Just before Joe Biden got pushed out of willingly withdrew from the Democrat nomination, J.D. Vance objected to the Dump Biden movement's attempts to anoint a new nominee. Calling it an attempted "coup," Vance reminded everyone of the legitimate constitutional process for dealing with an incapacitated president. And that doesn't involve doing an end run around a duly elected president and nominee who refused to leave, even after his incapacity has been exposed:

"I mean, look, there’s a constitutional process, the 25th Amendment. If Joe Biden can’t run for president, he can’t serve as president,” Vance replied.

Vance continued voicing his opinion, saying, “And if they want to take him down because he’s mentally incapable of serving, invoke the 25th 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 the appropriate way.”

That comment got recorded in a joint interview with Donald Trump the day before Biden's withdrawal, but aired the day after it. That didn't necessarily resolve the issue, though, because it would take two more days before Biden made a public appearance and affirmed his withdrawal in an Oval Office speech. The question remained -- if Biden can't run for office, is he too incapacitated to serve now?

Democrats don't want to answer that question, and maybe they won't need to do so. This morning, Trump told Fox & Friends that Republicans should stop suggesting a 25th Amendment removal, mainly because Kamala Harris would be worse than a marginally competent Joe Biden:

Former President Donald Trump said he doesn’t believe the 25th Amendment should be invoked against President Biden, warning it would be more “dangerous” to put Vice President Kamala Harris in office because she’s “real garbage” and “worse than he is.”

Trump slammed the vice president during a Thursday morning “Fox & Friends” appearance and said he didn’t think the 25th Amendment should be invoked as Biden will be out of office in a matter of months.

“I don’t think they should use the 25th Amendment. Not long to go, you know, we have four months now and then he’s got another month and a half,” Trump said before taking aim at Harris.

Trump's right on the politics of the moment, although there's clearly and explicitly some self-interest in his argument. Disqualifying Biden as incapacitated would immediately elevate Harris to the position of acting president -- if Biden went along with it -- and probably create some rally momentum to her candidacy. She'd be the incumbent and would own the Biden record, but that's already true without starting a coup. Trump already plans to hang the border crisis around the border czar's neck, along with all of Biden's other failures over the last four years, plus put a spotlight on Harris' radical politics.

In electoral-politics terms, Biden's basically irrelevant now. In fact, he's going to shortly discover that he's irrelevant entirely, even in executive terms. Biden became a lame-duck president on Sunday, but his party had emasculated him ever since the debate anyway. Harris will need to direct administration policy and implementation to a large extent to coordinate it with her campaign, which means that Biden will serve more explicitly as a figurehead than he did before. After last night's wan and unresponsive speech, we may not hear or see much from him at all. 

But if Harris tried to use the 25th Amendment, Biden would balk at it and set up a grave constitutional crisis. That might play well for Republicans in the short run but it would also act as a catalyst for a far more destructive political environment than we have even at this moment. Since Trump himself got victimized by the current elevated bitterness in American politics, he might have a real personal interest in dialing down the chaos -- especially given that Democrats entirely own the chaos of the summer. 

The country can limp through this arrangement until the election, Trump argues. He's probably right, but that shouldn't keep him or anyone else from making clear to voters that this arrangement resulted from a years-long cover-up of Biden's cognitive impairments -- and that Harris is entirely tied into that fraud and conspiracy of silence. She's unworthy of the office, even through a 25th Amendment emergency grant. That's a winning argument for Trump, and he knows it. 

Here's the full interview, via Right Scoop. The discussion starts at about the two-minute mark:

Addendum: Further into the interview, the panel asked Trump to react to Biden's speech last night. Trump called it "terrible," and Biden's removal from the ticket a "coup":

"I think it was a coup. They didn't want him running. He was way down in the polls, and they thought he was going to lose," Trump said. "They went to him and they said, you can't win the race, which I think is true, unless I did something very foolish, which I wasn't going to do, and I think he was so far down and they said, 'You're not going to win, and you're not in great shape, and you did poorly in the debate.' I think the debate started everything."

"I know a lot of people on the other side, too, that they went, and they forced him out between Pelosi and Obama and some others that you see on television. It was interesting," he continued. "I'd watch them on television and they act so nice. ‘Oh, yes, we loved you. We loved you behind the scenes.’ I know for a fact they were brutal."