On stage at a campaign rally in Waterloo, Iowa, on Tuesday night, Donald Trump was ragingly defiant about the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that had landed earlier in the evening — and now threatens to remove him from the presidential primary ballot in the state.
“Never forget,” he told the crowd. “Our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom. It is very simple, I am not going to let them do it.”
It marked a new chapter in the deepening stand-off between the former president and the American justice system.
The Colorado court found that Trump was disqualified from seeking office because he had engaged in an insurrection after the 2020 election, which culminated in the January 6 2021 assault on the US Capitol by a group of his supporters. The ruling struck at the very heart of his ambitions to win back the White House in 2024.
But as Trump has done with the 91 criminal charges he is facing across state and federal jurisdictions this year, the former president will try to turn the latest legal threat into political gold. It is an opportunity for him to rile up his supporters and generate sympathy across the Republican party with less than a month to go before voters start casting ballots in the Iowa caucuses.
The explosive ruling was greeted by Democrats and opponents of the former president as a new moment of much-needed accountability for Trump. But the legal pathway to barring him from the White House race is still very much uphill.
One thing is clear: America’s 2024 contest will often resemble a court drama. And the battle for the White House may be as much about the judicial chaos surrounding Trump as it will be about traditional matters like the economy, immigration and foreign affairs that are debated in more conventional elections.
So far, Trump’s fight against allegations that he conspired to subvert the 2020 election have only lengthened his lead in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. His supporters and some of his critics say that dynamic may be amplified anew in the wake of Colorado’s move.
“When the picture is painted that a liberal judge or a liberal prosecutor puts their thumb on the scales of justice, it offends the sensibility of the folks in the middle,” Chip Saltsman, the campaign chair for former presidential candidate Mike Pence, told the Financial Times. “It’s jet fuel for the base.”
Speaking to the FT in Waterloo on Tuesday, Bobby Kaufmann, an Iowa state legislator who has endorsed the former president, said the indictments Trump is facing from New York to Fulton County, Georgia, were a “joke”.
“If you look at what has happened since these charges, it has been nothing but up, up, up in the polls, because everyday Iowans, and everyday Americans, realise that if this can happen to a New York billionaire, it sure as heck can happen to us little guys,” said Kaufmann, whose father, Jeff Kaufmann, chairs the Iowa Republican party and has also endorsed Trump.
After the bombshell from Colorado, Trump’s Republican opponents all rallied to his defence.
Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, told reporters at her own campaign stop in Agency, Iowa, that she intended to beat Trump “fair and square”, adding: “We don’t need to have judges making these decisions, we need voters to make these decisions.”
At a campaign stop on Wednesday morning in Urbandale, Iowa, Ron DeSantis accused Democrats of “abusing their power” to pursue Trump through the legal system. But the Florida governor also tried to argue that the latest ruling was a reason Iowa caucus goers and other primary voters should pick him over the former president.
“Do we want to have 2024 to be about this trial, that case, this case, having to put hundreds of millions of dollars into legal stuff?” DeSantis said in response to a voter’s question about the Colorado decision. “Or do we want 2024 to be about your issues, about the country’s future?”
Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump strategist, posted on X, “I think we have to beat Trump at the ballot box, not in court.”
The Colorado supreme court disqualified Trump from the state’s Republican presidential primary ballot on the basis that he engaged in insurrection on January 6 2021, when a group of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in a bid to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in presidential polls. In a 4-3 decision, the majority cited the 14th Amendment of the US constitution — ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War. It bars anyone from holding office if they have tried to overthrow the government.
“The court’s decision is not only historic and justified, but is necessary to protect the future of democracy in our country,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which had backed the plaintiffs in the case.
Jason Crow, a Colorado Democratic congressman, welcomed the ruling. “The Constitution protects the right to vote and bars candidates who abuse the process or engage in insurrection. Donald Trump has done both,” he wrote on X.
But courts in a handful of other states have so far rejected the argument that the 14th Amendment bars Trump from holding office. Trump has vowed to file an appeal against Colorado’s decision with the US Supreme Court, and the Colorado court has put its decision on hold until January 4 to give the Supreme Court a chance to decide whether to intervene or let the ruling take effect.
That has put the US Supreme Court in the middle of yet another fraught and urgent political fight. It is already considering whether to take up a separate appeal from Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing federal cases against Trump, over whether the former president is immune from criminal prosecution over events that took place while he was in the White House.
“The timing of the Supreme Court’s decision is going to be either beneficial to [Trump] or not, and [the Supreme Court will] be criticised accordingly,” said Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School. “So I don’t know how they avoid that.”
Trump has not been convicted of insurrection against the US, and even the state and federal criminal charges he is facing in connection with his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election do not include insurrection.
If the US Supreme Court takes up the Colorado case, “I would be shocked if [it] doesn’t reverse that decision,” Klarman said. “I just don’t think there’s any good argument in a democracy for why a court ought to be preventing a majority of Republican voters from having their preferences.”
As for Biden, he told reporters that he would not comment on the Colorado ruling and its impact on his likely rival in next year’s run for the White House.
“Whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision,” the president said. “But he certainly supported an insurrection. No question about it. None. Zero. And he seems to be doubling down.”
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