I'm back. Thank you, Yas and Tom, for posting while I was away -- although I don't agree with quite a bit of what you wrote, and you're not going to like what I have to say about the Colorado Supreme Court ruling on Donald Trump's eligibility to run for president again. The rest of you won't like it either.
I agree with most commentators that the Supreme Court will overturn Colorado's removal of Trump from the presidential primary ballot. I don't think this will happen because the six Republicans on the Supreme Court want Trump to win -- I don't think all of them regard him as their first choice, and maybe none of them do. I think most would prefer a bog-standard Kochite Republican like Nikki Haley, preferably if she agrees to pursue at least some of the agenda of the Heritage Foundation (purging and politicizing the civil service, banishing federal agencies to hinterland locations in red America in order to reduce the number of Democrats voting in northern Virginia).
I think the Supremes will overturn the ruling for two reasons. First, they don't want to die. Colorado Supreme Court justices are now receiving death threats, and the members of the U.S. Supreme Court don't want to go through the same experience. They have better protection, so you'd think they'd be less worried, but I think fear will be a major reason they'll rule in Trump's favor.
Second, they don't want to weaken the anti-Biden coalition. Right now it consists primarily of MAGA voters, many of whom fail to show up at the polls when Trump isn't on the ballot, along with Republicans who don't worship Trump but hate Democrats and liberals with the fury of a thousand suns, just the way Fox News and talk radio and national Republican officeholders in the post-Gingrich era have taught them to do. The Supremes will be concerned that some of the former voters won't turn out if Trump is removed from state ballots, or might even write him in (whether or not we've been told that Trump write-in votes won't be counted), while the latter voters will mostly choose Haley or Ron DeSantis or whoever gets the nomination if it's clear that Trump is ineligible. This vote-splitting would seem to be very bad for the GOP.
So what Colorado's high court did is constitutionally sound but practically useless. And this is where I start saying things you won't like.
I don't care about the Constitution or the rule of law.
No, that's not what I mean. I care about the Constitution and the rule of law. But I care more about defeating Trump, Trumpism, and the larger Republican project of locking in permanent minority rule more than I care about the Constitution and the rule of law. I believe the legal pursuit of Trump is making it harder to defeat Trump and the GOP.
You know who would have been the ideal opponent for President Biden to face in 2024? The Trump of November 2022. The one who was blamed for the lack of a "red wave" in the midterms, and who was struggling to hold off Ron DeSantis in primary polls. He seemed weak and tired.
And unindicted.
Yes, I'm one of those people who thinks that Trump's rise in the polls -- primary polls and general election polls -- is directly traceable to his indictments. The ballot-removal movement is an indictment by other means. It tells voters, particularly those who might have otherwise walked away from Trump -- that "they" must be really afraid of him, otherwise they wouldn't be trying so hard to keep people from voting for him. Also, the legal pursuit of Trump tells Fox-addled voters, including the ones who might have moved on to other candidates, that the way to make the hated libs howl is to vote for Trump. Which is incredibly motivating to those voters.
I wish there'd never been any indictments, or if they were necessary, I wish the prosecutors had recognized the need to get to court in 2023 at the latest, even with weaker cases. Trump will appeal any guilty verdicts that come down next year. He may succeed in delaying the trials. I don't rule out the Supreme Court granting him immunity. It all makes him look like the man the establishment loves to hate -- which makes him, in a fed-up country, the strongest candidate in the race.
But isn't the pursuit of justice, without fear or favor, necessary for the survival of the Republic?
Oh, please. We fail to pursue justice all the time in this country, and the Republic survives. How many people should have gone to prison for the 2008 financial crisis and didn't? How many people responsible for conceiving and planning the Bush-era torture regime should have gone to prison? How many cops who are guilty of police brutality get away with it? And even Trump has gotten a free pass on his flagrant violations of the Constitution's emoluments clauses.
All of those things are travesties of justice, but the country survives them. It would have survived a failure to pursue Trump legally. But we all agree that it may not survive a Trump victory.
I'm being cynical and pragmatic here. We made Trump an increasingly popular martyr, and we won't even manage to throw him in the clink. We're constantly aggrandizing him in other ways -- how many stories have now been published about one social media post in which Trump reproduced a word cloud from Daily Mail poll respondents describing him with words like "revenge" and "dictatorship"? Republican voters want to see the libs owned and we just keep telling them, every day, "YES, TRUMP REALLY OWNS US! WE ARE SO OWNED BY THESE THINGS TRUMP HAS DONE! HERE'S ANOTHER STORY ABOUT SOMETHING TRUMP HAS DONE THAT HAS US SO ANGRY WE CAN'T SEE STRAIGHT!" That's true of a meaningless media-baiting Truth Social post and it's true of his -- yes -- very real crimes. We're not going to get him legally. We're not going to keep him off the ballot. But we might have beaten him and sent him back into exile if we'd treated him like a has-been -- and not like our worst nightmare.
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