Former 2020 Democrat Marianne Williamson likened Joe Biden’s successful Super Tuesday performance to “a coup.”
The author-turned-failed presidential candidate, who has endorsed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s White House bid, expressed her argument on social media Tuesday night amid the former vice president’s strong showing before later deleting it.
“This was not a resurrection; it was a coup,” Williamson wrote. “Russiagate was not a coup. Mueller was not a coup. Impeachment was not a coup. What happened yesterday was a coup. And we will push it back.”
Williamson deleted the tweet, but for posterity: pic.twitter.com/kdjCs5te3g
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) March 4, 2020
Biden’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield dismissed Williamson’s claims in an interview on CNN during the network’s Super Tuesday coverage.
“I’m not sure the overwhelming support of hundreds of thousands of American voters all across the country — I’m not really sure where that’s a coup. I think that is people rising up to say that they believe in Joe Biden’s vision, they’re excited about what he’s putting forward,” she explained.
“They want somebody in the Oval Office who is going to restore a sense of dignity to the office, who’s going to once again lead, have America lead on the world stage in a way that we can be proud of,” Bedingfield continued. “And I think what we saw across the country today was voters saying, ‘This is the vision for the country that I believe in.'”
Biden has won nine Super Tuesday states so far, including surprising victories in Texas and Massachusetts. He also took home wins in Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Minnesota despite not campaigning aggressively or at all in some of those states. His top rival, Sanders, carried California to salvage a tough night.
Williamson later explained her decision to delete the tweet in an interview with SiriusXM’s The Joe Madison Show.
She said: “It was a political hit, it was I felt very wrong. I deleted the tweet because the word ‘coup’ is, I think, at this point, incendiary language. But yeah, I think what happened Monday night was very uncool. … God forbid we have radical truth-telling at this point.”
