the presidency.

Meanwhile, the Democrats possess a new potential nominee in the form of Vice President Kamala Harris. And as a result, the party had one of the best fundraising days ever.

The MAGA right has a new conspiracy theory about Joe Biden following his announcement to drop out of the presidential race: He is either dead or incapacitated and needs to show “proof of life.”

Many conservative figures are posting that Biden hasn’t made any public appearances in the last few days, especially since he posted his letter to withdraw Sunday. Representative Lauren Boebert jumped on the conspiracy, insinuating that Biden didn’t make the decision himself but that it was made for him due to his diminished mental state.

Boebert wasn’t the only member of Congress claiming that Biden’s absence was suspicious.

Other right-wing figures saw something nefarious in Biden’s signature, saying that it was conspicuously different from how the president usually signs documents.

Right-wing tech mogul David Sacks made a reference to the film Weekend at Bernie’s, where a dead man is propped up and passed off as alive, perfectly summing up what the right thinks about Biden right now.

In reality, Biden has been isolating in his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, after being diagnosed with Covid-19 last week. While the decision to make his announcement withdrawing from the race via social media is unusual, perhaps he hasn’t wanted to make any formal announcements or press conferences from a beach house while sick. In his announcement Sunday, he said he would address the nation later this week. Regardless, conservatives aren’t posting out of any concern for the president: They’re going nuts still trying to process Biden’s decision.

The 2024 presidential race has seen both parties’ nominees bedeviled by concerns about their age and fitness. But after Biden’s decision to step aside on Sunday, Democrats have shed such concerns—and the words of Nikki Haley, who railed against gerontocracy during her campaign for the Republican nomination, have come back to haunt Donald Trump.

Haley was an early observer of the public’s dissatisfaction with both candidates’ ages, going so far as to predict that fortune would favor the party that first dropped their elderly candidate. After losing the New Hampshire primary in January, Haley took a shot at both presumptive nominees, prophesying that “the first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election.”

While the 81-year-old Biden has certainly faced the brunt of age concerns recently, a July ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that 58 percent of Americans saw both Biden and Trump as “too old for a second term.” With Biden out of the race, Haley’s warning is being widely shared by Democrats celebrating the party’s newfound advantage against Trump, who is now the oldest nominee in U.S. history.

Of course, one wonders whether Haley, who has since “strongly endorsed” Trump, maintains her prediction. As to its prescience, we’ll have to wait until the election draws nearer to see.

J.D. Vance has joined the chorus of conservatives who have begun claiming that President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race constitutes a so-called “coup” in the Democratic Party.

In an interview filmed on Saturday with Fox News’s Jesse Watters, a clip of which aired on Fox & Friends Monday morning, Watters asked former President Donald Trump and his newly minted running mate, Vance, the new question plaguing Republicans: “Is it a coup against Joe Biden?” Both of them fumbled their answers.

“Uh, sort of,” Trump said unsure, looking over to Vance for explanation.

At the time the interview was filmed, Biden had not yet dropped out of the race, nor endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump seemed ambivalent about whether switching to Harris would be a coup, while Vance took the opportunity to be more outspoken.

“I think it is,” Vance said. “Look, there’s a constitutional process, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. If Joe Biden can’t run for president, he can’t serve as president. And if they want to take him down because he’s mentally incapable of serving, invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

“You don’t get to sort of do this in the most politically beneficial way for Democrats. If it’s an actual problem, they should take care of it in the appropriate way,” Vance added.

Both Trump and Vance are going to need to get a lot better at answering this question, unless they can resign themselves to the fact that a presidential candidate dropping out is not antidemocratic. Vance’s brief answer failed to explain why an 81-year-old’s decision to opt out of rigorous campaigning and another four-year term, but not resign in the next four months, would constitute a coup.

Across the board, Republicans haven’t seemed to settle on a party line about Biden’s withdrawal, except that they all think it’s totally unfair.

“Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes,” wrote Senator Tom Cotton in a post on X.

