Trump seeks to spin court ruling into political gold

“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 chairman 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 Trump, said the indictments he was 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.

‘Voters make the decisions’

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, 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. He 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 he is immune from criminal prosecution over events that took place while he was in the White House.

Trump on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to reject the petition, saying the case should be allowed to play out in the lower courts.

“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 effect 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.”

Additional reporting: Lauren Fedor in Waterloo, Iowa

Financial Times