A progressive daily ledger of Trump-world self-owns, legal pain, policy blowback, and bad-faith chaos.
Colorado’s ballot bomb kept detonating, and Trump’s team spent the day trying to spin a constitutional humiliation into a persecution tale.
On December 20, 2023, the biggest Trump-world screwup was the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to remove Donald Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a historic ruling that immediately put his campaign on the defensive and dragged the race toward a fast-moving Supreme Court showdown. Trump’s lawyers also filed their response urging the high court to stay out of the election-subversion immunity dispute for now, a move that undercut the more frantic posture of the special counsel’s effort to speed the case up. Taken together, the day showed a campaign and legal team trying to convert severe constitutional trouble into a grievance message, while the underlying problem kept getting worse.
Trump’s people could call it lawfare, overreach, or a partisan plot all they wanted. The calendar on December 20 was less flattering: more legal jeopardy, more forced defenses, and another day where the story was not what Trump wanted to say, but what courts had just said about him.
5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.
The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to remove Trump from the state’s ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment landed as a historic political and legal blow, instantly forcing his campaign into emergency mode. The ruling did not end the race on the spot, but it created the kind of damage that cannot be wished away with a rally line or a fundraising email.
Donald Trump’s lawyers filed a Dec. 20, 2023 brief opposing certiorari before judgment in the federal election-interference case, telling the Supreme Court to let the D.C. Circuit finish its review of the immunity issue first.