MAGA Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also weighed in on X. “There’s a soft civil war happening in the deep state and the elites in power. The Democrats, the IC, and their activists in the media have been lying to us saying there’s nothing wrong with Biden for years,” she wrote. “Next, they start a coup against him demanding he drop out of the race when they couldn’t hide it anymore.”

Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec wrote on X that Biden’s decision to drop out indicated that he’d already been removed from power altogether. “Right now we do not have an elected leader running this country,” he wrote. “The most powerful nation in the world is being run by bureaucrats and a shadow government.”

Trump’s former senior adviser Stephen Miller called it the “defenestration of Biden.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t call it a coup, but he suggested it was undemocratic in a post on X. “Having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president, the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite,” wrote Johnson.

Johnson has been working in tandem with the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, to set the stage for chaos by continuing to insist that Democrats will face a number of legal challenges when getting another candidate’s name on the ballot, a bid that election law experts have firmly disputed. If the Democratic Party were to replace Biden as their party’s nominee, that would be one thing, but he was never the official nominee in the first place.

Following Kamala Harris’s announcement that she is running for president, users on Elon’s Musk X (formerly known as Twitter) found themselves banned from following the vice president’s political campaign account.

When users went to follow @KamalaHQ, the official rapid response page for Harris’s campaign, they were greeted with a message that said they had reached their “limit” and could not follow any more accounts at this time.

This message usually is deployed to prevent spam or “rate limiting,” for instance if one account is following hundreds of others. But it seems that the Harris account is the one being limited, rather than the users’.

An initial search for KamalaHQ on The New Republic’s X account also found that the campaign account is limited. The campaign account showed up in repeated subsequent searches, seeming to suggest the issue is being resolved.

This all may look a little suspicious considering Elon Musk’s growing relationship with Donald Trump. Just last week, Musk promised to donate $45 million a month to help Trump get reelected.

In the past several days, Musk has continued to post right-wing and pro-Trump memes. Following Joe Biden stepping down, Musk retweeted former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy saying, “We’re not running against a candidate. We’re running against a system.”

Musk has also attacked Harris more directly. “Democrats destroy democracy in pursuit of power,” a QAnon-linked influencer wrote with Biden’s resignation letter attached. “The Democratic elite, corporate media, and billionaire donors successfully pressured the candidate chosen by Democratic primary voters to drop out because he’s down in the polls and losing.”

Musk reposted the statement, simply writing, “Exactly.”

On Sunday, Musk also tweeted out a video of Harris saying her pronouns and describing her appearance for accessibility and captioned the post, “Imagine 4 years of this…”

Now that Joe Biden has withdrawn from the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris, Donald Trump wants to change the terms of the next debate.

The Trump and Biden campaigns had agreed to two presidential debates back in May: one on June 27 hosted by CNN and one on September 10 hosted by ABC News. Biden’s horrendous performance in the first debate created a groundswell of opposition that eventually led to his stepping down. But now, Trump is apparently worried enough about Harris to think things should change.

“My debate with Crooked Joe Biden, the Worst President in the history of the United States, was slated to be broadcast on Fake News ABC, the home of George Slopadopolus, sometime in September,” Trump ranted on Truth Social Sunday night. “Now that Joe has, not surprisingly, has quit the race, I think the Debate, with whomever the Radical Left Democrats choose, should be held on FoxNews, rather than very biased ABC. Thank you! DJT”

Trump also complained about being “forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden.”

“Shouldn’t the Republican Party be reimbursed for fraud in that everybody around Joe, including his doctors and the Fake News Media, knew he was not capable of running for, or being, President?  Just askin’?” Trump lamented.

It’s pretty clear that the former president and convicted felon is spooked by having to run against Harris, enough that he wants the next debate to be moved to his home turf, the conservative P.R. channel Fox News. It’s no secret that Trump and his campaign preferred Biden as their opponent, even creating legal plans to prevent Democrats from replacing him on the ticket.

But Trump and the GOP don’t have the “dementia patient,” as Republican operatives have described Biden, to kick around anymore. They’re scared enough of Harris to try to give Trump the advantage of a friendlier debate venue. And perhaps they should be scared: Harris has already given the Democratic Party its biggest fundraising day in years.

