41 Dems Endorse Legislation To Ban Trump From Running In 2024 But It May Be Unnecessary After Today

December 15, 2022

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“Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

Donald Trump crossed the Rubicon today. The sheer, unadulterated silliness of his hyping a “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT’ and putting everybody on pins and needles Wednesday and then it turning out to be a holiday season grifting ploy, spectacularly backfired with everybody. Simply everybody, the MAGAs most of all.

Trump moved quickly to cover his tracks when the outraged MAGAs began melting down on social media. They had hoped for something inspirational from their cult leader and even the most jaded amongst us assumed that Trump would announce a running mate, at the very least. And so the cartoonish revelation of his digital trading cards NFT simply fell flat on its face. Resoundingly so.

Concurrent with that Thursday disaster, Rep. David Cicilline issued this press release, which calls for Trump to be barred from running for office in 2024, due to inciting an insurrection on January 6, 2021.

WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman David N. Cicilline (RI-01), senior member of the House Committee on the Judiciary and former impeachment manager today was joined by 40 of colleagues in introducing legislation to bar former President Trump from holding federal office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states, “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States … 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.”

“Donald Trump very clearly engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021 with the intention of overturning the lawful and fair results of the 2020 election. You don’t get to lead a government you tried to destroy,” said Congressman Cicilline. “Even Mitch McConnell admits that Trump bears responsibility, saying on the Senate floor that ‘[t]here’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.’ The 14^th Amendment makes clear that based on his past behavior, Donald Trump is disqualified from ever holding federal office again and, under Section 5, Congress has the power to pass legislation to implement this prohibition.”

The legislation details testimony and evidence demonstrating how Donald Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States. It specifically details how Donald Trump engaged in insurrection when he helped to plan and encouraged the insurgence on January 6^th despite knowing that the election results were lawful; attempted to intimidate state and federal officials when they did not support his false claims and unlawful plans; tried to manipulate Mike Pence into unlawfully refusing to certify the election results, despite Mr. Pence’s and legal advisors’ assertion that he held no such authority; and supported the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6^th, refusing for hours to denounce or act against the mob and putting thousands of lives in danger.

Original cosponsors of the legislation include Representatives Earl Blumenauer; Jamaal Bowman; Tony Cardenas; Andre Carson; Sean Casten; Judy Chu; Yvette Clarke; Emanuel Cleaver, II; Gerald E. Connolly; Danny K. Davis; Mark DeSaulnier; Adriano Espaillat; Dwight Evans; Jimmy Gomez; Al Green; Sheila Jackson Lee; Pramila Jayapal; Henry C. “Hank” Johnson, Jr.; Mondaire Jones; Conor Lamb; Barbara Lee; Ted W. Lieu; Alan Lowenthal; James P. McGovern; Jerry McNerney; Marie Newman; Eleanor Holmes Norton; Donald M. Payne, Jr.; Chellie Pingree; Lucille Roybal-Allard; Jan Schakowsky; Mark Takano; Rashida Tlaib; Ritchie Torres; Nydia M. Velázquez; Bonnie Watson Coleman; Nikema Williams; Frederica S. Wilson.

Now. the sublime irony here is that while Rep. Cicilline is leading the charge to disqualify Trump and rightfully so, nobody is more actively working to get Trump out of the running than Trump himself.

It has been a mere month since Trump’s tepid speech in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom, which even Fox News and CNN cut away from, because it was so lengthy, uneventful, and in a word, boring. In that time, Trump had his disastrous neo-Nazi dinner, which provoked condemnation in all corners of American society, and then a few short weeks later, Trump hypes up his MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT and it turns out to be a holiday grift.

While the left collapsed in howling laughter, wiping away tears, the MAGAs were hopping mad. Trump went into damage control mode and deleted all references on Truth Social to his NFT. But has the damage been done?

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo published this brief squib in his newsletter. Trump may have finally done what the entire Democratic Party has been trying to do for seven years now — dump Trump.

Is Trump Done?

I’ve treated it as a given that Trump is the nominee in 2024 if he wants to be. But today’s “Major Announcement” from Trump, which ended up being a new set of NFT playing cards with Trump in a bulging Superman suit, crystalizes my growing doubts about whether he still has the juice to go another round. We’ve also seen a couple polls this week which show a clear majority of self-described Republican primary voters prefer Ron DeSantis over Trump, albeit with DeSantis continuing Trump’s policies. But polls can change. Nor does a poll more than a year out from the first primary capture all the kinetic dimensions of an actual primary battle. What is less changeable are the growing signs that Trump is just a loser.”

