Donald Trump was enjoying a euphoric end to the year. With the Republican primaries due to start in Iowa on January 15, the polls were pointing to a triumphant march to the presidential candidacy, barring the unexpected. But the unexpected arrived on Tuesday, December 19, via a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court. It concluded – with the narrowest of majorities, four justices to three – that Trump was ineligible to be a primary candidate in that state because of his role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection led by his supporters at the Capitol. The former president intends to appeal to the US Supreme Court, dominated by a conservative majority, to overturn this decision.
Trump's disqualification in Colorado – a state that has voted for a Democrat in every presidential election since 2008 – does not have immediate effect. The court has provided for its application to be suspended in the event of an appeal to the Supreme Court in Washington. Trump's name should therefore still appear on the ballot. The Colorado primary will take place on March 5, as in a dozen other states, on Super Tuesday. In the meantime, more than ever before, the political and judicial calendars will merge and feed off each other, plunging the US into uncharted and highly volatile territory.
Exactly three years earlier, on December 19, 2020, as he was enjoying his final weeks in the White House, Trump issued a clarion call on Twitter for his supporters to flock to Washington on January 6. The objective was to challenge the certification of presidential election results in Congress. "Be there, will be wild!" he wrote.
On Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the former president's responsibility in the preparation and conduct of the January 6 assault, extensively documented by the House Committee of Inquiry in 2022, then by the federal investigation entrusted to Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, and finally upheld by a Colorado trial judge in November. The court also notably refuted the free speech argument in its review of Trump's speech to his supporters on that fateful day of January 6.
But it went further in its conclusions, ruling that he should be declared ineligible, on the basis of section 3 of the 14th amendment to the US Constitution. This section does not explicitly mention the office of the president of the United States. But it does state that no person who has taken an oath to defend the Constitution may hold civil or military office if he has "engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof."
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