VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Coup upon coup upon coup

In March 2020, all the major Democratic primary candidates abruptly, mysteriously, and in near unison withdrew from the presidential race, ceding the nomination to Joe Biden.

Yet Biden had lost the first three races in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada — and won his first victory only in South Carolina.

Suddenly, on the eve of the Super Tuesday mega-primaries, the candidacies of front-runner Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and others simply evaporated.

The fear of a socialist, front-runner Sanders, winning the nomination — and thus an inevitable landslide loss to incumbent Donald Trump in the general election — had prompted the donor class and shadowy political insiders to act.

And they did so by choosing a perceived moderate, old Joe Biden from Scranton. That required the coerced departures of all his far-left rivals, who had hitherto performed much better than Biden in the primaries.

Now front-runner Biden still displayed obvious symptoms of serious cognitive decline that had seemed only to mount through the 2020 campaign. And his dementia continued to accelerate during his first three years as president.

Biden had deceitfully promised to conduct a healing campaign and a unifying presidency. But once in the White House, his extreme agendas proved the most divisive and far-left in nearly a century.

Rumors of that prior March 2020 Faustian bargain emerged. The Bidens got to serve as useful moderate veneers. So they enjoyed the ceremonial functions of the presidency while outsourcing the real operations to former Obama officials, consultants and advisors.

Indeed, Obama did not, as most ex-presidents do, exit Washington upon leaving the White House. Instead, he bought a mansion and stayed close by.

Democrats demonized anyone critical of Biden’s obvious mental decline. Their smearing crested during Biden’s now-aborted 2024 re-election bid, even as Biden could no longer display even a veneer of mental and physical engagement.

Polls revealed an impending Trump landslide victory in November — and a massive Democratic loss of Congress.

So suddenly on July 21 — just days left before state ballots were formalized with the names of the parties’ official nominees, and on the eve of the Democratic convention — party bosses, mega-donors and Obama puppeteers went into action for yet a third time.

They reportedly threatened candidate Biden with a complete loss of any further campaign funding and raised the specter of invoking the 25th Amendment to end his presidency — should he not suddenly withdraw from the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his surrogate on the ticket.

In one moment, the choices of nearly 15 million Biden primary voters were vitiated. No delegates were consulted. No other alternative Democrat candidates were even considered.

Biden was dethroned; Harris was coronated — without much public input or even knowledge of how or why. Democrat grandees stopped smearing Biden’s conservative critics, who had worried over his dementia. Instead, they now trumped opposition criticism of Biden’s decline.

Yet Biden most certainly did not resign his presidency. Instead, he promised to serve out his remaining six months in office.

So Democrat insiders not only removed their leading candidate, who for the prior six months had won all the 2024 primaries and almost all the delegates, but insisted that Biden keep Democrats and himself in power — but only if he agreed to quit the race.

In sum, at the eleventh hour of a two-year re-election effort, a cabal arbitrarily decided Joe Biden might well lose the Democrats the White House and the Congress. So they reversed course, now claiming his dementia was so acute as to destroy their November prospects. But mysteriously, his decline was not severe enough to imperil the American people, whom Biden must continue to lead until Jan. 20.

Furthermore, the bosses’ replacement choice, Harris, had entered no primary. She never won a single delegate. Harris also never captured a single delegate in her first and only presidential run back in 2020. She then dropped out of the race even before the first Iowa and New Hampshire balloting.

We have now witnessed three left-wing veritable coups.

In 2020, covert actors decided to ossify the Democratic primary races. Next, they conferred the nomination on a clearly cognitively challenged Joe Biden. He was now tasked with serving as a useful moderate vessel for a virtual, even more radical, Obama third term.

The same operators next assumed virtual control of Biden’s presidential agenda, given his accelerating cognitive decline. When that charade could no longer be sustained, for a third time, they circumvented the normal transparent democratic process.

So, they removed the once useful but now a liability Biden — while insisting that he was still fit enough to keep the left in power — until the anticipated Harris victory in November.

And all of this was the shadow work of those who sanctimoniously lectured America that “democracy dies in darkness.”

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com.