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I don’t mean this in a demeaning sense but a descriptive one. Again and again since the November election Trump keeps coming up short. Each effort to regain the initiative, reassert some control over the GOP, comes up short. This can seem like he’s just lost his touch. He’s fully seven years older than when he first got into this in the summer of 2015. He’s also been holed up at Mar-a-Lago for much of the last year, beset by an increasingly severe set of legal challenges. He doesn’t have access to Twitter (though Elon Musk actually did reinstate his account a couple weeks ago) and it’s been a long time since he has been willing to go on air anywhere but among the host of true-believer digital cable networks his presidency spawned.

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I can’t figure how much it is him or the context of the moment. But I think it’s more the latter. Trump is about winning and dominating. Right now he’s not doing either. The poor midterm result was a huge repudiation. But Trump is more vulnerable to setbacks than other politicians since winning is not only the goal. It’s the ideology itself. He’s falling behind his Republican rivals. His followers are losing at the polls. He has reverse after reverse in the courts. Often it seems like his 2024 bid is just a ploy to stay out of jail, which is hardly an exciting campaign slogan: Trump 2024, Because the Boss Doesn’t Want to Do Time. The same bag of tricks doesn’t have the same impact when he has the stink of a loser about him. And he does.

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Trump still has plenty of potential advantages. The more beatable he looks in the polls the more challengers he’ll draw. Many party leaders hope for something like a bloodless palace coup in which DeSantis eliminates Trump and painlessly stands in for him. But there are plenty of ambitious Republicans who want a shot at the big prize as well. If Trump looks beatable, as he currently does, there’s next to no chance DeSantis gets a clear shot at him. That helps Trump a lot since his 30%-40% support among Republicans in a hypothetical primary battle is certainly far more durable than anyone else’s. On his own, DeSantis gets everyone who’s tired of Trump. With others, the anti-Trump vote gets divided.

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I still don’t know that I’d bet against him. But he does continue to lose juice. And even starting the campaign in earnest is a year away.

If Trump keeps up with the batting average he’s got right now, one horrific faux pas every two weeks, with mini faux pas sprinkled in between the yuge ones, I can’t see him getting through the primary. And this is putting his legal issues to the side, altogether.

At this point I think it’s safe to say that Trump will either manage to self immolate, or Jack Smith will fix his wagon once and for all, or a combination of Jack Smith, Letitia James, the D.A.’s office in Manhattan, so on and so forth, will end the speculation about Trump in 2024 for us.

Right now my money is on self-immolate. Trump needs to ingratiate himself to the base now. I have no doubt but that he and Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka and the rest of them are all huddled together in a corner of the omelette bar and figuring out a way to win over the base. Unless Trump comes up with a plan to put the entire Democratic party into prison at Guantanamo by April Fool’s Day, I’m not sure he’s going to prevail in a GOP primary.

The Superman major announcement was a really, really bad idea.

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4 COMMENTS

KR December 15, 2022 At 6:12 pm

“Congressman David N. Cicilline (RI-01), senior member of the House Committee on the Judiciary and former impeachment manager today was joined by 40 of colleagues in introducing legislation to bar former President Trump from holding federal office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.” What a STUPID political stunt! Less than THREE WEEKS left before the insurrectionists take power and upend everything rather than TWO YEARS AGO??? Stupid pissing contest. Do I give them credit for even doing this? Hell no! Much too little, much too late. IF you’re going to do SOMETHING, do it while there is time to make sure it can be done properly.

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- Joseph December 15, 2022 At 6:47 pm
  
  Well, there’s always a chance this little “stunt” (combined with the epic fail of Trump’s “major announcement”) might allow some GOPers the cover they need to finally break from Trump for good. The only real downside is those GOPers will still be doing some political calculations as to whether they–or the party as a whole–has any chance of wins in 2024 (depending on how badly Trump’s pissed off his diehard MAGA supporters; with enough diehard Trumpistas who might vote against whatever “RINO” is offered up in the primaries–and vote for whoever Trump endorses–it could strip enough support away, especially in true swing districts/states, from the GOP leading to a Democratic victory).
  
  Of course, the whole thing would’ve been moot if there could’ve been enough Senate GOPers with spines to vote “guilty” in Trump’s second impeachment.
  
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Daithi December 15, 2022 At 10:06 pm

I doubt if would matter in the long run.
As the last thing el Supremo wants is to ‘lose’ in a primary. While his popularity with the Repubiqanons continues to tank, he’ll suffer from some vague illness and ‘be advised by his physician that he should stand down’

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Alberto Saavedra December 16, 2022 At 9:33 am

Trump manages to surpass my worst thoughts about him frequently. He makes Caligula look normal.

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