Nikki Haley’s Old Warning Haunts Trump as Biden Bows Out

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.