The Supreme Court has unanimously decided Donald Trump must go back on the Colorado Republican primary election ballot. And this has a number of implications, none of which actually change the strategy for Joe Biden, for Democrats, for the left, for the progressive movement, and I’ll explain why.
At the very beginning, the impetus for arguing that Trump should be removed from ballots is that through his inciting an insurrection on January 6, 2021, while he was holding federal office, he was president at the time, he violated the Constitution, which specifically says you can’t hold office if you incite an insurrection. Quite open and dry. So from a colloquial standpoint, of course he did that. Of course he did. Legal challenges started arguing [that] because he did it, he can’t be on the ballot going forward. This was done at the individual state level in Colorado and a couple of other states.
At that point, it should have been obvious to us that we weren’t going to defeat Donald Trump by removing him from ballots. And what is the reason? The reason is that the states that could actually decide the election, Michigan’s the exception, they tried to do something, but for the most part, the states that are going to decide the election are unlikely to remove Trump from the ballot. And red states.
I mean, of course, if Texas removed Trump from the ballot, that would be great for Joe Biden, but those states were never going to do it. Texas was never going to do it. Arkansas, you know, sure, Biden could, could benefit from those electoral votes, but they weren’t going to do it. So in the best case scenario, the remove Trump from the ballot strategy would see Trump removed from the ballots in blue states that he has no shot at winning anyway. It might fire people up or not, or who knows, encourage them to vote. But the point was, simultaneously, and remember, two things can be true at the same time, of course he should be removed from a legal perspective. And of course, if you see the law, and you see the Constitution, and you see what Trump did, you say, well, let’s remove him, because he did the thing you’re not supposed to do. And also, it wasn’t likely to be how the election was going to be won.
So the Supreme Court made the decision. They said, states can’t do this. States could do it if the individual was running for state office, but we’re talking about the federal constitution and an individual running for federal office. And this was not just the right wingers on the Supreme Court. This was a unanimous decision. They said Trump’s got to go back on the ballot.
So is this a defeat for the left or not? I really don’t think so. Listen, it’s a defeat for the country in that, of course, Trump did the thing that’s disqualifying, so he shouldn’t be on the ballot, because he did the thing. Jurisdictionally, what the Supreme Court is saying is not [that] Trump didn’t engage in insurrection, they’re saying he’s running for federal office and states can’t remove him.
So we’re just going to have to win by vote. That’s the bottom line. And this is what I’ve been telling my audience for a while now, on all of these different things. Well, what about trying to win by removing Trump from the ballot? He deserves to be removed, [but] it’s not going to be how we win. What about convincing Trump supporters to change their minds? Folks, Trump supporters are in a cult. How do you change their minds? We’re not going to win by changing the minds of Trump supporters in South Carolina, a state Republicans will win regardless. We’re going to win by getting out the vote from people who recognize that Trump’s a dangerous disaster in the swing states that make a difference, right, in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc. That’s how we’re going to win this thing.
And the line I’ve been using now for a while is the MAGA movement must be made politically irrelevant. You get to vote. You get to believe Trump won 2020, or Obama is secretly the president, or the earth is flooded, you get to believe whatever you want. I’m not even going to try to change your mind, because you’re in a cult, and it’s impossible to do it in the eight months that remain, seven and a half months that remain. So I’m going to talk to people who already know I’m right, but they don’t plan to vote, and explain to them, I can show you videos. See this crazy Trump supporter in Wisconsin, okay, you can cancel out their vote by voting. And then if you bring your friends, now we’re canceling it out and going even further. We must make them politically irrelevant. We’re not going to de-program a cult in seven and a half months, nor should we really waste our effort trying to now.
There’s a bigger question for the country: What does it mean to have millions of people who have fallen for this cult? That’s a big question. It’s not the question we’re going to answer on November 5, 2024. It’s a question that socio-culturally we’ll have to answer over the next coming years, and it’s going to be a difficult one to answer. But it’s not the one that we need to answer to win in November, which we must do.
