Republicans claim a ‘coup’ attempt to delegitimize Kamala Harris’s candidacy

Speaking on the sidelines of the Republican national convention last week, Chris LaCivita, one of Donald Trump’s campaign managers, repeatedly used an incendiary word to describe the pressure campaign to get Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race. Those efforts, he said, were a “coup”.

“This is nothing more than an attempted coup by the Democratic party,” he said. “They are actively engaged in an attempt – in my view and a lot of people share this view – in deposing the president of the United States.”

It was language that foreshadowed how other top Republicans would respond when Joe Biden did drop out of the race, immediately suggesting that the move was anti-democratic.

Related: As Biden departs, Trump set to face questions over his age and acuity

During an appearance on Fox News on Monday, Trump and his running mate JD Vance endorsed the idea that Biden’s removal was illegitimate. Asked if they thought it was a coup attempt, Trump said, “Sort of, yeah” and Vance said, “I think it is”.

“There’s a constitutional process, the 25th 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 25th amendment.”

Their comments underscore how Republicans are already trying to delegitimize Kamala Harris’s candidacy. For a Republican party that embraced the lie that the 2020 election is stolen, the efforts to undermine anyone other than Biden marks the latest front in their attempt to seed doubt about any result that isn’t a Trump win.

Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, suggested that Republicans would file lawsuits to try and prevent Biden from being removed from the ballot. The Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative thinktank behind Project 2025, posted on X: “We have been preparing for this moment for months.”

The organization has been circulating a memo suggesting a strategy for challenging any effort by Democrats to replace Biden on the ballot.

Such litigation would likely be little more than a public relations effort – legal experts have said there is no barrier to another candidate appearing as the Democratic nominee on state ballots because Biden was never formally nominated. Whoever is eventually nominated at the Democratic national convention in August will be able to meet state deadlines for ballot access.

“Assuming the Democratic party formally chooses a presidential nominee before or during the Democratic national convention, there are no legal barriers to that candidate being on the general election ballot nationwide,” Adav Noti, the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, a non-profit that works on election issues, said in a statement.

“In all 51 jurisdictions, the deadline to name the presidential candidate falls after the nominating date at the convention. Legal actions attempting to block the nominated ticket from appearing on the general election ballot would have no merit and would be rapidly disposed of by the courts.”

A memo from the Wisconsin Elections Commission reviewed by the Guardian, for example, says a candidate for president needs to be sent to the commission by 3 September, giving plenty of time for Harris or others to file. A spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office in Georgia said there weren’t any limits or “bumps in the road” for a new presidential candidate there.

But even if Republicans aren’t legally successful – their lawsuits and the attention that comes from it could help fuel the perception that the process isn’t legitimate.

“It’s an old strategy to claim that the Democratic nominee is illegitimate,” said Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“From Obama’s birth certificate to Hillary Clinton’s emails to Joe Biden and Ukraine, and attacks on the fairness of the 2020 election, there has been a long road of seeking to cast Democratic candidates as somehow not entitled to hold office. Lawsuits saying the Democratic party process for replacing Biden is illegitimate would help feed into that narrative.”

In addition to undermining the legitimacy of the election, Republicans are also using Biden’s withdrawal to try and create a false equivalency with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and blunt accusations the party is anti-democratic.

“The idea of selecting the Democratic party’s nominee because George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a smoke filled room, and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard, that is not how it works. That’s a threat to democracy, not the Republican party,” Vance said at a rally in Ohio on Monday.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, pointed out the hypocrisy of those statements on a call with reporters Sunday.

“I will say it’s refreshing to hear some individuals who sought to set aside all of the votes in some states in their choice of electors in 2020 coming out and saying that,” he said.

“I am concerned, somewhat skeptical, that this newfound concern for democracy … may stick through November if it turns out their preferred candidate loses,” he added. “We are seeing a variety of machinations going on, even now, by supporters of president Trump, who are setting the stage for lies and attempts to subvert the process post-election if it turns out he loses.”

Republicans have also sought to undermine the legitimacy of Harris’s candidacy in other ways.

Conservatives have recirculated a 2020 Newsweek op-ed by John Eastman, a disbarred lawyer who played a key role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, suggesting Harris is ineligible to run for president. Eastman argues that even though Harris was born in the United States, she’s not a “natural-born citizen” – a constitutional qualification to be president. The claim has been debunked and Newsweek published a lengthy editor’s note apologizing for the piece, acknowledging it had been used to promote the racist lie that Harris wasn’t really American.

The efforts come as Republicans have spread false claims that massive numbers of non-citizens are registering to vote and have filed misleading lawsuits suggesting states aren’t adequately maintaining their voter rolls. A network of activists who believe voting machine equipment can’t be trusted have continued to ramp up efforts to aggressively monitor election offices.

Other efforts to undermine Harris’s candidacy have bordered on the absurd.

One post circulating on social media falsely speculates that Biden didn’t really author his letter because the signature doesn’t look like his. “We need to see proof of life,” Todd Starnes, a host on the far-right site Newsmax, wrote on X.

Some rightwing commentators are seeking to tie her to Biden’s record and have brought up her role in immigration policy by calling her the “border tsar”. Others have gone beyond that, calling her a “DEI” candidate and speculating she has mental health issues.

A Daily Mail headline on Monday said: “Could Kamala Harris’ inappropriate laughter and ‘word salads’ be symptoms of a little-known psychological condition?”

And even after rounds of endorsements from the left for Harris, some on the right still believe Clinton or Michelle Obama will emerge as challengers. Michelle Obama has long been a fixation on the right as a potential 2024 nominee.

“You are being walked through a pantomime,” Patrick Byrne, the Overstock founder and election denier, wrote on X. “The last scene, Michelle or Hillary emerge as the new leader. Probably Michelle.”