Donald Trump addressed a cheering crowd at the Waterloo Convention Center on Tuesday night, but never mentioned the day’s biggest news about his presidential campaign. Shortly before Trump took the stage at his Commit to Caucus event, the Colorado Supreme Court issued a decision confirming a lower state court’s finding that Trump had engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and ruled the former president was therefore barred by the Constitution from holding government office and wouldn’t appear on the state’s primary ballot.
Attorneys for Trump immediately said they would appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. In their decision, the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court stayed their decision until Jan. 4, the day before the state will begin printing the ballots for its March 5 presidential primary. If the U.S. Supreme Court takes the case — as everyone expects it will — the stay would remain in effect, and the printing will go ahead with Trump’s name included.
“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the court’s majority wrote in their opinion in the 4-3 decision. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”
Thursday’s ruling was the first time a court actually decided the merits of a case arguing Trump should be excluded from office based on the third section of the 14th Amendment. Earlier cases in Minnesota and New Hampshire were dismissed on procedural grounds without the courts ruling on the merits of the case. A judge in Michigan ruled that disqualification on the 14th Amendment grounds was too much a political question for a court to decide and dismissed the challenge. That decision is currently on appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court.
The case in Colorado was brought by two law firms and the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington on behalf of six Colorado voters, who are either Republicans or have no party affiliation. The case rested on a widespread and growing consensus among legal scholars that the 14th Amendment bars Trump from future service in government office.
The amendment was adopted in the wake of the Civil War to resolve several lingering issues. Among those issues was what to do about representatives from the states that had been part of the Confederacy. Section 3 of the amendment states that if the person had previously held any civil or military office that required them to swear to uphold the Constitution, their having “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” meant they were ineligible from any such office in the future, unless Congress, by “a vote of two-thirds of each House” declared they are eligible.
The text of the section is only two sentences in length.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a “vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The district court in Colorado found that Trump, who had sworn to uphold the Constitution as president, had engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, but the judge decided since the presidency is not specifically named in the section, it was beyond the court’s power to disqualify Trump.
In their arguments before the Colorado Supreme Court, Trump’s attorney claimed the position of president is so unique it cannot be considered an office “under the United States.” The Colorado justices rejected that argument, and spent 19 pages in the 133-page opinion establishing that the presidency is an office, and as such is covered by Section 3.
“President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,” the justices wrote. “Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”
Although Trump never mentioned Colorado during his rally in Waterloo, the Trump campaign began sending out multiple emails condemning the court’s decision as soon as it was issued. And even before Trump stepped on stage, his campaign was using the decision in fundraising emails.
“Trump looked pretty stoic when he came on the stage today,” the New York Times’ Michael Gold reported from the rally. “Normally, he walks around the stage and interacts with the crowd a bit more. But today, he was pretty static.”
At the conclusion of the rally, Gold wrote, Trump “spoke for just less than an hour, which is one of his shortest speeches on the trail lately,” without mentioning Colorado, even though he did run through his standard litany of false claims about the 2020 election being “rigged.”
“The former president has not usually been hesitant to discuss lawsuits and criminal cases against him,” Gold said in a bit of understatement.
The Waterloo appearance by the leading candidate in the Iowa Republican Caucus did have one noteworthy moment. Trump became the first major party presidential candidate — possibly the first candidate for federal office in American history — to declare he has never read Mein Kampf.
Trump was responding to major media organizations finally stating bluntly that his rhetoric, especially about immigrants, uses tropes first used by Nazis and other fascists.
At a rally in Durham, North Carolina on Saturday, Trump told the crowd that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.” It wasn’t the first time he’s said that. In September, Trump told a rightwing news site that migrants crossing the southern border are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
He returned to the theme in Waterloo.
“It’s true that they’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing,” Trump told the people gathered at the Waterloo Convention Center. “They don’t like it when I said that, and I never read Mein Kampf. They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that.’ In a much different way.’”
The Nazis, of course, were obsessed about “outsiders” polluting the “purity” of Aryan bloodlines. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, “All great cultures of the past perished only because the original creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
Trump probably doesn’t need to worry about his blood-purity remarks damaging his chances of winning the Iowa Republican Caucus, no matter how similar they are to Hitler’s. In the most recent Iowa Poll, likely Republican caucusgoers were asked if Trump’s statement that immigrants “who enter the U.S. illegally are ‘poisoning the blood’ of America” made them more or less likely to support Trump.
Forty-two percent of respondents said it made them more likely to support Trump, while 29 percent said it made no difference. Only 28 percent of Republicans said it made them less likely to back Trump.