Former President Donald Trump
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Donald Trump fears that the Supreme Court could side with Colorado and take him off the ballot.Trump’s advisors are preparing challenges to decisions in Colorado and Maine to disqualify him.GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie said the decisions made the ex-president into a “martyr.”
Donald Trump quietly fears that the Supreme Court could side with Colorado and take him off the ballot.
Colorado voted to remove Trump from the 2024 Republican primary ballot in a shock move, saying he was ineligible for the White House under the US Constitution’s insurrection clause.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows also declared Trump was ineligible to stand, citing the 14th Amendment in her 34-page decision.
Trump’s advisors are now preparing challenges to the decisions, The New York Times reported.
Trump has been confident with people close to him, privately telling some people he thinks the Supreme Court will rule in his favor, per the report.
Nevertheless, Trump has some concerns that the judges will want to avoid coming across as “political” and so may go against him, the report adds, despite having appointed three conservative judges to the nation’s top court.
The report by NYT senior political correspondent Maggie Haberman and political reporter Johnathan Swan said Trump’s concerns were relayed by “a person with direct knowledge of his private comments.
Bellows said that the decision to rule Trump ineligible to appear on the state’s primary ballot was due to his inflaming his supporters on January 6, 2021, directing them to the Capitol to prevent certification of the 2020 election and the peaceful transfer of power.
GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie on Friday criticized the decision, arguing that the move turns the ex-president into a “martyr.”
“It makes him a martyr,” Christie said of Maine’s decision. “You know, he’s very good at playing ‘Poor me, poor me,’ he’s always complaining. The poor billionaire from New York who’s spending everybody else’s money to pay his legal fees.”
Following the news and the publication of the state’s reasons for the decision, a spokesperson for Trump released a statement accusing Bellows of being a “virulent leftist” and “hyper-partisan Biden-supporting Democrat.”
“We are witnessing, in real-time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter. Democrats in blue states are recklessly and un-Constitutionally suspending the civil rights of the American voters by attempting to summarily remove President Trump’s name from the ballot,” the statement said.
Colorado also cited January 6, 2021, in its decision, saying Trump violated the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution.
The 14th Amendment specifies that anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or has “given aid or comfort” to those carrying out an insurrection is ineligible to run for office.
