Allies and rivals stick by Trump once again after Colorado Supreme Court ruling
If you thought this week’s ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court — that the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause bars Donald Trump from running in 2024 — might prompt other GOP primary candidates to pile on the former president … that’s not at all what happened.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis accused the “left” of “abusing judicial power.” Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley declared, “We don’t need to have judges making these decisions.”
Even Trump critic Chris Christie said, “I don’t believe a court should exclude somebody from running for president without there being, you know, a trial and evidence that’s accepted by a jury that they did participate in an insurrection.”
But this is all part of a pattern we have seen since the Republican primary began.
Remember that after Trump was indicted in Georgia for interfering in the state’s 2020 election, DeSantis called it a “criminalization of politics.” After a federal grand jury in Miami charged Trump with mishandling classified documents, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., called the indictment a “weaponization of the Department of Justice against the former president.” Haley said she would be “inclined in favor of a pardon.”
Again, that is not coming from Trump’s campaign manager or spokesperson — that is from the people running against him for the Republican nomination.
And polls of Republican primary voters give us an indication as to why.
Back in April, after Trump was arraigned in New York over state charges of falsifying business records, an NBC News poll found that two-thirds of Republican primary voters said they supported Trump and dismissed concerns about his electability.
In June, an NBC News poll (conducted a week after a federal grand jury indicted Trump for mishandling classified documents) showed Trump with a growing lead over his rivals in the aftermath of his latest indictment. So he…
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