Donald Trump’s rivals have sharpened their attacks on the former president as they blanket Iowa just over a week before the state’s caucuses kick off the Republican presidential nominating race.
But in the shadow of the third anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Trump’s Republican challengers are contorting themselves around what could be the former president’s greatest vulnerability in a general election rematch with President Joe Biden.
The anniversary comes a day after the US Supreme Court said it would take up the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to remove Trump from the state’s ballot, guaranteeing that his role in stoking the insurrection would remain central to the 2024 election.
Wary of alienating a Republican base that still largely believes Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was illegitimate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley – Trump’s two top-polling rivals – are carefully avoiding directly criticizing actions that have led to charges against the former president in federal and state courts.
DeSantis on Friday lashed out at the decisions in both Colorado and Maine to remove Trump from 2024 primary ballots under the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist clause,” and suggested he could seek political retribution by attempting to remove Biden from Florida’s ballot.
DeSantis equated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and his supporters’ storming of the US Capitol, to decades of inaction in Washington on border security.
“I’m actually looking at this in Florida now. Could we make a credible case that Biden” could be removed from the ballot “because of the invasion of 8 million? And again, I don’t think that’s the right way to do it,” he told reporters following a campaign event in Cumming,…
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