Notes

Politics and the English language: a ‘coup.’ After it became clear that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris would replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for the November presidential election—a role she’ll formally accept at her party’s national convention this week—her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, described it as a “coup.”

The claim quickly became a meme on the American right and—unusually for a Trump provocation—the subject of at least some earnest conversation beyond the right.

Of course, it’s not a coup—on any established meaning of the word: Biden stepped down, albeit under coordinated pressure; the party is uniformly behind Harris—an elite decision, in the first instance, but one that’s proved enormously popular across the party’s tens of millions of members; … and there was no evident threat of violence.

It’s not a coup, but it is—as some Democrats have taken to saying—weird.

It may once have been normal for party insiders to pick U.S. presidential nominees in what journalists have since imagined as smoked-filled rooms; but what’s happened here is unprecedented in contemporary American politics.

It may also be true that Harris has been formally first in line to replace Biden as president since January 20, 2021; but that’s a different thing—with a different process to it—and the last time Harris did run for the Democratic nomination herself, in 2020, she could hardly have done worse.

Now, it seems, her handlers are advising her to play it safe and avoid speaking to reporters, even about the core of her policy platform. That may well change after Harris accepts the nomination and it’s no longer possible for anything to go sideways at the Democratic National Convention. But the weirdness may linger—even if no one’s ultimately done anything wrong.

—Gustav Jönsson