With disqualification in Colorado and Maine, the damage is done — to Trump, not democracy

Was it antidemocratic for the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Donald Trump from that state’s GOP presidential primary ballot? Ditto for a recent decision by Maine’s top election official to do the same? The answer, for a lot of respectable people, seems to be yes. (Both moves are pending appeal, the first one to the US Supreme Court.)

I get it, but I think that perspective is missing a few important aspects. First, that the courts are part of democratic politics. The law is, too. They are tools that a democratic people use to achieve democratic objectives. Yes, they can be abused, but critics of these decisions are not alleging that. They seem genuinely concerned, no, terrified by the prospect of Trump and the GOP becoming worse than they are.

The second thing being lost in this debate is history. Colorado’s top court isn’t doing what the US Supreme Court did in 2000, when it decided the winner of the presidential election by stopping a recount in Florida. The Colorado ruling was based on law and actual events. Trump really did lead an attempted paramilitary takeover of the US government. The Constitution really does bar insurrectionists.

While it’s reasonable to be terrified by the prospect of Trump and the GOP becoming worse than they are, it’s not reasonable to forget about history, or a shared experience that constitutes the empirical reasons – historical, legal and constitutional – for considering the question of disqualification. Again, critics aren’t touching that. They all seem to admit that the reasons for the question are sound. What they are worried about, no, terrified by, is the prospect of rightwing backlash.

That should be the focus of the debate, not whether Colorado’s top court or Maine’s top election official is antidemocratic. (That both moves will have another day in court is actually evidence of their democratic nature.) But critics are terrified, and they are right to be. They know that there’s no reasoning with Trump and the Republicans. The only people who can be reasoned with are the people who are considering the empirical reasons for Trump’s disqualification.

Appeasement may be expedient, but the effects won’t last. We already know, because of our shared experience, that Donald Trump won’t accept an electoral outcome in which he’s beaten. We already know that, because he won’t stop complaining about losing. Hell, he won’t stop complaining about Robert Mueller having established beyond a shadow of doubt that the Russians helped him win in 2016. This man’s ego is so fragile that he needs everyone to think that he’s invincible.

This need of his is so great that when the American people decided in 2020 that he shouldn’t be president any longer, he began hatching a conspiracy to overthrow popular sovereignty by attempting a paramilitary takeover of the US government. Now that was antidemocratic! Reactions to it, whether from a state’s supreme court or from a state’s top election official, are inherently democratic.

To be sure, election officials in Republican-controlled states could try to disqualify Joe Biden. (They can be trusted to be terrible.) But they won’t have empirical reasons for doing so – Biden did not attempt a paramilitary takeover of the US government. Attempts to disqualify him would be inherently antidemocratic. Critics of the Colorado and Maine decisions should reserve their concern for that possibility.

Let me conclude with a third thing that I think is missing. The damage has already been done – to Donald Trump, I mean, not to democracy.

Seeming invincible isn’t just an overwhelming psychological need on his part. It’s an election strategy. The idea is that he’s going to win, because he can't lose, and even when he loses, he wins. It’s stupid and dangerous, but it worked once, so it might work a second time – if enough people choose to forget about our shared experience of witnessing the greatest act of antidemocratic politics of our lifetimes.

But enough of us probably won’t forget in part due to decisions like the ones from Colorado and Maine, which disqualify him, or like the recent ones from Minnesota and Michigan, which preserve his place on the ballot. If Trump were invincible, there would be no question. There’s a preponderance of questioning, however, so he’s not invincible. Indeed, he never was. He’s the weakest candidate in at least two generations.

Weak doesn’t mean benign, of course, but that’s for another day.