Kamala’s ‘coup’ is a MAGA decoy They are peddling an age-old conspiracy

Well, not exactly. As anyone who has been paying attention to the recent spate of Kamala memes knows, “everything is in context”. Nothing falls “out of a coconut tree”. And that includes rumours of coup and coverup.

This particular species of accusation — “the largest political cover-up in history”, as House Speaker Mike Johnson pontificated — has appeared over and over again throughout American history, and from both sides of the aisle. After the Watergate scandal, the country’s Left-wing waxed outrage when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, seething over what they were convinced had been a secret deal for clemency. A bit farther back, the centennial of the country was clouded by similar suspicions, as in 1876 the House of Representatives delivered the Presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. He held up his end of the dark deal by removing federal troops from the South, thus earning for himself the Trumplican nickname, “Rutherfraud” — and enabling decades of Jim Crow.

As per usual, the strongest antecedent can be traced to the days of Andrew Jackson, who anticipated Donald Trump in many ways — from his penchant for scorning central authority and his contempt for the political and banking establishments to conspiratorial ideation regarding the economy. Way back in the 1820s, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Henry Clay, observed that Jackson “lives by excitement”, and was never “without some object of attack”. Likewise, today’s MAGAverse has unleashed an unending stream of vitriol against Harris, calling her a “radical Left lunatic”, a “bum”, “a failed vice president”, a “demon”, “dumb as a rock” and a “co-conspirator” in the bloodless coup.

While Trump declared he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not “lose any voters”, Andrew Jackson actually did commit murder — and went on to occupy the Oval Office. But he failed on his initial attempt, which was when charges of a “corrupt bargain” entered the American political tradition.

When Jackson took a run at the White House in 1824, he faced nepo baby John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts (John Adams’s son), Washington elite William Crawford (James Monroe’s Secretary of the Treasury), and firebrand House Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky. Among this crowded and prestigious field, the Populist Army General did not manage to pick up enough electoral college votes to win outright, so the outcome of the race fell into the hands of the House of Representatives, which at the time was led by Henry Clay, who had come in fourth place.

In the nasty stew of political intrigue that ensued, two certainties emerged: the first was that Clay would not throw his support behind (third-place) William Crawford, who had just suffered a stroke. No one believed Crawford would survive the summer, much less possess the wherewithal to lead the country for the next four years. The other certainty was that Clay despised Jackson.

Such things considered, everyone knew that John Quincy Adams would soon be inaugurated as the sixth President of the United States. At which point an anonymous letter appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper called The Columbian Observer, accusing Clay of selling his votes in return for being offered Secretary of State. Such a bargain, the author claimed, was “one of the most disgraceful transactions that ever covered with infamy the republican ranks”.

As waves of outrage over the “corrupt bargain” grew, the writer of the anonymous letter identified himself as a Jacksonian by the name of George Kremer, Representative from Pennsylvania, who promised to substantiate his accusations before the House Investigations Committee. But when the appointed hour arrived for his testimony, Kremer was nowhere to be found.

Clay threw his support to Quincy, who became president despite having received only 33% of the popular vote. When the newly installed chief executive subsequently appointed Clay Secretary of State — at the time, the traditional stepping-stone to the presidency — an infuriated Andrew Jackson railed at the Speaker, calling him “the Judas of the West”.

In those days, as in ours, charges of corruption were par for the electoral course. They would have soon dissipated had it not been for the efforts of a man whose name has been almost entirely lost to history — but who may be more responsible than any other citizen for the eight-year reign of Andrew Jackson. In the aftermath of the 1824 election, Duff Green became editor of The United States Telegraph and for the next four years devoted himself to assailing the Adams administration for “bargain, intrigue, and corruption” — the same insinuations making the rounds among the trolls of Gab, Parler, Truth Social and X in the aftermath of Biden’s withdrawal from the race, and Kamala’s bloodless coup.

The “corrupt bargain”, then, has been going on for more than 200 years and has yet to run its course. Indeed, the current narrative will soon enter its second stage — namely, litigation. Despite delirious Democratic visions of Kamelot, Republican National Committee gun-for-hire Charles Spies recently filed a complaint to the Federal Election Commission accusing Biden and Harris of violating campaign finance laws by shifting Biden’s campaign funds to Harris. The case may eventually end up in the hands of that all-too-familiar Right-wing law firm, aka the Supreme Court. Nothing new here, either, as at the end of Jackson’s second term he made it a point to expand the number of Supreme Court judges from six to eight — adding two of his own, just in case.

As for Jackson’s favourite newspaperman, Duff Green blithely continued ever further along the road of conspiracy, becoming one of the first to articulate the now notorious “Great Replacement Theory”, targeting hordes of evil immigrants from Ireland and Italy whose “imported Catholic votes” would promote the anti-slavery agenda of the North. His career reached a sorry climax on an afternoon stroll when he was caught off-guard by an opium-addled Congressman from South Carolina named James Blair, who could have been offended by any number of Green’s vicious editorials. Blair bludgeoned the journalist to the sidewalk with his cane, kicked him into the gutter, then jumped on him, thereby breaking Duff’s arm, collarbone and a few ribs. (Point of information: Congressman James Blair weighed 350 pounds.)

The savage absurdity of Green’s life is mirrored in the manner of Andrew Jackson’s death. His only regret in life, he declared on his deathbed: “I didn’t shoot Henry Clay.” Here was a man who encapsulated the abusive spirit of 19th-century American politics that has endured to this day. Scholars from Bernard Bailyn to Richard Hofstadter have traced America’s history of hysteria and false accusation from the pamphleteers who fed the flames of patriotism in the years prior to 1776 through the anti-immigration and anti-press laws of the Adams’s administration, and long after. They have concluded that paranoia was an essential component of America’s revolutionary ferment — and beyond.

All of which is to say that MAGA’s charges of a “corrupt bargain” serve a pragmatic purpose: the political jujitsu of distracting from the party of the January 6 insurrectionists led by a character who has been involved in more than 4,000 legal cases in United States federal and state courts — from tax disputes to personal defamation lawsuits to sex abuse. Not to mention stashing top-secret documents in the gilded bathrooms of Mar-A-Lago. A man whose son-in-law has made a $2 billion deal with the Saudis. Nothing to see here.

Of course, if charges of corruption don’t harm Harris, there’s always her race and sex. But here’s the rub: the attacks against Harris have yet to land. Perhaps, after long centuries, a strange and unprecedented coconut will fall out of the blue — and Kamala and her legions will herald a new age in American politics.

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Frederick Kaufman is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and a professor of English and Journalism at the College of Staten Island. His next project is a book about the world’s first political reactionary.

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