Couldn’t resist, could ya?!
YOU incorrigible idiots. You’re so sure that you were put on this Earth to save the country from Donald Trump that you’re willing to gamble it all to have the chance. And you’re going to lose. The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to try to kick Trump off the ballot on Tuesday was the decadent, spurious, irresponsible, inevitable and logical conclusion to the long-standing practices of the Resistance, which for six years has been the former president’s greatest asset.
Trump couldn’t just be a vain, self-serving charlatan willing to seize upon every advantage available to him. He had to be a Russian asset since the 1980s and/or blackmailed fetishist with a secret video ready to drop at any moment.
You could never admit that, despite the divisive, overheated rhetoric, Trump was smart to address the crisis at America’s southern border. Instead, his successor quickly shelved the effective policy measures that were implemented, deepening the crisis. There was no time to investigate the role the Chinese Communist Party played in starting the COVID-19 pandemic because Trump had uttered the words “China Virus.”
The Trump administration’s prodigious and ultimately successful effort to develop vaccines to beat back that pandemic couldn’t have been acknowledged as a triumph until Election Day, so the vaccines had to be smeared as dangerous, experimental drugs.
How many man-hours were devoted to searching for the pee tape?
What were the cable news splits on coverage of the substantive issues at the border versus Trump’s comments about it?
Why’d Kam get a pass?
Were Jonathan Chait or Kamala Harris ever held responsible for their reckless conspiracy theorizing?
These excesses have long buoyed Trump, but never so much as during the 2024 election cycle.
It seems long ago now, but Trump was no lock to reprise his role as the Republican standardbearer as recently as March of this year. Voters seemed to have tired of the former president, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had closed the national polling gap between them to 15 points without even declaring his candidacy. He was even besting Trump in some statewide polls in Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida, Georgia, Texas and Michigan.
Enter Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who dropped in a flimsy criminal indictment against Trump in the spring that just about everyone intuitively understood would not have been brought against any other defendant.
Within a month, Trump’s lead had doubled.
Rocky Mountain low
The more substantive indictments that followed had the same effect despite the fact that they were much more meritorious. Four separate criminal indictments in such a short period of time in the lead-up to an election were understandably — and in some ways correctly — seen as a political effort to keep Trump off the ballot.
Not only did the indictments cause Republicans to rally around the leader, it gave him the confidence to skip out on the primary debates that would have given DeSantis, or potentially Nikki Haley, the opportunity to expose and supplant Trump.
But it was not to be. Now Trump leads both by 50 percentage points, and if there was ever a chance of an alternative pulling off a miracle upset, it was dashed by the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to try to remove the nearly presumptive GOP presidential nominee from the primary ballot in the Centennial State.
Trump is unfit for office, and his actions in the wake of his embarrassing loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election are among the most disgraceful ever taken by a commander in chief.
Trump should have been convicted for high crimes and constitutionally barred from returning to office by the Senate after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, and the Republicans who failed to do so bear full responsibility for that failure.
But their mistakes do not excuse this extraconstitutional effort to prevent Americans from picking their next president for themselves.
May put him in office
This overstep, perhaps the biggest yet, is imprudent and arrogant enough to not only reinforce conservatives’ priors, but to push persuadable voters who are already leaning toward backing the former president over the incumbent into Trump’s camp.
A colorable case that he is being unjustly persecuted, combined with Biden’s dismal performance in office, will in all likelihood be enough to return Trump to the White House.
Trump already leads Biden by three points in polls, and he doesn’t need to perform nearly that well to win the election. In 2020, Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points and the Electoral College by more than 70 votes. But really the election was only decided by his razorthin margins of victory in states like Georgia (0.23%), Arizona (0.30%), Wisconsin (0.63%), and Pennsylvania (1.17%).
Trump, by the way, is presently positioned to win all of those and more.
If he is re-elected in 2024, the role that the institutional GOP, as well as the voters, played cannot and will not be ignored. They’ll deserve all of the opprobrium they receive.
But so too will the collection of narcissists and buffoons whose eagerness to play a starring role in stopping Trump has backfired spectacularly.