After a majority of the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible for the 2024 ballot, Republicans didn’t just denounce the decision, they also condemned the motivations behind the lawsuit that led to the decision. For the former president and his party, the argument is relatively straightforward: In a democracy, the goal should be to defeat one’s opponents, not deny voters a choice by kicking opponents off ballots.
Despite its superficial appeal, the pitch is not without flaw — Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has merit, and it shouldn’t be cast aside as an electoral inconvenience — but as the legal debate continues, there’s another dimension to this that’s worth keeping in mind:
It’s a little late for Trump to decry disqualification efforts, given his enthusiastic embrace of earlier disqualification efforts.
Ian Bassin, executive director of the group Protect Democracy, told Politico that the Colorado ruling added “an almost Shakespearean irony” to the larger political debate.
“Trump’s MO has always been to accuse others of the transgressions of which he himself is guilty, largely to obfuscate his own guilt,” said Bassin. “So it’s fitting that after rising to political power by falsely accusing Barack Obama of not being eligible to be president, it’s Trump who it turns out has now been found by a court to be the actually ineligible one.”
It’s an important point. Before the electoral college elevated Trump to the White House, his political career was based in large part on a racist conspiracy theory targeting Barack Obama. The Republican didn’t just say that he disagreed with the Democratic president and wanted Obama to lose, Trump said that Obama shouldn’t even have been allowed to appear on the ballot in the first place. It was, Trump insisted, at odds with the plain text of the Constitution.
To be sure, the argument was stark raving mad. But this is relevant anew precisely because the GOP front-runner is whining hysterically about running into the same problem he hoped to create for his presidential predecessor.
What’s more, it’s not just Obama. Trump argued in February 2016 that Sen. Ted Cruz — who’d defeated Trump in the Iowa caucuses two days earlier — deserved to be disqualified. The future president claimed without evidence that the Texas senator had “cheated” in their race, so his victory shouldn’t count. It came on the heels of a larger effort targeting Cruz’s eligibility because he was born in Canada.
The list doesn’t stop there. As regular readers might recall, in late 2015, for example, Trump pushed the idea that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t “even be allowed” to run for national office. A few months later, he said then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich shouldn’t have been allowed to run against him in a Pennsylvania primary.
Even during his pre-inaugural transition period, the then-president-elect, apropos of nothing, remained focused on Clinton, insisting after the election that his former rival’s name shouldn’t have been allowed to appear on the ballot. A month before Election Day 2020, the Republican kept the pattern going, arguing that Joe Biden should also have been deemed ineligible for the presidential ballot. Remember, leading GOP voices spent Wednesday insisting that the core principle in a democracy should be, “Let voters decide.” And yet, Trump has spent recent years pushing in the opposite direction, repeatedly making the case that his opponents should’ve been disqualified from running. As a Washington Post analysis concluded, “Trump has repeatedly pushed the idea that a candidate’s eligibility for president shouldn’t be left up to voters. The candidate who a court now says is constitutionally ineligible to serve as president once showed great interest in having people he disagreed with disqualified under the Constitution’s standards.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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