Trump on Tuesday night derided the ruling as “eliminating the rights of Colorado voters to vote for the candidate of their choice.” But not only did Trump try to overturn the will of voters after the 2020 election, he has on myriad occasions pushed the idea that candidates should be disqualified irrespective of the voters’ will.
He built a base in the early 2010s with the ugly and false “birther” campaign, whose entire premise was that Barack Obama wasn’t eligible to be president
Trump didn’t stop there. During the 2016 GOP primary campaign, he repeatedly pushed the idea that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) might — and even should — be disqualified, both because he was born in Canada and because he purportedly cheated in the Iowa caucuses, which Cruz won.
Needless to say, there is more than a vein of irony in Trump’s having said that promoting false information about an election should lead the authorities to disqualify someone. And 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.
And if it sounds familiar, it should. After all, long before Trump derided the idea that a presidential candidate and former president like him could be indicted, he called for the prosecutions of both his 2016 and 2020 opponents, as well as former president Obama.
If the whole 14th Amendment exercise is the political farce that Trump says it is, he certainly played a role in writing the script.
He built a base in the early 2010s with the ugly and false “birther” campaign, whose entire premise was that Barack Obama wasn’t eligible to be president
Trump didn’t stop there. During the 2016 GOP primary campaign, he repeatedly pushed the idea that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) might — and even should — be disqualified, both because he was born in Canada and because he purportedly cheated in the Iowa caucuses, which Cruz won.
Needless to say, there is more than a vein of irony in Trump’s having said that promoting false information about an election should lead the authorities to disqualify someone. And 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.
- And during the 2016 campaign, on dozens of occasions he said that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t “be allowed to run” because of her private email server. “She shouldn’t be allowed to run for president. She shouldn’t be allowed,” Trump said shortly before Election Day 2016. “I’m telling you, she should not be allowed to run for president based on her crimes. She should not be allowed to run for president.”
And if it sounds familiar, it should. After all, long before Trump derided the idea that a presidential candidate and former president like him could be indicted, he called for the prosecutions of both his 2016 and 2020 opponents, as well as former president Obama.
If the whole 14th Amendment exercise is the political farce that Trump says it is, he certainly played a role in writing the script.
