(LifeSiteNews) — Now that President Joe Biden has officially withdrawn his bid for reelection, details have begun to emerge about how Democrat insiders finally convinced him to step aside – including a threat that his own party would forcibly remove him from office.

Biden announced on Sunday he was dropping out of the 2024 race and endorsing his Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place as the Democrat presidential nominee. The decision followed weeks of public and private calls to step aside ever since a disastrous televised debate with his Republican opponent Donald Trump, where his apparent fatigue and incoherence brought to the surface longstanding concerns about the 81-year-old president’s mental infirmity, and convinced many the problem could not be obscured well enough to keep him politically viable.

On Monday, the New York Post reported that a “source close to the Biden family” informed them about the Democrat “palace coup” the president bitterly resisted for weeks and what it took to get him to eventually relent.

According to the insider, certainty of Biden’s political weakness actually predated the now-infamous debate and, in fact, letting him go through with it “was a set-up to convince Democrats that he couldn’t run for president.”

That decision worked to provoke a complete change in the mainstream media’s coverage of Biden’s health, and a deluge of Democrats publicly and privately turning against him. But it wasn’t enough to get Biden himself to step down, so “party bigwigs” reportedly threatened to invoke the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides for a vice president and cabinet to remove a president deemed incapable of continuing his duties.

With Biden’s resignation, many Democrats quickly coalesced around Harris, who as the sitting vice president of the United States would normally be considered the favorite to step in. But she has long been beleaguered by long-standing discontent with her own job performance and doubts as to whether she would fare any better against Trump.

And while Harris has reportedly obtained enough delegate pledges to secure the nomination, according to the Post’s source, “delegates will be strongly encouraged to instead back Arizona Sen. and former astronaut Mark Kelly for president at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.”

So far, RealClearPolitics and RaceToTheWH indicate that the change in Democrat nominee has not changed the trajectory of the race; Trump maintains his lead both in aggregations of the national popular vote and in the Electoral College.