In the less than 24 hours since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Vice President Kamala Harris has already begun bringing in the big bucks for the Democratic Party.

Biden announced Sunday that he would be withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race, after weeks of mounting concerns over his age and mental acuity from his fellow Democrats. Moments after he withdrew, he endorsed Harris to be the new Democratic nominee. And it appears that the prospect of a new nominee may have led people to open their wallets.

By the end of the day Sunday, ActBlue, a popular fundraising site for Democratic candidates and causes, posted a surprising update.

“As of 9pm ET, grassroots supporters have raised $46.7 million through ActBlue following Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign launch,” the post read. “This has been the biggest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle. Small-dollar donors are fired up and ready to take on this election.”

By the end of the day, ActBlue had raised more than $50 million dollars, according to an estimate from The New York Times, the third-biggest day for online fundraising in the site’s history.

While not all of that money might’ve gone to Harris, as ActBlue raises funds for the entire slate of Democratic candidates, it indicates a significant upswing in enthusiasm among donors after weeks of turmoil and reports of frozen cash flows into Biden’s campaign.

President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 race on Sunday, caving to increasing concerns over his age and ability to take on another four years in arguably the world’s most critical and tenuous position.

“Over the past three and a half years, we have made great progress as a Nation,” Biden wrote in a statement, citing victories in lowering prescription drug costs, expanding affordable health care, helping veterans, passing “the first gun safety law in 30 years,” and appointing the first African American woman to the Supreme Court.

“I know none of this could have been done without you, the American people,” the statement read. “It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

In a follow-up tweet, Biden announced he is endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

“My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made,” he said. “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats—it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”

The president has effectively opened up the Democratic Party’s nominating process to a near-total free for all, just four months out from the presidential election.

Top Democratic contenders for the final leg of the race include Harris, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, all of whom outperformed Biden in polling match-ups against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Conversation around whether Biden would exit quickly overtook his campaign after a disastrous debate performance against Trump in June. During the match-up, the 81-year-old Biden shocked the nation by repeatedly losing his train of thought, forgetting the softball questions tossed to him, and utterly failing to challenge Trump by any measure of the word.

This story has been updated.

Senator Chris Coons, the national co-chair of Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, said on Friday that the president was “weighing” the viability of his candidacy as more and more elected Democrats call for him to step aside.

“This is an internal party matter and a matter of the campaign that is playing out very publicly,” Coons said at the Aspen Security Forum, an annual security and foreign policy conference, according to The Hill. “I think our president is weighing what he should weigh, which is: Who is the best candidate to win in November and to carry forward the Democratic Party’s values and priorities in this campaign?”

The Delaware Democrat was effusive about Biden’s “exceptional presidency,” and lauded him for his performance during last week’s NATO Summit. “He chaired … meeting after meeting, three days of the NATO summit—strongest NATO has ever been—did a press conference, did campaign events, did campaign rallies, and there are folks still saying he’s not strong enough or capable enough to be our next president. I disagree,” Coons said.

Shortly after speaking, Coons reaffirmed his support for Biden in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “I fully support the President. He’s told me he’s in it to win it,” Coons wrote. “I’m with him 100% because I know he can beat Trump just like he did last time.”

Biden, who remains in isolation after being diagnosed with Covid-19 earlier this week, has made no indication that he intends to withdraw. But he’s reportedly grown “more receptive” to concerns about his reelection chances and has begun some serious “soul searching.”

Meanwhile, on Friday alone, a whopping 11 congressional Democrats called for Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, including Representatives Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico, Kathy Castor of Florida, Morgan McGarvey of Kentucky, Greg Landsman of Ohio, Betty McCollum of Minnesota, Zoe Lofgren of California, Jared Huffman of California, Marc Veasey of Texas, Chuy Garcia of Illinois, Marc Pocan of Wisconsin, and Sean Casten of Illinois.

Also on Friday, New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich became the third senator to call for the president to withdraw.