Gallup tells us, at 39 percent, President Joe Biden’s year-end approval rating is the “worst of modern day presidents seeking reelection.” This explains the panic in the Democrat Party. Terrified that voters will return former President Donald Trump to the White House and send Biden into retirement. Desperate Democrats have gone nuclear and want to blow up our democracy by barring Trump from running for president. Instead, the effort will blow up in their faces.
That’s because the more Trump gets attacked with baseless charges in politicized prosecutions, the more support he gets. Millions of Americans see the lawfare waged against Trump for what it is. They know Trump’s only crime is not surrendering to an establishment status quo by remaining committed to an America First policy agenda.
It’s likely you’ve heard by now that a narrow 4-3 majority of the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Trump is disqualified from holding federal office under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The court said Trump “engaged in insurrection” when his supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“I’m not an Insurrectionist…Crooked Joe Biden is!!!” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. This makes sense, because the move by Biden supporters to bar Trump from serving a second term as president is a grave threat to the survival of our democracy.
I compared the Democratic war on our democracy to going nuclear at the beginning of this column because keeping a candidate off the ballot is a dangerous and disastrous escalation in the Democrats’ efforts to seize power. It must be avoided, just as countries with nuclear weapons avoid using them.
The “mutual assured destruction” principle is a doctrine of deterrence. If one country used nuclear weapons, other countries could follow, and we could see billions of people killed and civilization destroyed. In other words, no one wins, and everyone loses. Similarly, if one party started barring its opponents for running for president in a political war, our democracy would go into a death spiral. And without the ability to elect a president of their choice, there’s no telling what angry disenfranchised voters would do. Just thinking about it is frightening. Yet, it seems to not be frightening the Democrats who never bother with considering the catastrophes that follow their actions.
Even though the U.S. Supreme Court is unlikely to rule that Trump is unqualified to serve as president under the 14th Amendment when he appeals this dangerous and partisan Colorado ruling, the state court decision opens a Pandora’s Box of nightmarish scenarios.
The Hail Mary desperation play by Trump opponents to deprive voters of their ability to elect the presidential candidate of their choosing isn’t just election interference. It’s blatant and un-American election rigging.
Totalitarian states including Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, and Cuba today — and Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the last century — routinely bar regime opponents for running for office. Venezuela just did so earlier this month. It would be tragic if America joined the ranks of these anti-democratic nations. But now, unbelievably, the threat is very real.
Some have argued that actions to bar Trump from running are helping him because he then portrays himself as a victim. Hardly. The increasing support for Trump comes as the political bureaucracy continues to confirm Trump’s argument that the justice system is used by the bureaucracy to maintain control and punish dissenters. Americans, regardless of their politics, also loathe unfairness, and the effort to remove a choice from the ballot is deeply unfair and makes a mockery of the Constitution.
Case, in point, in March (just days before Trump was hit with the first of four baseless criminal indictments) a Quinnipiac University poll of Republicans on their party’s presidential candidates showed Trump with 46 percent support, compared with 32 percent for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and 5 percent for former South Carolina and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley. No other Republican candidate received even 3 percent.
In its latest average of national polls, the FiveThirtyEight political website reported Thursday that Trump has the support of a whopping 62 percent of Republicans, compared to just 12 percent for DeSantis, 11 percent for Haley, 4 percent for businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and 3 percent for former New Jersey Gov. Christie.
Meanwhile, a story published Tuesday by Slate was headlined: “There is No Precedent for How Bad Biden’s Polls are Right Now.” The story said Biden trails Trump by 3 points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls of all voters and has a dismal job approval rating of just 40 percent.
To their credit, even Trump’s badly trailing opponents in the race for the Republican presidential nomination say he shouldn’t be barred from the ballot in Colorado or any other state. That’s a view all of us should adopt.
Voting for candidates of our choosing to govern us at the federal, state, and local level is arguably our most important right and responsibility as citizens in a democracy.
Whether you love Trump or hate him, you should support his right to be on the ballot because doing so upholds the right of all of us to govern ourselves. With our votes, we ensure that government is the servant of the people. When government can bar candidates who leaders don’t like from the ballot, government becomes our master.