COULD Donald Trump win the US Presidency again? You bet. And strangely enough, every attempt to stop him seems only to help him.
Yesterday it was the turn of Colorado to give the former president a helping hand.
The heavily Democrat state was never likely to vote for Trump in next year’s presidential election.
It voted solidly for Joe Biden in 2020 and for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
But this week, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump’s name would not be allowed on the ballot in next year’s presidential election.
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The cause? The “insurrection” of January 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the events of January 2021 make Trump ineligible for office.
To do this, they reached for an arcane piece of law. Specifically section three of the 14th Amendment.
This was a piece of law introduced after the American Civil War to stop people who had fought for the southern cause from getting elected to office.
Just a sore loser
There was a good reason for that.
The US almost pulled itself apart during the civil war. Afterwards it was crucial that the war for succession in the southern states was not reopened.
It worked, and the US has held itself together for the almost 200 years since.
Now, this is the law that Colorado is trying to use to stop Donald Trump from running.
There are plenty of legal problems with this.
Not least the fact that the amendment they are referring to was voted down by Congress in 1872 and in 1898.
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In other words, not only is it unclear whether this section of the amendment can be applied outside a Civil War context, it may not even still be law.
That issue will now be fought over by legal bigwigs on Donald Trump’s team and by others.
But the real issue is much bigger than that. It is this: Should anyone be barred from standing for office in the United States?
After all, the whole idea of a democracy is that the people get the right to decide who should govern the people.
There are plenty of arguments to be made that Donald Trump is unfit for office. Most of these were rehearsed before his election victory in 2016.
And all of them have been rehearsed at the highest possible pitch ever since.
Many of us are sympathetic to those arguments.
My own view is that what Donald Trump did in refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election was unforgivable.
He claimed he had evidence of massive voter fraud.
Many of us waited to see what he produced. And what he produced was, to use an Americanism, one big nothing-burger.
Yet, still, Trump claims he won.
And still he has not produced any evidence to show that.
And if anyone thought that he had such evidence but hasn’t been allowed to show it, here is an interesting test — if Trump believes that the system was able to rig the vote against him in 2020, what has he done in the years since to make sure that the same thing won’t happen next time?
The answer is nothing. Except to whinge and whine and complain about how unfair everything is.
In reality he is just a sore loser. The sorest loser imaginable.
Still, he has the right to make his case before the American people.
Many people inside and outside America might not like Donald Trump. But the fact is that a large percentage of the American public does.
In recent months, the Republican Party candidates have been going through a round of televised debates in which they have all had the chance to make their own pitch to the American people.
All of them hope that they might be the Republican party’s nominee to run against Joe Biden in 2024.
The debates have been robust and have shown a great amount of talent in the Republican Party.
By contrast, the Democrats are the party that look in real trouble.
After all, if Joe Biden isn’t able to run next year, the party will have to allow his Vice President Kamala Harris to run for the top office in the land.
And she has public approval ratings somewhere round the same level as the Ebola virus.
She is supremely unlikeable and has failed at every task the President has thrown her way.
Not least her total inability to deal with the southern border crisis which makes even our immigration issues look small. Harris has been a disaster in office, and if she ran against almost any Republican candidate she would be roundly defeated.
Her party is propping up Biden largely to avoid this disaster. But none of the Republican field has been able to pull ahead in the race.
Huge poll lead
Sensibly or cynically, Donald Trump sat out all the Republican debates, refusing to participate.
That is because he has a huge poll lead against all the other candidates with the Republican base.
Nikki Haley has done well in the debates. Ron DeSantis has done well on occasion.
Chris Christie has proved a terrific debater and Vivek Ramaswamy has shown himself to be a very ambitious outsider candidate.
But none of them has succeeded in making themselves the candidate.
It seems if you add the approval ratings for all the other Republican contenders together, you still don’t have a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee next year.
And that is because Trump has an incredibly loyal and devoted fanbase.
Around 40 per cent of the party base would vote for him whatever he did. And he has done most things.
Look at the barrage of attempts to take him out.
From civil cases to criminal cases, the legal efforts to eliminate Trump from the race have kept on coming. Colorado is just the latest.
But the fact is that none of these efforts has remotely dented his popularity. Far from it. They seem in fact to have strengthened him.
And there are two main reasons for this. The first is that every time another attempt is made to knock Trump out, his supporters see a two-tiered justice system.
They look at Hillary Clinton’s sore loser status since 2016, or Joe Biden’s family corruption — as exposed on his son’s infamous laptop — and they notice that only Trump seems to be in everyone’s cross-hairs.
The second reason is that the more the political, media and legal establishment go for Trump, the more that Trump supporters see the whole system as being corrupt.
And when they see that, they believe — rightly or wrongly — that you need a big, vengeful beast to get back into office and take the whole system down from within.
For these people, Trump is their best beast. They believe that he can solve the problem of the vast illegal migration, the institutional corruption and much more.
The fact that Donald Trump should seem to be the only just person in the land might seem outlandish to many of us. But for many Republicans it is a matter of faith.
And the Colorado court is just the latest body to confirm their view.
Trump’s opponents seem to think all these legal moves will take him out. I suspect they are wrong.
The thing with Trump is that whatever doesn’t kill him only makes him stronger with his base.
He is a survivor.
And if the current polls are right he could also be the victor.
Time to start preparing for Trump — The Return.
